Mariella Gattini

Looking inward is always a good exercise, but many don’t do it because of what they might find. Some of us are terrible hoarders of bad moments so if we look within ourselves we might find what we have put in the back of our minds for a long time, and the reacquaintance with what we thought was in the past can reemerge and hurt us once more.

Hoarders of memories are the worst of all hoarders because their mess is not visible, and can be disguised in a myriad of ways to be able to keep going, but with this inconceivable burden on their shoulders.

Live and learn, right? Not so fast. We live our lives in our minds, everything that happens to us goes through our scrutiny, our mental processing, and that can take some time, especially when we experience something traumatic. In our search for comfort we put aside everything that can question who we are and how much we can achieve in life. Normally, who we are is very different from who we want to be, therefore, looking within ourselves can be painful because it can remind us of our limitations and sorrows.

Nevertheless, this inside look is, by all means, a good exercise in courage and in the acceptance of who we really are, because, aside from our share of limitations and sorrows, we also have a unique value that is going to be available for the benefit of this world as long as we live, and for a limited time only.

The precariousness in which we live must serve as an indicative of how important, and urgent, this internal exploration is—because the answers to our most significant problems always come from within, they never come from the environment, not even from our fellow humans. The answers are located deep inside where, sometimes, we don’t even dare go in, don’t dare to tackle, because it might become a titanic enterprise, one from which we can, perhaps, never resurface. Nevertheless, this necessary intent can also connect us with our core value as individuals.

We need to recognize, clean, and nourish our brain because without it we are nothing but a carcass. Our minds are precious, we should treat them as the treasures they are. Our lives are fragile, transient works of art worth exploring from the inside out.

Never again will there be someone like you—never before and never after—that’s how special you are. Don’t be fooled by statistics that want to categorize everybody by class. Statistics are formal pieces of structured thinking that want to make practical sense of everything and everybody so that nothing seem unexpected, and everything look predictable.

The truth is that nothing, and nobody, is safe—real life is as unforeseeable as it gets. Still, there is always this window of opportunity we all have to look deep and long at who we are and cry, laugh, despair, enjoy, or reminisce at everything we have experienced so far. And for some, it might even be a very short and shallow adventure, who knows. The question is not about how important or deep our life is, the idea is to be able to recognize the value of every step we put forward by also getting rid of the burden of hatred along the way. Loathing is a natural human feeling that seems to protect us from the world, but it is very deceitful because the only thing that hatred yields is destruction—our own internal annihilation and the elimination of important human ties we need to survive and to reach higher levels of development.

I wish you the best in this—your unique internal voyage. It might seem scary at first because the confrontation with reality is never what we expect, but despite whatever you need to face, don’t be afraid of what you might discover. On the contrary—embrace it, love it, and cry if you need to, but always be aware of the unique opportunity you have right now to make the most of what you are able to enjoy in your extraordinary life. The here and now are important because they are the building blocks of what is to come.

If we all look within, we can create this massive exploration that has the potential to bring us together in the common purpose of our preservation, renewal, and development. Perhaps we can even be happy for a minute or two before we enter our next adventure.

First steps are always the most difficult, but the path that follows can also be treacherous, for that reason, the more you know and trust yourself, the more seizable the road ahead becomes. I can not promise you rainbows at the end of the road, because life is a never-ending wandering—we never arrive anywhere, we are always in a state of becoming, and the ones we are today are neither who we were yesterday, nor the ones we will be tomorrow.

Life can be painful, it can turn us into bad-tempered individuals, submerged in despair, but it can also give us the chance to see the value in us despite all odds. Looking inward we can find the answer. Deep within.