The voice of silence

Every morning, at the same time, the awkward sounds of a human voice come through the glass of my gallery. Screams that could be laments, but could also be singing exercises by someone who, obsessed with cultivating his voice, has completely lost his mind. This person, whom I have never seen and whose sex I cannot identify, walks around in this way, day after day, shouting in front of the Palau de la Música , without anyone listening.

I don’t know what the purpose of his walk is. Maybe he or she doesn’t know either. It’s just one more sound that is ignored every day. Every day except today, naturally. Today we stayed at home. Today his voice is the only one that can be heard. Today there was silence and many of us may hear that and other voices for the first time… Voices that were there but that the excess of noise prevented us from hearing.

Thus, many of us who are now seeing how we can do our work from home, allow ourselves to listen to that voice that says that the cost of so many trips to work, the hours lost in commuting, the tupperware in the mini-kitchen or in the space provided for that purpose in our work universe, perhaps were not essential.

That our coordination meetings with our teams, held by videoconference, are now different, requiring more explicit, more intentional intervention structures, but at the same time allowing us to better sustain our points of view and make consensual decisions efficiently; getting involved, making more effective use of our interventions.

The truth is that today, on a global level, forced by an unknown virus, we are practicing something different. A new way of being and acting that allows us to design new rules, that allows us to listen to silence. Whether we like it or not, we are in a different place and the changes that are taking place are not only giving way to an alternative form of organization, but to the need to put systemic solutions into practice.

Borders have changed, but boundaries still need to be set and maintained, and we don’t know exactly what they are or how to do it. We want governments or banks to cover the tremendous costs of this global crisis, but we fear that this could affect our savings. We want to recover spaces of value that go beyond the acquisition of goods and services of dubious value, but we do not know what values represent us.

We are at a crossroads and the temptation to repeat old patterns of control, fear, blame, of prevailing at the expense of the other, not with the other, old practices, in short, do not offer an effective response to a global problem. So maybe all that will change today. It may be that nature is pushing humanity, through this new collective responsibility, to take a leap in evolution and that we will be able to resize our importance and define our place on the planet, allowing us to listen finely to the most fragile and silenced of all voices, the voice of life.