Me and COVID-19: Life is Wide

While browsing through the graphs of the dramatic statistics on the projection of the Covid-19, I have embarked on a journey through these sterile lines that, day after day, told the tale of life along the axis of time and growth, where contagion and death are mute, but loud vectors. The lifeline is always represented as a thin one; or else it takes on other geometric forms made up of equally thin lines. That line itself means nothing. The parameters we plot on the abscissa and the ordinate that give it meaning. Eliminate those and it’s just a simple line: naked, empty, alone. That’s the way we’ve always represented "life" on a graph - a thin line. But how wide is it? What does it really contain in its shades of colour when we draw it on a sheet of paper, or in the pixels flickering on a computer screen? How wide would that line be if it could tell the story of our everyday lives in its own voice? The stories of the dead we sadly count today. How much we have lost due to their death? How much “wideness” has gone lost? Could we have preserved that wealth? Could we have collected it, shared it, used it, made it good for others, for society, for ourselves? The pandemic taught me, once again, knowledge is the only weapon we have to face the future, and knowledge need intelligence to be leveraged. An intelligence helping us to avoid baptizing the countless superficial banalities as innovations, celebrating them without investing in the fundamentals of the research that maybe will pay back later rather than immediately, but will lead us to better and more inclusive humanity instead of acting like a bunch of individuals able to recognize themselves as a “society” only in case of a pandemic.

Professor Nicola Palmarini, Director, National Innovation Centre for Ageing