When Chiara came back from Thailand she gave me a little Ganesh statue. This figure of a human body with elephant head sitting in a jolly and relaxed position on a lotus pedestal captivated me immediately. Ganesh has four hands each one holding a tool that he offers to help his believers: for this reason he is considered the God of the new beginnings. I immediately thought it was a very beautiful gift since I have been starting from scratch so many times during the last years: I moved to another country, I changed job, house (twice), everything! I felt, therefore, protected by this symbol in my constant transition.
Unfortunately, on a beautiful sunny day, Ganesh’s statue slipped from my hands, falling on the ground: three of his four arms broke off. OMG! I am doomed! My mind went wild and started listing all the possible misfortunes that could happen to me when Chiara told me: buy some glue.
The solution was absolutely simple, so that I gave my daughter Martina some glue (she’s always in charge of fixing things) and she brought Ganesh back to normality in a blink of an eye.
This reminded me of a post that I read on the internet that stated “Healing is not linear”. This means that recovering is not a straight line, one does not get better and better until they become an enlightened guru. When we are undergoing a crisis we search within ourselves and sometimes find out some things about ourselves that we didn’t know anything about until then. That can distress us for a while, until we accept the change and go on, feeling like a weight just lifted off us.
This, however, doesn’t mean that we won’t have to survive other storms. We are no robots, we’re so complex, and we often have to go back on our steps to reconsider what we did, to see it from another point of view.
I’d say that God Ganesh came to teach me a great lesson: when false expectations are shattered, when there’s no hope and nothing makes sense, the easiest solution is also the right one. We happily glue the pieces back together, knowing that, sooner or later, something will break again, but we will always be ready to see it and fix it.
Cover picture by Martina García Andreoli