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Change is always scary, but sometimes necessary: “For ten minutes”

An habit for almost twenty years, then a phone call and the farewell of the person you love. A life to reassemble and a change, slow but inexorable, as the only way out. The novelFor Ten Minutes” written by Chiara Gamberale in 2013 begins here. A brilliant, exciting and passionate book written by a person who has gone through a similar experience and tells it in an engaging way. A story that may seems autobiographical but so it is only in certain parts. “For Ten Minutes” is a novel for romantics of life, rather than of love; it talks about inner strenght, willingness to escape from the dark moments even when everything seems lost and when life seems to have turned away from you.

Change and new habits as a starting point

A love story that ends after many years is a wound that can heal only with time. It is the door, your door, to happiness that locks and leave you out. Definitively. From day to day. But in this period when mind and body need to get used to a new normality, it’s important to create some moments to take care of ourselves, to like ourselves. That’s why an apparently trivial habit can make you rediscover sensations that had been asleep for a long period of time. Now it’s time to let them wake and show up. To grow up, even in your 40’s.

We become so deaf when the fear of getting lost exceeds the desire to hold back..“. For Chiara, the protagonist of the book, change was the most scary thing. She was happily “cooped up” in her structured life and she couldn’t imagine a different one. Let alone somewhere else. Her love and her job: her balance was there. Her entire life just for this… and then, in a while, her life gets wrecked and Chiara is forced to wipe the slate clean and re-invent herself as someone new in a city like Rome that she never really loved.

A difficult re-start, almost desperate, that moves its first steps when the protagonist decides, together with her  therapist, to give herself ten minutes a day for  31 days in order to make new experiences and to acquire new habits. Not just a rebound thing, but a real experiment to discover who she really is deep inside. And in these ten minutes we find many characters: Gianpietro, a friend, Ato, the boy that she hosts after-school, the Chinese owner of the shop next door and his friends: each of them helps Chiara in this slow recovery, even if the real push turns out right from her. Thanks to her obstinacy and her will to look forward despite everything. Despite these changes.

And so I say to myself that, if there are people who play violin, change diapers, play amateur porn videos, teach hip-hop, sow and read Harry Potter, there is for sure at least one out of seven billion who waits for me, and in ten minutes I’ll meet him.” And that’s right.  Desperation, abandonment, sadness and melancholy that initially wrapped around Chiara’s heart and mind disappear and leave room for light, for a new happiness. A new way of being and looking at things. With more enthusiasm, believing in yourself and in your abilities. And having self-confidence. Always.

 

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