Do you know who he is?
It’s a platypus.
An animal that lives in Australia.
A strange animal,
and for this reason, most likely,
has always caught my attention.
He greets you.
(Laughs)
Look at him!
It has the beak like that of a duck.
Then it has the webbed paws, exactly like those of a duck.
But he does not have two, he has four.
It has the fur that is similar to that of a mink,
or – perhaps more likely – like that of a nutria,
and has the tail like that of a beaver.
But the extraordinary thing is that it’s both a mammal,
but he lays eggs.
It lays eggs,
but a good mammal suckles the puppies.
What animal is it?
It is semi-aquatic,
so he lives both in the water and on the earth.
And it is the only example of his family and his genre.
He has no relatives, which perhaps –
It’s a bit lonely.
Poor, described as a nerd, a loser.
Instead,
if we go to see the milestones of our nature education,
for example the Manual of Young Marmots,
he is an animal that has unique qualities:
has the sense of electrolocation, which few animals have,
that is, it captures the prey by identifying its energy.
He is an Olympic swimmer and swims without using his eyesight,
but using the other senses.
Then he can swim for hours in freezing waters
and its body temperature does not vary by one degree.
So, for me, it can easily be the stunt of Keanu Reeves in the Matrix,
a real cool!
And yet no exciting things were said about him.
The Australian legend tells
that was born from the crossing of a duck with the mouse.
The mouse kidnapped her, took advantage of her,
and he was born.
Not really a good start.
The first British settlers who identified it and intercepted it,
they killed him – of course –
they flayed him,
they brought the whole skin home
and they had him examined by the scholars.
British scholars said
that such an animal could not exist at all.
It was without a doubt a fake,
artfully packaged by an Asian embalmer.
In philosophy, it is the metaphor of all that complicates classifications.
So: it is not classifiable,
as a result it is not understandable,
as a result it is not an example.
On time, it ends up among the vulnerable species,
that is the list
immediately preceding the red list
of endangered species.
To all effects, however, to date, it is not yet finished there.
I have always felt like a platypus.
Not so much for my body,
(Laughs)
I have all the pieces belonging to the same species, it seems,
but because I have always felt different from the environment around me.
I lived in Selva del Montello,
a very small village in the province of Treviso,
but with my head I was in Seattle, in the United States.
Because my great-aunt came from there, Oliva,
that after a life lived in Seattle
he returned home just when I was born.
Aunt Oliva was my babysitter and spoke to me in English.
In a village, Selva del Montello,
where, even today, the official language is dialect.
If you speak Italian you’re already weird.
As a child, then, I said I wanted to be a carpenter.
(Laughs)
“A female!?”
“Can not you dream of being a nurse, like your mother?”
“No, the carpenter!”
I’ve always been a big talk, in a family of taciturn people.
At my house, you can spend hours without breaking the word.
I was different.
I felt one way and understood that I was perceived in another.
All in all I felt fine, but I understood that I was perceived as strange.
And behind me, a chorus of opinions and lapidary sentences.
Sociable girl in a geographical area of bears.
“Chatty, long tongue!”
“Child with a creative attitude.”
And then: “I want to go to art school.”
“Art is not lived!”
I go to the university; what do I choose?
Oriental languages.
“Japanese?!”
And then I decide to send the curricula before finishing my studies
and I hire a company, an American multinational, right away.
“Who knows when they’ll ever take you …”
“Immediately!”
“Without a degree you do not go anywhere,
a good job you’ll never find it! “
After ten years of that good work in the American multinational company,
I decide it’s time to change something.
I understand that I’m no longer right with myself
and I make the decision to dismiss me,
without a plan B.
So I’m firing from a permanent contract,
without a plan B.
“Are you crazy?”
“Do not you know that there’s a crisis outside?”
“Where you live?”
At that time, which was the sabbatical period,
that’s cool to say sabbatical,
(Laughs)
I went back to the carpenter girl.
I started a small business,
a workshop for buying and selling used furniture.
Not ancient: used, old.
I bought them, colored them, restored them, sold them.
Guess.
“Imagine, what are you going to do?”
Oh well, these here were partly right:
the Everest of the Italian bureaucracy
it does not help a small laboratory a lot.
