By Manuel Montobbio
When life calls us to sail through other seas and there comes the moment to part and our journey has been the journey of life, we necessarily experience a paradox and a metamorphosis. Since all end is at the same time a start, and what is lived doesn’t finish, but changes. Thus we celebrate today the end of a journey and the beginning of another; but at the same time its continuity and that of the ship of Spain that sails from now on always through the waters of Albania.
Seneca told us already in his Letters to Lucilio that death does not come suddenly, but “death” is called that last one that snatches us away; and that we die every day, since every day we loose part of our life, which diminishes when we grow up. But he was also telling us that everything ends but nothing perishes, and that all that seems to perish in fact just changes; and that the happiness of life does not consist in its length, but in its use.
And that is why we depart from Albania but we don’t leave: we stay. Because we have been staying every day our life we spent in it, and we exist in the deeds, the realities and the dreams which our effort made possible and in the people we are in; and we exist wherever they are.
When looking backwards, we contemplate not only the path never to be walked again, but moreover the “how” and the “what” we leave behind.
The “what” of this Embassy and of the many realities each and everyone of us could mention after these suspension dotsŮ that makes us feel that Spain is not anymore the same it was in Albania that night of July the 10th 2006 when I arrived at Rinas Airport in order to be the first Ambassador of Spain resident in Tirana.
And the unrepeatable “how” of this journey that now comes to its end; because never before the ship of the Embassy of Spain had sailed through the seas of the modern History of Albania. A journey initiated that night as the captain of a ship without a ship, that armed just only with a laptop and a mobile phone started the adventure of creating the ship and act and sail as it already existed. Building the hull, contracting the crew, installing the machines and programs that will make possible its navigation; enable the structures, the professional team and the juridical instruments and programs that ensure that an Embassy is the what it can arrive to be. And at the same time, while the boat is under construction and the crew learns to sail, navigate with the veils unfolded and against the wind; since such is the path to travel and the horizon to reach, that no effort or time is enough to advance towards it. And while the ship step by step starts to sail in its whole potential and makes its own the waters of Albania, this captain also assumes the sailing of larger fleets in key moments of her collective life, such as the OSCE Chairmanship in 2007 or the Presidency of European Union the first semester of this year.
Senequian “how” of employing the life in it, sailing with life in the world and in thelife. “How” of having committed ourselves, of having catalyzed, of having translated each other and our respective worlds. And by knowing the other’s world, this is inevitably, desirably, transformed into ours; and ours into his. Because in order to translate your world, to explain and share it with the other, you cannot but put your self in his shoes, get inside his world and bygetting to know it, it gets transformed into your own. Kavafis said that Ithaca is in the journey: having travelled it together transforms us; as by translating, meeting and knowing each other and walking together, the worlds of Shqiperi and Espa
