How will you greet people?
To answer such an important question, we have to define what a greeting really is. The greeting is the beginning of an encounter. Any encounter. And it reveals its nature, first of all with a gesture. Be it a hug, a handshake, a bow: the way we greet says a lot about who we are, where we come from and what will happen after the encounter. Or, at least, what we would like for it to happen.
By greeting we reduce distances. From the ‘Good morning’ sent on WhatsApp to a group of friends in a font that gives you goosebumps, to the incipit of the most well-known prayer in Christianity, the Ave Maria, which covers an abyssal, unimaginable distance with the smallest of words.
The choice of greeting expresses ideas. It’s the raised fist and the right hand of comrades. A lot of big and terrible utopias were created with an associated form of greeting. When times change and we need to mould a new world, it’s through the greeting that we identify its shared project. A new greeting for each new era.
The greeting is always some form of prophecy.
But the pandemic has changed the way we greet each other. We can’t touch each other anymore, and in our culture more than in any other touching is a gesture of courtesy, affection, respect. A handshake, a hug and above all a kiss, the purest and most democratic of greetings, can’t be lightly exchanged anymore. And we miss them, we miss them like air. Because human beings live on bread and water, but also on carefree gestures from the heart. We are social animals, it’s our nature.
It’s therefore down to our thought and imagination to devise a new way of greeting for this changed society that lives at a distance never experienced before. We need a new language to say things as old as our nature: feelings, emotions, intentions that animate our days. No new invention will ever be able to replace a kiss, of course, but it might tell us that we have come out of lockdown different and, if we come up with a good invention, better.
To reimagine a greeting we have to start from what’s absent, from our missing parts. We need to start from our mouths, our noses (for Eskimos the nose rub is a kiss), which will be hidden for who knows how long. Because, in addition to a kiss, the mouth is above all a (shy or full-toothed) smile, which says a lot about us and our intentions. In addition to a kiss, the mouth is a whisper, a warm breath of intimacy which manages to dissolve surprising distances and establish exclusive and reserved human contacts. Through our mouths we unleash a passion that animates the whole body. But that breath, together with the rest, is banned and covered for a greater good, which mutilates and at the same time protects us. We are relinquishing mouth and nose denying ourselves so many of those daily prophecies of which all of a sudden we have rediscovered the value.
The human body is designed to compensate the loss of a sense by sharpening the others. In this pandemic, our body has had to adapt to be able to carry on speaking with that force that only human communication, unique and without equals in the history of evolution, is capable of generating.
Wearing a face mask changes us, but it leaves uncovered our hands and above all our eyes, which are the most powerful instrument in an encounter. Able to scowl or enchant, only the eyes can produce a new greeting, as powerful and as intimate as our sacrifices. The eyes, alone, can be a river of emotions, a sea of ideas, a book of poems, in less than an instant.
If the question is “how will we greet each other?”, the immediate answer is definitely that we will keep doing it with our arms. From the open arms to the waving hand. From the fist to the bow. And it’s not by chance that we are only mentioning the fist: if you’re considering using the Roman greeting as a plausible option for the period of pandemic, this article is already downloading onto your computer a virus that will reset everything. Please click here if the download doesn’t start.
But apart from everything else, greeting with our eyes is what we should meet more often and what would be worth developing as prophetic instrument of the Covid-19 era. I wish we would more and more learn to interpret the look of still-unknown love, of the friend we don’t have to explain anything to, of the grandmother who watches her grandson go away fearing it might be the last time she sees him. But also of who is on our same boat, who is in our same mood, who has our same opinion. Giving, day after day, more and more importance to the gestures we have lost the habit of appreciating. We, always shielded by PCs and smartphones, must change the way we greet each other to rediscover a world in which we can reduce distances without physical contact, only by lifting our eyes. A world that reminds us every day how equally and magnificently human we are, in the most beautiful of prophecies yet to be fulfilled.
