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 weather-wise, this week is looking gray and rainy, especially Wednesday. In any case, Wednesday is the day of a notable improvement on the reopening front, the first milestone of a freedom gradually regained on the terraces of restaurants and cafes, cinemas, theaters and concert halls. But all this in compliance with the imposed gauges and the health distancing that will remain, even when the restrictions imposed on our social activities 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 coming weeks are therefore under the sign of opening, the freedoms of the summer of 2021 will be held by health protocols, in summer centers welcoming minors or in tourist residences. Regaining one's freedom, yes, but with a framework, and undoubtedly, a new awareness of the limits.

Have we entered an age of limits?

Yes, I think so, and even if we perceive in this expression a part of frustration, we remember that learning to live our human freedoms within the framework of limits is becoming an adult. Because embracing limits is 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 paid the price for this, these last fifteen months, sometimes in a dramatic way. However, without having completely emerged from the pandemic, we are now talking about the world after ".

We have moved on, as indicated in the book Cahier des Tendances 2021 (Éditions de l'aube, 2021), which seeks to analyze everything that changes. In this book, which has just been published, we discuss, for example, these "Zoom towns", these cities that attract new teleworkers, combining a larger living space, less daily transport and proximity to nature. I take away three leitmotifs from reading the Cahier des Tendances 2021. First, we have reached the age of limits that 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 emphasize in this work, awareness of this injunction of the living must lead to provoking "a politics of the living, of an unprecedented radicality ". 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 are cultivated.