Erected before me in its grim cloak, the spirit of the future did not breathe a word. Nor would he utter a word, for now, and I knew it.
So I let him lead me to where he knew.
I found myself in a fir forest. I walked through the snow with heavy steps, wrapped in a blue cloak. I was not afraid and I was not cold. I glimpsed from afar some houses, whose windows shone. The closer I tried to get, the farther away they got. The farther away they got, the more inexorably lonely I felt. I was becoming forest. And lake.
The spirit took to telling:

A child who lives on the top of a hill sees every night, on the top of another hill opposite his own, a house with all gold panes and thinks, “When I get older, I will pack up, leave early in the morning and maybe around evening I will get to the house with the gold panes and then yes… But now I am too puny for that long walk, I will wait until I grow up.” And the years go by and the child never stops worshipping from afar the house of golden glass, and one fine day he feels that he is old enough to go. And he walks, walks, walks, sweats seven shirts, the soles of his shoes get as thin as snow, his little jacket gets torn, but there he is at the first shadows of the evening he reaches the house and … it is a house like any other, the glass perfectly transparent and colorless. The exhausted and desperate child is about to let himself fall to the ground, when, as if by chance, he turns to his distant home: the glass is all gold

[Chandra Livia Candiani (2018), Il silenzio è cosa viva, pag.9, Giulio Einaudi Editore].

I turned, therefore, and took the way back.

But I calculated to take a circuitous route, so as not to follow the same paths as on the outward journey and the same company. I would have nurtured the enthusiasm of that time: the one that arrests your step and invites you to contemplate the golden reflection of the moon on the lake. I would have agreed to devote myself to what I know how to do, however little or however small.

However little others may believe it is worth.

However little I might believe it to be worth.

I would have made my small accomplishments available and thus perhaps felt useful, and avoided wandering in the snow alone and aimlessly. I would then have breathed a few more seconds before giving an answer and given myself a few days of vacation, mindless. I would have nurtured connections.

When the crew woke up I announced that I had booked a Christmas vacation in the snow.

No one believed it.

So I finally asked Max to do it for me.