The color of our roof

    

Manuel António Pina used to say that we shouldn't move away further than half of our strength allows us, or the vision of the color of our roof, from the distance. When I was a child, and listened to the parable of the sower who had to pick a good soil to drop the seeds, I never thought that a good soil would not be the one from the garden at home, beneath the roof. It doesn't occur to a child, or to Manuel António Pina, who had the soul of a child, that the tiles of our roof can be distant from the roof we live under, or that the roof can be completed with tiles spread apart. Assuming, of course, that we only have one roof, because if we spoke of two roofs, we would be speaking of two souls, and then we would have "two souls at war, knowing that neither will win, two suns, and a bed at the crossroads," as Jorge Palma’s poem.

And this gives rise to a problem. The sower of my childhood now has a little hole in the soil, under his roof, where he puts the seeds, and digs another little hole in another field from where he can't see the roof. He goes back and forth, constantly running, but without knowing if the seeds from one hole are being carried away by the wind as he moves away. To know that, he would have to stay, and to stay, he couldn't go, which is (only) a problem if on the other side, the other hole has some tiles which he needs to be able to complete his roof.

My coming to Germany coincides with the Netflix release of the movie "Society of the Snow" which, among other things, shows us that the greatest joy is to return to where we are awaited, which is always the place we left behind, and keeping the strength to help our friends. And if our friends don't come with us, and if the greatest joy is to return, we always run the risk of planting seeds in barren lands, of not being able to avoid the passing wind, or not seeing the small rays of sun under our roof, with our loved ones who live there.

There are circumstances in which it is certain that some seeds must be planted far from the roof, and cases where there is no other option. Some don't have a roof, some have war beneath it. Some abandon their roof to defend others', directly or indirectly, and I include in this category some of my friends from Cambridge, who live far away from their roof, researching important topics such as the protection of vulnerable groups, the defense of democracy, the cure for cancer, the treatment of infectious diseases, etc. But sometimes, having lived abroad for many years and having crossed paths with so many "foreigners," I get the unsettling feeling of not really knowing why some abandon the roof. Some may not have a good roof, which distresses me even more because it reminds me that I have a good roof and that I should go back. Or they are good finance students, and follow the logic of diversification of investments with their seeds, which makes less and less sense to me as I grow older, when it comes to personal matters. But many, I am convinced, never thought about it and just go with the flow of the wind, which wouldn't be a problem if the same wind could not take away their original roof.

It is easy to convince myself that I have a mission, that there are some tiles of my roof far away from it, either because the institute I came to has the necessary books for my research or because it is the same institute where my grandfather researched and worked, and the reason why my mother was born in Germany. Coming here to get some tiles means getting closer to my family, to the language which my mother learned to speak, to the deserted and silent streets on Sundays, to the snow that in those times my grandparents kept clearing so that no one would fall on their part of the sidewalk, and the setting of so many stories I have heard all my life.

But even when we know there is a mission, we still wonder how many tiles are needed to fulfill it, and how many are already too many. I have convinced myself that the more well-defined the mission, the more motivated and joyful we are to fulfill it, which means it's better to know well that we are going to get tiles A, D, and F, than simply moving to get some mere reddish tiles. I would like to be as the actress from Charing Cross Road, who, on the plane to London, when asked, "business or pleasure?" answers, "unfinished business." I wish that my business and that of my friends is always to get tiles that fit and complete our (only) roof, that we never forget the color of that roof, to avoid wasting time with wrong tiles, that as Pina says, we always keep half the strength to return, and that the seeds under our roof are so firm that no wind can take them. The passage of the wind is borne by those who have a mission, as well as by those who don't have one, although my desire and hope are that we always keep the peace of knowing that we wouldn't have been capable of shielding the seeds from being carried away by the wind, even if we had made a makeshift camp in the garden under our roof, which is almost always true but can be difficult to convince ourselves of, if we haven't been there to confirm the formidable force of the wind.