Can I say I am alone? No. Even if my friends are far away, they are not. I understand that we all feel powerless in the face of this situation, but I realize how, in our days, we are all searching for something that will overcome our loneliness and our thoughts. It is as if in these days I have many receptors, ready to pick up anything that might help me not fall into despair.

The past few days have been heavy, because I was only looking at what I could not do anymore. A message from a friend, asking me how I was getting on, allowed me to restart again. She has the same struggles, but she faces them differently. Seeing this in her made me want the same position she has. I then read a page from School of Community that speaks about this: "It is through an encounter that what we have been called to, what we have looked at respectfully, rather afraid and confused, begins to become clear, like the dawn that tinges the horizon with light…In this sense, the encounter is a source of memory”.

I said to myself: "I cannot change this situation, but if it is happening, it is because I have something to learn. Help me to recognize You here, in these days, in these usual faces, in the effort of studying". I tried to put myself in an open position and, with surprise, I realized that many things happen in my days, small things, which help me to start again.

Read also - "The value, today, of my yes to this companionship".

Let me recount a very small fact: Fr. Marco’s mass. My dad asks me, annoyed, if I really have to stream it. I say yes, because I feel the need. I start watching it with my mom and, after a while, he too sits down next to us. It strikes me how this situation helps us to break down walls of resistance and allows us to discover ourselves as needy and as beggars: looking for something or someone to fill the void we feel. The gestures we propose, the articles by Carrón, the phone calls with friends, help me to do just that: not to fall into my thoughts and the common mentality and to discover that I am reborn in a relationship. As we read in School of Community: "When an encounter is all-embracing, it becomes the shape, not only the sphere, of relationships. It not only establishes a companionship as the place where relationships exist but it is the form by which they are conceived of and lived out”

Lucia, Bologna, Italy#Coronavirus