In addition to being immersed in this pandemic that seems to have no end, in Venezuela we inevitably end up seeing everything that we lack, because it is true too. Access to public services, transportation, food and medicine is becoming increasingly complex and we are witnessing growing poverty everywhere. We cannot hide our head in the sand, but neither can we let ourselves be blinded and live with a scarcity mentality renouncing the desire to be better.

There are, in my opinion, two key positions that allow us to be protagonists of a change in mentality and to initiate processes in the area we are dealing with (within  our square meter).

In the first place, the certainty that reality is a sign and hides something great and positive for each of us. If we deny this possibility outright, it is much more difficult to turn problems and shortages into opportunities. The complaint will always prevail and cloud our reason.

The second position, which I would dare to say is a condition for the first, is brilliantly summed up by the phrase of the Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Without amazement, we remain deaf to the sublime” (which is also the title of the Rimini Meeting 2020). This is the fundamental posture to open the doors of knowledge. Amazement at the mere existence of things and at ourselves is key because it is the raw material to start a job, and also because it  allows us to have the sensitivity to be amazed by them.

Referring to Robinson Crusoe, G.K. Chesterton in his book The Ethics in the Land of the Goblins, summarizes the positivity of someone who has survived a storm: “Everything has been saved from a shipwreck. Each person has gone through a tremendous adventure: with a premature birth which could have not been, or children who never see the light. People used to talk a lot in my childhood about men who were geniuses but later on stalled or became a wreck. It was common to say that many men were a ‘Could Have Been Great’. For me, it is more fundamental and more exciting to think that all the people we meet on the street are a great ‘It Could Have Not Been’. 

You and I, our families and friends, this pandemic, all the good and the bad that happens to us, even our Trabajo y Persona Association, and therefore all the news in this bulletin: “Could Have Not Been”, but they are and they exist. This is why I invite you to ask yourself: For what purpose? How are we being called to live what strikes us?