The young people asked us….
A group of young people, a listening desk, a box. These are the ingredients of a small experiment carried out in a school. As managers of the listening desk we wanted to do something different, something that sometimes seems impossible for both adults and young people. Ask and receive an answer.
A class of teenagers asked to talk about sexuality. How to do that? How to actually talk about what they wanted to know? We thought we’d get the questions on paper cards and collect them anonymously and freely in a box.
Here are some of their questions… Here are some of our answers…
How to relate to others?
It is difficult to talk to adults about feelings and sexuality. Why do they avoid addressing these topics? They were young too….
How to introduce the topic with families?
Maybe we could start with the first question… how can we relate to you today and more generally how can adults relate to adolescents?
Between young people and adults it seems that there must be a meeting-clash.
Adults possess something unique and also useful for all others, namely a certain knowledge of life, given by their experiences. And so as adults, we have this very responsibility: Don’t let you do anything stupid, dangerous or useless, because we know from experience that they are. In a word we must be able to say NO to the youngest. But we must be able to explain this responsibility, we must be able to explain these NO. We must have understood something of the experiences made to be able to tell you otherwise it is an exercise of power that you rightly rebel, getting angry and away. And you might think that you can’t understand it at all.
But I understand that we are all human beings, so somehow we can understand each other.
Let’s say that what matters to you young people is not the same as what matters to us adults. But if I am an adult and remember my story, I can imagine what a young person thinks, what is happening to him, what he is experiencing. If in the transition from young to adult I do not make disappear what I was before, forgetting it, then you can understand. You might even think it’s not so bad to be an adult if you don’t become such an asshole after all.
What are the other elements, apart from love, that need to be in a relationship?
How should the first approach be?
With these and other questions comes out an idea of love a little schematic… but there is no rule in love.
What do you fall in love with? Do you decide? Does it always correspond to the pattern you have set out? You fall in love with an image, with something you don’t always see. One in the crowd becomes special. You see in that person something different than everyone else. Something unique, something original. It’s just that unexpected and surprising uniqueness that attracts us.
Since the original, different, new and unique things are by definition also unknown, falling in love means a little ‘gamble everything, risk everything, dare. No ingredients and no recipe.
These are some of the questions we found in the box. There were even deeper, sometimes dramatic ones. There were very funny and witty ones. For now we have started from these… for the new year we are waiting for more questions.
Maria Giubettini
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