We learn from our mistakes

Called from the desert: 3 insights for survival (and for following your mission)

The 'calls' we receive are immersed in a thousand patterns of shapes, channels, background noise and we often struggle to understand where to direct our energies

23 April 2024

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These days, I feel I am on the edge of a battle. It is as if all around me, down in the gorges of the desert, a thousand battles - some silent, others echoing up to the peaks on which I stand, observing - are being fought, each demanding a little of my attention, perhaps a little of my strength. Unable to move to select my (or my) holy war(s), assuming there are any, I sit in observation like Marco Polo and the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan in Calvin's Invisible Cities. What are we called to in our lives? To pursue a purpose? To leave a trace that the wind does not blow away? And even if it were - if the wind blows it away - is it not the harsh law of the desert (and of life) that takes its course?

As a professional, but first as a person, I have always felt called. Called to put my skills to service, my seeds to fruit, sometimes letting them die so that spring could bring forth something even better and trigger virtuous circles of experience and life. The calls did not come in an equal manner and never completely easy (even though inside I always hoped to receive a call from God as in the musical 'Aggiungi un posto a tavola' in which the voice of an extraordinary Enzo Garinei orders Don Silvestro to build the ark to preserve civilisation from the second universal flood). How beautiful that call: direct, simple and clear.

I believe that today, however - for me and for others - the calls we receive are immersed in a thousand patterns of shapes, channels, background noise. And in this low-frequency disturbance, we struggle to understand where to direct our energies. Sometimes, we just follow the flow, which is just a stream whose direction we follow like fish, others it is a storm that swirls and returns us to a different zone of a boundless desert. Alone, we and the desire to understand where we are, we and a vocabulary to decipher the present (without sometimes succeeding).

I saw a few days ago the second chapter of the sci-fi colossal Dune, inspired by Herbert's 1965 novel, which takes place in the future in an interstellar feudal universe where different noble families fight for control of the planets. At the centre of the story is a boy who seeks his calling in a desert called Arrakis, the only place in the universe where 'spice', a precious substance essential for human life (perhaps for us it could be water? Perhaps still - begrudgingly - fossil fuels?) The protagonist - an extraordinary Timotée Chalamet - flees to the desert where he becomes first part of and then quickly leader of the Fremen tribe, the native inhabitants of Arrakis, known for their extraordinary survival skills in the desert.

Of all the elements that fascinated me in this story, one caught my attention in particular: the resonance of the desert, which speaks, which calls, which knows how to communicate (if only one wants to listen), which suggests practical strategies not only to survive, but to imagine a better future (for oneself and for those to come). This is what I am getting from this desert.

1. Called to pour our individual choices into collective experiences

The experience of the desert is solitary, just as the experience of life - we might say - is solitary. In Dune, Paul knows very well that the common history is written by many individual stories, each with its own specificities. His - like everyone else's - will be essential to carry the planet into the future (or they will all die). In my own small way as an author, I can't help but include in my scripts small details that can help the individual recognise himself in a sort of common experience (because if it is true that everyone lives his own life, it is also true that experiences repeat themselves, teach, and that life is united by similar emotions and similar plots that we can find and rediscover in the past, present and future). Alessandro Baricco, in a recent lecture at the Holden School, defined history as an exploding magma, from which pass - as in a point - infinite lines of plots. Through the same desert, pass infinite ways of perceiving storms, stimuli, dangerous creatures, shelters. There can be a thousand ways to perceive the same experience: that is why - by imagining them and creating them for others - I try to set up channels for these calls to be facilitated, inclusive, clear. If the desert experience is solitary, if each call is personal and each choice free and independent, we all play an essential role. In understanding how to deal with them, first and foremost.

2. Called to give weight to the essential and the superfluous, called to the sacred

Water is the most precious commodity in the desert. Water is life and writes into it a priority law aimed at survival rather than the superfluous. On Arrakis, but more widely in any of our deserts, every aspect of life is designed to minimise the loss of moisture, from clothing - such as distilling suits, which conserve and recycle body moisture - to water conservation habits and techniques. Water becomes not only a vital resource, but also a currency of exchange, a language of relationships, a sacred element. The wealth of an individual or a tribe is measured in terms of how much water it possesses, and the 'right to water' of a dead person - that is, the natural moisture of his or her body - is recovered and conserved for the community, becoming sacred.

What is sacred to us? Relationships? The success of a project? Our serenity and tranquillity? The desert calls each of us to understand what is sacred, what is essential and what is superfluous for our evolution, what are the criteria on the basis of which we choose the paths to take and the battles to fight.

3. Called to make our voice resound

Apparently, in groups or in society and so equally in the desert, we are called upon to show courage, to make our voice resound. He who stands still, the desert eats him. One of the most significant moments in Paul Atreides' promotion to Fremen leader is when he manages to ride a giant sand worm, one of the most feared and respected creatures on Arrakis. This act of daring and skill not only demonstrates his courage and exceptional abilities, but also marks the ultimate integration into the Fremen culture. We are called to prove our worth, in the desert and out. We are called to write history by raising our voices, not so much to shout, but to signal that we are there. Standing on the sidelines yes, being passive no. The desert does not forgive that.

Called by name

Long before Dune, our name defines us and who we are. As a young girl, a dear family friend, Sister Elena, from one day to the next decided to change her name and become Sister Angela: I was shocked by this change (I never really asked her the reason) but I kept that feeling of evolution that brings with it the awareness of a change of course, of a change of step. The desert calls us but it is we who decide the name by which to be called. The desert calls us to listen ready for action, choosing not so much what part we want to take in the game of power, but who we want to be in our present for ourselves and for the community to which we belong.

*Consultant Newton Spa