FROM THE NORM TO THE MARGIN

Liberated Delivered

Here I am at B9B on Six Beach in Bali, in front of a plate of nasi goreng accompanied by a local beer. Around me, rhythmic music, few customers. It is 2.35 pm. My dress is soaked because for my first "big" outing alone here, I found myself under a beautiful rain shower. In front of me the ocean is agitated, the sky is grey and it keeps raining. But what happiness!I feel calm, which is rare for me. I really need to learn to let go, to do what I have to do without putting pressure on myself. To reformat myself for my umpteenth life.I'll tell you about my other lives later, but right now I'm too good to want to think about it. Only the present matters. I can't change the past and I've learned that the future never goes as planned. Come on, if I keep repeating this sentence to myself, it will become part of me. It's strange to always have the impression that what we live is a succession of parentheses, pieces put together.By nature I'm not someone who does things; it's circumstances and society that force me to. I belong to those people who sit back and look around. Is it because I am not comfortable with others? I never feel quite up to it. I replay events in my head and say I should have said this, done that. But I think there's something else.I live my life the way I think is right, not taking the comments around me too much to heart. When I look at my surroundings I feel like an explorer. Yes, I know I'm not Magellan or Columbus, but I like to look at a young couple who talk to their little dog as if it were a human being because there is love there. I like to look at a father who enters the waves holding his child's hand to protect him from the current because there is love. I like to look at a baby asleep in its mother's arms because there is love. And what moves me most is to see old people walking around holding hands because there is hope. All these things that we don't pay enough attention to make me melancholic for some and jealous for others. Am I destined to experience love between two people?Don't get me wrong; I love this world I live in. Especially now that I live on an island paradise. The ocean, its noise that forces silence, its salty taste on the skin. The sun and the clouds in perpetual motion. Our bodies transforming before our eyes without us seeing it. Sometimes I am sad, unhappy, but I wouldn't want to change my life for anything in the world. I am clumsy, imperfect but I have children who love me and whom I adore, a family that is not always easy but always present. And then I had the right to smiles, looks, extended hands and comforting arms.

So why should I have any regrets?