And suddenly we understand that for deep connections to happen physical contact is not required.

We have time to gather around a table to play games with those - today - less strangers who share the same space with us. We find ourselves wanting to get in touch with the ones we once called friends, and we send a text message that ends up in a videocall that lasts until our phones burn in our hands because we are catching up on all those hours we weren't there, trying to fill our absences and un-fill our memories, doing our best to make it up to them for being so busy, so out of time, so… not there.

In every call, we bring up old memories, and we discover how much we haven’t told each other in the last month, year… decade? We are surprised to realize how many stories we have to share… and to listen to.

And there we are, smiling and laughing in one of the hardest moments of human history.

And we realize how much we have missed, and how in a world that seems to be so connected, we have been so disconnected, so gone, so…apart.

We got so lost in our corporal daily world that we forgot real connections are contactless and invisible to the eye but more tangible and everlasting than the best hug or kiss. But perhaps, only perhaps, in a few months we will be able to leave our old mistakes locked down to walk out into an era where what matters the most is not how many things do I have on my to-do-list of the day, but how many opportunities to connect with the ones I care about I won’t miss.

And perhaps, only perhaps, we will be smiling and laughing there too.

The Invisible Depredator

And the world had to stop for me to realize that my anxiety, my stress, and my anguish never came from the outside, but from the inside. The outdoors was a gift, a relief, and a distraction to my inner demons, which I used to leave at home in order to face the immediate, the tangible, and the exterior every day.

Now without the out-of-doors, there’s only this in-journey where my demons become as physical as a boxing fight while the authenticity of the exterior fades into a surrealistic novel that no one ever wanted to write, but we are all reading in the news and social media.

And is in this weird mixture of what we once thought was real and unreal that genuine transformation emerges. If while those people in the exterior fight The Invisible Depredator, we -the indoors- open the inner doors to face the confined demons in us, our home and our relationships with others we will be ready to walk into a new era… one in which people will understand that our enemy has never been what’s out of us – the outside, The Other - but our own incapacity to let those demons out of quarantine and put them down in the hands of a stronger Invisible Depredator: courage.