A short holiday in Le Marche

Bench in Sirolo, Le Marche, Italy

I've spent a few days in le Marque, the Italian province. Le Marche is South of l'Emilia Romagna, West of Umbria and North of l'Abruzzo. On the East there is the Adriatic Sea, very blue, out of a green and steep coast, sometimes difficult to access, but always worthwhile. Its beaches are not of sand but pebbles.

It was the middle of September and there were very few people, usually quiet, walking or reading or sunbathing for the sake of it (it was sunny but the sun and the light were very pale, not enough to get a tan), as it's usually the case in September. It was difficult to imagine how it might be in the middle of the summer, and you ended up thinking, or dreaming, that it wasn't mainly a touristic coast, that somehow the difficulty in reaching its beaches had prevented it from becoming so. Then, in Sirolo, one of the villages by the coast, there was further support for this dream-idea: among several benches overlooking the sea, we saw this one of the photo, where you could sit giving your back to the sea and watching instead the people walking along the road, as people in small villages tend to do after dinner in summer evenings. It was as if, when installing the village benches, in the midst of the touristic frenzy, somebody had nevertheless remembered them, the village all-year-round inhabitants, and their enjoyment not just in contemplating the sea but also in taking turns walking up and down, to digest dinner better, and sitting to watch others do so.

Banksy´s maid, a commentary on...Oh, on what?

Let´s state very clearly, for example, what´s certain and what´s not

Linus with his security blanket in Peanuts, created by Charles M. Schulz

I've been reading for the second time Stephen Batchelor´s Buddhism without Beliefs, and, once again, have tuned in inmediately to the same sentence. It's the sentence that, in different states of completeness and incompleteness, makes up the headings of the chapter entitled "Death": "Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?"
Why I find it so appealing? He's not quite saying "live as if today was the last day of your life", in the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll mood. Not quite. He's rather telling you to live as if, knowing only that sooner or later you're going to die, you didn't know whether today is or isn´t the last day of your life, which is different, or at least feels very different. Specially if on top of it you keep wondering, as he does, "what should I do?"
It seems a bit useless at first, to think and feel and wonder in this way, but then somehow it's not. He says, "Ironically, we may discover that death meditation is not a morbid exercise at all. Only when we lose the use of something taken for granted (whether the telephone or an eye) are we jolted into a recognition of its value." (1997, page 32)

He also says, "Think of the beginnings of life on this earth: singlecelled organisms dividing and evolving; the gradual emergence of fish, amphibians, and mammals, until the first human beings appeared around five million years ago; then the billions of men and women who preceded my own birth a mere handful of years ago. Each of them was born; each of them died. They died because they were born. What distinguishes me from anyone of them? Did not they feel about the uniqueness of their lives just as I feel about the uniqueness of mine?" (page 29)