JUST A LIST OF THINGS

There is a thought that crosses my mind at the beginning of every year and knocks on my door. Knock knock! Who is it? It’s me! Who is me? My list of good intentions.
In 2026, I would like to… Eat better, slow down, be more present, change something about myself. A tiny gesture, often fragile and revealing.
I wonder why at the beginning of the year we feel (or maybe it’s just me?!) the need to tidy up, to choose what to take with us and what to leave behind. Like when a relationship ends, we want to keep only the good things and throw away the rest, a question of inner space, I think.

Things to give as gift:

a book about trees
a four-colour pen
an imaginary trip to a faraway country
a blank sheet of paper
time

I always wonder if, alongside individual resolutions, there are also collective resolutions on everyone’s list. Not ambitious or abstract goals, no! Small daily choices: what kind of people we want to be in the world, for example, what we are willing to defend, which values deserve to be preserved and which ones need to change. As if the fate of the universe depended on this trifling matter, on this silent decision made at the beginning of a new cycle.

There are things that must be preserved and nurtured, I believe: dignity, equality, the possibility of being different without being excluded. And there are others that must change, such as habits that we realise no longer work: the cruel idea of success, strength and competition as the only measure of everything.

It occurs to me that perhaps making a list of good intentions nowadays could be a kind of act of resistance, at least against time passing without asking our permission.

Things to do:

waste time without justifying myself
make a mess
water the plants
learn something useless
write, write, write

Resistance, what a tormented word. Resistance today certainly does not take the form of dramatic gestures, if we think back to what resistance to fascism was like. It is rather a minimal, almost invisible movement: remaining human while everything invites us to consume, impoverish and accelerate. It means not letting ourselves be swept away by the tide, stopping when a certain kind of world convinces us that the only thing possible is to keep going in this way, faster, more superficially. It means defending an idea and finding the fantasy to resist the advancing nothingness.

Perhaps this year, trying to resist has taken on a new meaning. Resisting in the sense of choosing how to change, in the sense of slowing down our gaze to allow our imagination to come to light. Resisting and not trusting only what appears on the surface. Because the essence of things rarely shows itself on the surface: it must be sought, listened to, paid attention to.

Light things:

butterflies
poems
walks hand in hand
the alleys of the city centre
the smell of the fireplace

There is a physicist, Carlo Rovelli, who, fortunately for all of us, writes (fairly) understandable books on physics. In an interview on the occasion of the release of his latest book, he says: ‘The equality of all things is somewhat the heart of the book. I am a scientist, a physicist, but my interest has always been to connect my physics, the physics I have studied, with the rest. With the issues that interest us outside physics, in everyday life. Many of my colleagues are interested in unification, the unification of forces, which explains everything in a single equation. I am interested in the unification between physics, what we have learned about the world and what we have always known about the world, our daily lives, the open questions. And that’s what the book is about. The main lesson that comes to us from physics – from all physics, from all sciences – is that we are wrong when we separate: body and mind, living things and dead things, heaven and earth, men and women, fish and stones and chairs. Obviously, all things are different, but there are no great metaphysical divisions; it is not that my body and my mind are separate things. They all live in the same space, they are all part of the same nature”.

Things to improve:

the zip mechanism
my physical fitness
the ability to push or pull depending on what is written on the door
the weather
the substance of some ideas

There you go. Inspired by this idea of equality as something absolute and natural, I would like to remind those who “govern” us of a couple of things. That, for example, there are no hierarchies among human beings. That words are important and should not be used to deceive and distort reality. That the sea is not so deep and people’s memories are not so short. And that even if there is no way to know exactly where to leave flowers among the waves, water is not so different from other graves, and that a life is a life and you cannot make 116 lives disappear by pretending nothing happened, letting them be swallowed up by the current. Perhaps remembering this would make it easier to understand that this distorted idea, that some are worth more than others, stems from something that has broken inside them: a fracture that leads them to peddle statistical solutions, measures and rankings. I would like to tell those who are supposed to govern us that their gaze is accustomed only to seeing surfaces, not spaces.

This year, I think this is on my list, and I will try to resist in order to preserve equality as a profound intuition, not as a word to be repeated. As if to feel, almost physically, that the delicacy that runs through us is the same for everyone. That the world is not made up of isolated individuals, but of bodies, stories and hopes that constantly touch each other, even when they seem not to.

Things to remember: