"Chesterton once said that angels can fly because they take themselves so lightly." Alan Watts

There’s a song that stuck in my head as it happened to so many others after the Sanremo Italian Music Festival. The beat makes you move a little and, given today’s stillness, it’s already something, but what really stuck is that one word that I want to repeat till I drop: "LIGHT" indeed "VERY LIGHT".

The winning intuition was to stick this word into a popular need: the need to return to whistling, to downplay the worst by coming out of stiff orthodoxies and without this representing emptiness of Feelings.

Bernie Glassman recalls that a British philosopher said: “whatever is cosmic is also comic. Do your best and don't take yourself too seriously", although it really looks like that the paradigm is currently reversed. Especially now, after more than a year spent under the daily and endless dispatch of death and devastation, our emotional world has collapsed, leaving us depressed like deflated tires..

Adulthood usually deforms us under the weight of an illusory gravity, simply because we are convinced that everything is so seriously real that there isn’t another way out.

This is similar to what happens in the initial approach to Yoga practice, when we believe that it is unlikely to lift up from the floor without fatigue or that it takes a superhuman force to hold the balance in certain positions. Then we realize that the less we think about it, the more we smile and breathe and experience them with simplicity, the more our convictions falter, opening up new glimmers of possibilities for us. I have heard many times "My son always does that pose" and that is nothing more than confirmation that if we do not think too much as we do as "adults", life is much lighter.

Lightness is a tribute to childhood reminiscences that still inhabit some dark corner of our adult Self; that anarchist childhood that makes you dance in a funny way because it comes from inside, that makes you laugh in crackles even if "it’s not appropriate", who does not know the weight of fears that block the streets and devour dreams. 

Umberto Saba wrote in a beautiful poem that youth, eager to take on weights, spontaneously turn their backs to the load though in the end "cries with melancholy". "In the end the air is thinner and the steps become light": in adulthood, we approach happiness by rediscovering wandering, evasion and poetry. Humanity is adult now, we have no choice but to continue carrying weights like mules that step in melancholy paths or to set out as wanderers whose "light thoughts join the resin of the pines and make our minds clear as a cloud". (F. Battiato)

Elisa F.