Every day, surely, has its inspiring events. When there are a good three of these then that day truly becomes a perfect one. 

A day like that happened a couple of week ago with three inspiring events.

The first one was when we attended a meeting with a Bikku or Buddhist monk from Sri Lanka. We went to a meditation and massage studio just outside Lucca’s walls. His holiness Sri Bante Rahula answered many questions on Buddhism and its practice. Afterwards we were invited to Rahula’s monastery in Ponte a Moriano for lunch. This was simply delicious and reminded us of the lovely time we managed to spend in that serendipitous island shortly before the pandemic began.and cut our stay there short.

The second inspirational event was meeting up with chess grand-master Gasparov. He had been invited by our local chess group and a competition was organised in Bagni di Lucca’s casino. There were many participants including the Italian female champion (who lost against Gasparov). Of course we did not dare to challenge the grand-master but it was awesome to watch the motley crew of die-hards ranging from prodigious teenagers to grey-haired veterans taking part in a sport which has channelled even the roughest gang members into a more constructive form of aggression.

The third was hearing Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ quartet performed in one of the finest village churches in our area: that of Tereglio. To hear this sublime music played by some of our finest players was wonderful. To think that this composer, whose melodies as our school music master would say were ‘distilled in purest honey’, died when he was just thirty-one!

Inspirational events like these can all lead us into higher worlds that help to leave those petty, material concerns infiltrating our lives far behind. These breaths of inspiration are what we so desperately need in a planet which is being heavily attacked by ignorance and intolerance, by climate change and by wars, by tropical-like storms and by the most unbearable conflicts.

Let us be thankful that we can still be able to experience these things.