EDITORIAL - BODY WELL-BEING AND PANDEMIC SITUATION. CRITICALITIES AND EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

Abstract

What are the effects of the pandemic on body well-being? What are the criticalities and which are the processes that can represent educational opportunities? These are the questions of this call for papers which intends to range from the change of some specific life situations, such as the condition of being student through e-learning, to the change of everyday times, much less marked by being active with the body, by moving to change our own field of experience.

The concentration of multiple experiences in a strongly reduced body space is a fundamental consequence of the pandemic that has forced to replace the interactions among bodies with virtual interactions which, if, in some ways, reduce and impoverish the quality of communication, in others it accentuate some dimensions, first and foremost which favours verbal language.

In the educational relationship, the impossibility of a synchronic interaction with other bodies could increase the self-referential working group educational and didactic character, where the presence of the other is no longer immediately prompting adjustments or changes in direction on the cognitive, emotional and relationship side in general.

Within family context, the expansion of the cohabitation times can force a persistent sharing of the same environments with the consequence of an overexposure of the bodies. Overall, the existence of bodies appears to have been widely modified in the pandemic situation, with the danger of struggling to find oneself again, of not being able to manage changes, of making room for forms of malaise rather than new temporary balances. How could the discomfort linked to the pandemic situation have the body dimension as its theatre? What could be the indicators of increasing difficulties in children, adolescents and adults?

Other criticalities are inherent the inevitable neglect of their health/disease states, not giving themselves and their bodies the attention and care that they would also need; putting a large part of primary and secondary prevention on standby spreads a "waiting" thinking and feeling and people wait for the end of the pandemic to resume taking care of the well-being of their bodies, resigning themselves to living with small or more serious problems and, in some way, to sacrifice oneself in the name of a greater danger, which for too many has become a dramatic personal history.

How, then, could these most lonely and "suspended" bodies, the bodies of the most fragile people, could benefit from the educational work of parents, teachers, educators, instructors and coaches? All this in the awareness that education has no interruptions whatsoever and that our choices and non-choices, even and above all in this era of pandemic, far from being neutral, have had and will have a decisive power in conditioning towards more existences, resigned, less vital and creative, or happier.