We tend to have very marked certain moments throughout the year that indicate beginnings and decree endings, as if we could choose when life stops and when it resumes. We live under the illusion of dominating everything. We love to lord it over events, because in that way it seems to us that everything that happens is under our control, and we love that sense of security, it makes us feel very powerful. But this is not so. Those of us who work at Education live in the fantasy that everything starts when our classes begin, that is, after the summer vacations, and January sounds like a distant future in which, although we start our calendar, in reality, nothing changes substantially. When our civilizations lived attached to the land, to the work in the fields, to the rhythms of nature, everyone was very clear about which was the time for work and which was the time for rest, which was the time for celebration and which was the time for thanksgiving, everything was configured from agreement with what was necessary to be able to have a good life.

Now we insist that everything can happen at any moment and we have lost sight of the need that not any rhythm of life is a rhythm proper to human beings. Our eagerness for every desire to be satisfied immediately has made us forget that waiting, in reality, is not the absence of something or a lack, but the richness of knowing how to place everything in its place and enjoy everything in its time. We can live neither out of space nor out of time, but neither one nor the other is ours. There are those who speak of their life as if it were an object, perhaps because they think it belongs to them absolutely, and have not realized that living is not a possession, but a doing, a knowing how to do that implies a radical openness to the world and to the beings that inhabit it. Being protagonists of our own days does not make us owners of anything. If we stay on the sidelines, things happen, but perhaps not in the most appropriate way, not in the most favorable way, not in the most desirable way.

Vacations are undoubtedly something appropriate, favorable and appetizing, but they are not a state that can last forever, among other things, because that would destroy our way of being in the world. The end of summer is experienced by some people not as a favorable time to start new projects, but as a kind of apocalypse in which routine threatens to engulf us. Some even experience a kind of vital anguish at the simple fact that they have to return to their lives, as if what they have been doing for days or weeks had been an out-of-body experience that should last until the final judgment. Perhaps one can feel wonderful lying in a hammock enjoying a mojito, and it may seem to him that this is the final evolutionary stage to which humanity tends to reach. Someone may think that returning to his home, to his work, to his friends is an undeserved condemnation, it is an unbearable suffering?

However, to stop doing what we like does not necessarily mean to start doing what we do not like. Every moment of change, deep down, is a moment of opportunity, that is, a good time to start doing things differently, or to do something different, to commit ourselves to living better and making those around us happier. What can be uncomfortable about going back to routine is that everything happens as if we were automatons. That would be a tragedy: not knowing that every day everything can be different, that every morning we can find sparks that give new light to the usual. One of the symptoms that our life is not lived by ourselves is the fact that we give up dealing with the little things of each day as if they were exactly what they are: something unique. Behind all that web of known issues, repetitive tasks, the same old places, the same old people, we can bring many new things every day: enthusiasm, courage, strength, affection, respect, joy, generosity, patience, and even good humor...

Complaining is a national sport, especially for those who live well enough off to not be concerned about the 'important things', those that if one does not have -family, work, friends, housing...- make everyday life unworthy of a human being. Our tendency to exaggeration is directly proportional to our gentrification. The easier things get, the harder it is for us to manage a minimum of prudence, that virtue that makes us see that returning to the everyday is a privilege only enjoyed by those who believe that their life is a gift, an opportunity, a blessing.