François Prouteau: “In May, do what you please”

« In May, do what you please » (in May, do what you want) – « never exert influence until May is out », the saying goes, …

Yes, but not quite, all the same. Because on the weather side, this week promises to be gray and rainy, especially on Wednesday. Be that as it may, Wednesday is the day of a notorious improvement on the reopening front, the first milestone in a freedom gradually regained on the terraces of restaurants and cafes, cinemas, theaters and performance halls. But all this in compliance with the gauges imposed and the sanitary distances that will remain, even when the restrictions imposed on our social activities come to an end on June 30. However, we hope to be able to remove the mask outdoors this summer, as indicated by the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran (May 4 on Europe 1)

If the weeks to come are therefore under the sign of openness, the freedoms of the summer of 2021 will be held by health protocols, in summer centers welcoming minors or in tourist residences. To recover one’s freedom, yes, but with a framework, and no doubt, a new awareness of limits.

Have we entered an age of limits?

Yes, I think so, and even if we perceive in this expression an element of frustration, we remember that learning to live our human freedoms within the framework of limits is to become an adult. Because embracing limits means adapting to our human condition, being both robust and vulnerable, living as a human capable of being altered by others and by life, by good and bad viruses. We have borne the brunt of this over the past fifteen months, sometimes dramatically. However, without being completely out of the pandemic, we are now talking about the world after «  .

We have gone elsewhere as indicated in the book Cahier des Tendances 2021 (Éditions de l’aube, 2021) which seeks to analyze all that is changing. In this book which has just been published, it is a question, for example, of these “Zoom towns”, these cities which attract new teleworkers, combining a larger living space, less daily transport and proximity to nature. I retain from reading the Cahier des Tendances 2021 , three leitmotifs. First, we have arrived at the age of limits which calls for conversions for a new « living together « . The second leitmotif is that this era is systemic and dictated by the living: “ everything is connected, everything is linked”.As Nathanaël Wallenhorst and Renaud Hétier point out in this book, awareness of this injunction of the living must lead to provoking « a politics of the living, of unprecedented radicalism « . The third leitmotif concerns benevolence towards any initiative that can bear good fruit in this change of world, so that it can take place, mature in a space inside or outside our homes or our cities, find a garden where good ideas grow.