I hated eating pears. It was a fixed rule for me, ever since I was a child: that taste just didn’t sit right with me. I couldn’t eat them, and even their smell made me nauseous.
I thought I was born that way, genetically predisposed to reject pears. But not long ago, I discovered that as a baby, my mother once forced me to finish one. I didn’t want it at all, and I vomited it right in front of her. Yet along with the pear, I vomited a lesson that would serve me almost thirty years later: forcing things never works. And indeed, as it happened to me, the reluctance toward something forced stays for a long time (I only started eating pears again many years later, as an adult).
It might seem like a banal lesson, especially since we see it reproduced everywhere, day after day: forcing a key that won’t turn usually breaks it; forcing jeans that are too small tears them. Nature itself never forces anything, simply because it doesn’t work.
And yet, very few people live a life free of force. Few parents don’t try at all costs to make their children graduate or push them into a stable job “just to have them settled,” as if they were mannequins in a shop window. Few couples don’t struggle to keep a relationship going simply because it’s convenient at the moment, even if making the opposite choice would be hard. Few people don’t tell themselves the lie that they are honest and altruistic, forcing a reality created by their imagination, while doing everything possible to grab favors and privileges, caring little about others. And few forced truths are as absurd as the one we read in the papers this morning: the Italian government refusing to recognize the state of Palestine because it’s “premature.” Such an absurd force, in the face of a people’s extermination, that it’s impossible to hear without feeling ashamed to be represented by it.
The problem of avoiding force isn’t only individual: patience is lacking, and so is time. In a highly materialistic society like ours, we struggle to see patience and time as valid investments.
So while society forces us to run ever faster, we are deceived, and as we run, time passes without knowing what we really want. While we are taught that everything must happen immediately, that results must be achieved now, we forget to truly listen to ourselves and those around us.
But it’s not true that we cannot go against the current: it takes a nonconformist, rebellious spirit; it takes the ability to listen to ourselves to the bone. The willingness to understand our children and accompany them toward who they really are, instead of forcing them into the shape we imagined.
Because when we force them, the result is always the same: they vomit discomfort and dissatisfaction everywhere, just as I vomited that pear. And it’s no surprise when we realize that force never works.
