We continue to expect our life to work in a certain way. We build securities, plans, identities, expectations, and immerse ourselves in existence as if it were supposed to follow the plan we have established. Then, whenever something deviates, we become angry, we enter into crisis, we identify blame and those to blame. As if loss and crisis were an error in reality.

And yet there is one fact before which every one of our projects pales: death. It is the only radically revolutionary event of which we are certain, precisely because, paradoxically, we do not know what will come afterwards. There may be nothing, or something we are unable to imagine, or of which we have only a vague religious idea. But we know that, whatever it may be, what we now call our life will end. We will lose the body, our relationships, our roles, our securities, our plans, the image we have of ourselves. In short, everything in which we seek refuge today will disappear, or will undoubtedly be different in form from the way we experience it now.

So why do we consider every small loss intolerable? Why do we treat every crisis as something that should not happen?

Perhaps because we have not yet understood what the crisis comes to show us.

Every crisis, loss, failure, upheaval places us, partially and in advance, before the same truth that death will make total: we cannot hold on to anything, nor preserve indefinitely what we have. We cannot guarantee that life will remain in accordance with the idea we have made of it.

And therefore crisis can become a blessing, not because pain is pleasant, nor because we need to invent a religious or dogmatic justification for it, but because it forces us to prepare.

It gradually tears us away from the illusions to which we cling.

The deepest pain of being human, perhaps, does not simply consist in suffering, but rather in not accepting that reality can make us suffer, in demanding that what happens should not happen, in continually constructing interpretations capable of protecting us from the radical nature of existence.

But reality does not owe us this protection at all. Crisis comes, together with loss and death. And perhaps we should not continually ask ourselves how to avoid them, but what they are teaching us about the nature of what we believe we possess and of what we believe ourselves to be.

Every small loss can be a preparation for total loss, just as every crisis can become an exercise in freedom. Every collapse can also allow us to discover that what is collapsing is not who we are.

This is not a consolation at all, but rather a radical recognition of the actual nature of reality. And precisely for this reason, although it can be painful, it protects us from much other suffering, deeply devastating and, above all, useless. In the end, this recognition can sometimes become perhaps the most luminous one of our entire life.

Because perhaps living does not mean succeeding in preserving what we love, but learning to recognise its value precisely by knowing that we cannot possess it definitively. We cannot hold on to people, situations, the body, our own image, nor prevent what appears stable today from changing, ending, or being taken away from us. We can, however, learn to live it while it is there, without turning its inevitable loss into a reason for not having lived it.

Perhaps this is precisely where crisis can be transformed into something luminous: not in the promise that what we lose will be returned to us, nor in the consolation that every pain necessarily has a meaning, but in the possibility of living with a different awareness. That of someone who knows that everything passes and, precisely for this reason, does not have to wait until something is lost to recognise its value.

And this also applies to what we had not planned to encounter, just like wild strawberries. We can buy a strawberry, choose it, take it home. A wild strawberry can only be encountered; it is unexpected, and we did not even know it was there. And when we find it, it is surprising. It is not something we have sought or obtained, but something that has happened to us: a small unexpected gift that we can only receive.

P.S. Wild Strawberries is the English title of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, whose original Swedish title is Smultronstället, literally referring to a place where wild strawberries grow. The film tells the story of Isak Borg, an elderly professor who has to travel to Lund to receive an honorary doctorate. But what should have been a simple journey gradually becomes a confrontation with his own life, through encounters, memories, dreams and visions. The proximity of death breaks apart the structure through which the protagonist had defined himself and organised his existence. What seemed consolidated is shaken, and the past returns not as memory, but as something that lucidly questions the present.

The place of the wild strawberries belongs to his youth, to the memory of what was loved and of what has been lost. It is a real place and, at the same time, an inner one, which in the film becomes the key image through which the protagonist confronts the time that has passed and what remains of his life.

It is a film full of life, precisely because death becomes impossible to remove.