Today, to present another page of the book we are preparing – #Spirit of 74: the 74 words necessary for everyone to live happily the passion for their chosen profession – we will talk about the Bar. The Bar? Yes, the Bar.
In Italy, work and the Bar are two extremes of the same image.
Obviously excluding those people who work professionally in the food and drink industry, the image we have of the bar, specially those of us who live in the provinces, is that of a place where we can relax for a few moments with a cup of coffee or where we can pass a few hours doing nothing and chatting about nothing in particular.
But in any case, we certainly don’t imagine it as a place where we go to “produce”, an expression often used in the wrong context.
But are we really sure that these places have nothing to do with our work?
If we stop to think about it, maybe we will realise that in those environments there is something very important for our activity, something which teaches us to work better, something which helps us to understand in a real way the sense of what we do in our daily work.
Anyway, that’s how it seems to us.
Looking on from a distance we notice that the attitude of many people – including ourselves – always concentrated on our work, whether standing by our work benches or bent over a PC interpreting data, we realise that often “our” world tends to exclude everything else.
In our opinion it is for this reason that the Bar can convey, to those who are prepared to listen, that which we call reality. As Gaber said:
“Reality is a bird, which, having no memory, must imagine which way to go”
And if the path of that bird is also in the light-hearted words that we speak between a coffee and a spritz in the corner bar? Those words which tell of an everyday reality, maybe trivial but never taken for granted, which deep down concerns us all?
Sometimes we have been invited to attend a congress. In these occasions we remember, with a nostalgic smile, when our founders turned their attention to their local bar trying to imagine if the people there could be possible clients for their products.
In those moments we can imagine that understanding the Bar is a bit like really understanding people.