Never accept advice
“Be careful in accepting advice.
And be patient with those who dispense them.
Accept this last advice.
Never accept advice .. “
The song “Accept the advice” by Franco Battiato ends with these words, a song inspired by the final monologue of the film “The Big Kahuna”. It is one of those texts that are neither music nor poetry. Rather, they are “mother’s words”, also valid for those who still have it, she has had it or has never met her. More than a thousand treatises teach you to be in the world. A super-concentrated juice of life and experience that, almost by contrast, ends in the only possible and true advice that could be given to a person, which is not to accept advice.
And not for some form of antagonism towards what I believe to be a fundamental value in life, experience. Simply the invitation that makes the song and that I do my own in my own way, is to never think of being able to channel your existence according to defined rules and rules, according to which you just need to follow the right advice so that everything runs smoothly. The truth is that life also gives a damn about experience, even that of a thousand years and a thousand men; change the cards on the table, invent tricks that shoot the cards on the game table.
And there is no experience that holds. Sometimes, especially when I see my old photographs from “a few” decades ago, it happens to me that I almost talk to Roberto I see on those images. Sometimes, often to tell the truth, I congratulate him on what he has managed to do, but sometimes I would almost like to give him some advice. To face what will be which, indeed, for a game of timing, is in reality what it has been. I think it is an experience that happens to many that of wanting to talk to themselves about several years ago. But as we know it is an illusion because time has only one direction, alas, and that is what leads from the past to the future and never the other way around.
No lessons to learn
And in this perennial movement the only real lesson we can learn about living and the tripping with which life sometimes threatens us, the only real lesson is that there are no lessons to explain life itself. Whether you are a multi-degree scientist or totally illiterate, wounds and smiles remedied will be the only compass of your existence, the north and the south through which you can direct your steps. And who cares if you steer them on the wrong roads, wrong to the point of forcing you to go back. And who cares if every now and then the path you have chosen will be rough enough to make you fall.
Do you know what I answer to those who tell me they don’t know what to do in life? To give a damn because we are not in this world to plan our life but to live it: life means living, as the word itself says, not planning. With the thousand doubts that this entails. Every day our eyes are opened and we go on stage, without a script. With the uncertainties about what it will be that they often become the only bread to eat, at least in certain passages. How sad that already planned lives make me, those in which everything is already beautiful and defined. Yesterday they did that, to be here today and to be there tomorrow. Such a pity! But anyway, they are happy! I do not want to put down the pen of my life, and as long as I have a blank sheet still to write then I will know that I am alive; I just need that, a beating heart and lungs still full of fresh air.
