Here comes the holiday season, this illuminated end of the year when the memories of those who have left us invade our memories and tickle nostalgia in our hearts.
More than a time of rejoicing, the holiday season is also one that leads us to look at the lower part of the hourglass of passing life and to think of those who have just left us. Of these disappeared, there are headlights that go out, taking with them the lights that made the magic of family gatherings. Such has been human life since nature decided that the biosphere could not be a place of eternal life and that the recycling of bodies was at the center of this picture that it has painted for more than 3.5 billion years. “You can never turn a page in your life without a certain nostalgia clinging to it. The invisible spider of melancholy still spreads its gray web over the places where we were happy and from which happiness fled. So said the novelist, poet and compatriot from Rimouski Ève Bélisle, who left us in 2002.
My late mother, who was one of those pillars whose collapse destabilizes a family structure, taught that long before drugs and doctors, the presence and the heart of the other are essential to our physical and mental health. A truth to which the biologist in me can only adhere. Humans are social animals whose homeostasis greatly depends on others. Moreover, the COVID-19 virus has harshly reminded us of this reality. By forcing everyone into confinement, which is comparable to the principle of sequestration on which our prisons are based, this virus has left an epidemic of mental health problems in its path, including psychologists, doctors, teachers and health professionals. education are just beginning to gauge the magnitude.
We need each other. Touching each other, talking to each other, bickering, making up, eating together, consoling each other, cheering each other up, pacting, gossiping and sharing the joys and tears of others are all behaviors that are at the heart of our humanity.
I therefore wish you, dear readers, to heal each other with family and friends during this holiday season. If you want to push the therapy further, why not fill all your voids by pulling a log to someone who is brooding alone? The shared meal, however frugal it may be, will then turn into a royal feast open to all subjects and, for once, cynicism will become the turkey of the farce.
Why not offer a foreigner the place that was traditionally left free at the table of Quebec families during the Christmas grub? At the beginning of the 1990s, when I was consumed by loneliness in the coldness of Rimouski, my friend Pierre Gauthier made this beautiful gesture for me. Pierre commandeered his parents’ bungalow to offer a Christmas gathering to lonely foreign students in the city. It was his homeless Christmas. I swear to you that this little attention made its way into my heart and never came out. I can even tell you that she is one of the catalysts of this great interest that I have for Quebec and its history. The desire for integration is born much more in these sparks of tenderness than in political advertising. In other words, it’s fine to say that immigrants have to be integrated, but you can’t force someone to take an interest in a new culture and adopt it. The desire to fit in is a very personal process that often takes root when love and outstretched hands catalyze it.
One day, in a book by Paulo Coelho, I came across a little tale that I like a lot and that fits very well with my subject. Since our elders said that the fable is the mind of one who becomes the wisdom of all, I share it with you in these times of rejoicing. This will be my little Christmas tale to end the season.
“A rabbi once asked his two disciples if they could tell him exactly when the night ends and when the day begins. One of the students then raised his hand and replied:
— Master, it is when from a distance we can distinguish a sheep from a dog.
— In reality, said the other, it’s when from a distance we can tell an olive tree from a fig tree.
— You don’t have the right answer, the rabbi decided before adding: it’s when a stranger approaches that we confuse him with our brother and that the conflicts disappear. This is when the night ends and the day begins. »
In Eastern wisdom, there is a proverb that sums up this story differently: “One day, while walking in the mountains, I saw a wild beast. As I approached, I realized it was more of a human. And as I approached again, I recognized my brother. »
I wish you a happy holiday season!