Paradoxically, I discovered this attitude while rereading Man's Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl), a book that draws on the stinking landscape of the Nazi concentration camps. It is a brief essay to describe how the atrocities of internment influenced the psychology of the prisoners. As a rule, people were brutalized to incomprehensible limits. However, some, not many, did not regress as men; on the contrary, they harmonized and strengthened their personalities, improved as people. Frankl studied the symptoms that defined this group. And the first of them, besides being unexpected, shocked me: these prisoners experienced a strong nostalgia for everyday life....

To these prisoners, the imagination pushed them towards scenes of their usual life, prior to confinement. The curious thing is that they did not relive happy, brilliant or outstanding events or happenings, no; they usually recreated, with tenderness, the smallest details of an ordinary day: I could see myself at the bus stop, locking the apartment, answering the phone (Frankl); a comfortable armchair, the creak of the house key (Szpilman); a soft bed, my mother's caress (Wiesel); a wonderful hot bath (Levi); my mother adjusting my father's tie, grandmother's sweetness (Sepetys)... The memories "flew to these home details with such intensity that they almost brought tears to our eyes" (Frankl).

Perhaps we could have some doubts about the authenticity of these experiences, and consider them as fantasies provoked by the strong commotion of the internment or by the deep affective turmoil. The answer is no, a resounding no. Those prisoners lived with death hidden behind a near dawn; and, in the face of death, one is not for lyricism or artificial tenderness. Therefore, they aroused authentic nostalgia, and awakened the will to live; in such a way that Primo Levi baptized these emotions with a beautiful German word that can be translated as "home pain"...

That pain at home... it moved me! And it shook me to question myself about normal life: doesn't the same thing happen in our day to day life; do we reflect on those homey details; do we notice them; do we appreciate them; do we enjoy them; do we enjoy them?

My first impression was quite disheartening: we practically do not even notice them; moreover, we tend to notice them only when they are missing or fail: if the coffee is cold, if the car does not start, no hot water, the elevator does not work, they do not answer a greeting, the cell phone is lost....

And, quite possibly, a normal day holds many of those nostalgias of prisoners, perhaps unnoticed: a warm shower, a tasty breakfast, a soft armchair, the silence or the bustle of home, a conversation with a friend, a caress, a lost smile, the kiss of a child... We tend to write down the annoying or unpleasant, while we do not value, out of habit, the pleasant everyday moments. If this were so, it would be a ruinous business: today we do not enjoy them and if they were missing we would mourn them?

On the contrary, let us imagine applying ourselves to the lesson of enjoying these continuous and small situations of well-being. Then... we calmly enjoy the morning coffee, we respond to a familiar good morning, we contemplate a serene sunset, and the hot water, and the car that starts, we reciprocate a kind detail or a smile and, in these times, we are even grateful for the early start to go to work... How many possible pleasant and peaceful sensations perhaps unattended...!

A lesson that should be read without any candid or movie-like outbursts. Evidently, the hustle and bustle of a regular workshop entails roughness, setbacks, annoyances, weariness, friction in coexistence... Good! But they are intermingled with a number of pleasant circumstances. The question is to make a realistic balance between the joys and sorrows, between the annoying and the desirable... If we subtract the good moments from the usual difficulties, we will at least alleviate the feeling of contrariness... And, who knows? Maybe one day, or some days, the joys will outweigh the small sadnesses... And if we can imagine...: maybe the positive balance will reach one hundred or two hundred days a year... This would diminish the inner stress and settle the wellbeing. To achieve this, it is not necessary to do anything extra or extraordinary, it is enough to change our attitude: to get used to enjoy the pleasant moments that any normal day gives us.

But it doesn't end there... Primo Levi, two years after his release, writes to Jean Samuel, a former fellow captive: "since I can still really enjoy all the little things in life that usually go unnoticed, I don't complain too much about the big and small daily worries". An appreciation of acute psychological depth: the response to events also depends on the inner calmness or turbulence, since it is not the same to throw a dry branch on a blazing fire as on a calm one. In final, enjoying the smallest moments of happiness seems to be a great business: we enjoy more and we get less upset...