Oh well, I put a moment aside the “Civetta sul Comò”, it was called that,
and I reprogram, return to do what I did for ten years,
and where, however, I had left my heart,
but I return as a freelancer,
Free. Professional.
Oh well, what do you think?
The support?
“Who gets you back, after you’ve been a carpenter in the middle?”
“You’ll never make it!”
This sentence I remember very well, pronounced by a business consultant
that I had asked.
“What if… ?”
“You’ll never make it!”
I’ve been doing that job for eight years as a freelancer: happy!
(Applause)
Here I am!
Punctually, during the journey,
I stopped, I looked inside and I saw myself different.
I felt a different being.
I was the Ornitorianna.
(Laughs)
I always did what I had in mind.
I always arrived where I wanted to arrive.
And I assure you that I have seen so many spells happen.
Where did I leave?
I’ve always dreamed so much.
I say about myself that I could be a donor of dreams.
And I’ve always been equipped to make them, those dreams.
We know it:
when we walk,
we take the dream and bring it to the ground, and try to make it happen,
we meet a lot of obstacles, we all know.
The first is that chorus there.
But at a certain point, after a while,
I understood that my first obstacle
it was not the conditioning, the judgments, the thoughts, the voice of others.
And it was not even my inner voice, conditioned by those.
Another problem was my problem: a very big obstacle.
I had the absolute need to cohabit in me
two very different souls, opposite!
The creative, artistic, and the very rational one.
Two very beautiful, very strong souls,
with the same rights to exist.
I advanced, pulled by one, pulled from the other,
trying to gratify one and trying to gratify that other one.
So I was advancing with the handbrake pulled.
I was a potential being, explosive, but hindered.
We feel all of those internal contradictions and tensions.
And all, somehow, and for something,
we feel different.
But it is a diversity that is all in all trivial.
The point is not diversity in itself,
it’s how we fit into that diversity.
I suffered a lot, but I did the same!
Take out the dream from the drawer?
I do!
I plan?
I do!
I fall, I get up, I fix the shot.
I do!
I stop my ears,
because I believe that the platypus will plug the ears, so as not to become extinct.
I do!
Arrival, to the result?
I do!
And as I get to the result, I’m already doing something else.
Because I understood
that is not the result that makes me happy, is the path that makes me get there.
It’s in doing that I’m happy, and that’s where I want to be.
For this reason,
I say that for me doing is the activator of happiness.
I always do,
even when I find myself in the dark, in the tunnel.
It’s that famous tunnel where you see the small, small,
then you get bigger and you find yourself paved,
because it was not the light, they were the headlights of the TIR.
I get up,
a little flattened.
And there, I say this sentence:
“Marianna, look at your feet!
This is the time to look at your feet and move on. “
This sentence is the phrase that I repeated the most in my life.
And it’s a sentence that ended up in the Ornitorianna Handbook.
Here it is!
Now I take it and I want to read some things.
The Ornitorianna Handbook is a collection of effect phrases,
like that there, a spur, a stimulus,
rules, instructions, tricks, escamotage,
orders that I give myself.
It is my guide to doing.
A bit like the Manual of Young Marmots, in fact.
In here, on the first page,
there is a sentence, a dedication, which I made to myself,
which is the mantra of Ornitorianna:
“I decide who I am in life, I do not let others decide.”
That dictated by my parents, it sounds like this:
“Assa star, so much co ‘e pensada has made it”
Translated from the dialect of Selva del Montello:
“Leave it,
he has not even finished the thought that he is already doing it. “
It is divided into chapters, very long.
And I have the pleasure and the desire to share two points per chapter with you.
The two points that for me were more enlightening, in my doing.
The chapter of “Do Confidence”.
“I trust myself and my intuitions.
I trust my friends, my allies, my cheerleaders.
Those with pon pon
that jump, dance and cheer forever for me,
because they love me. “
The chapter of “Respect”:
“I respect my values and I constantly admonish myself on this.
Respect the physiological time of things and people.
I, of mine, am an impatient person:
all right away.
It does not work, we know it. “
The chapter of “I allow myself”.
“I allow myself the moments of discouragement,
I know so much, I overcome them.
I allow myself the playful part in everything I do.
I have to have fun! “
The chapter of “I protect myself from all academics”.
“In everything you do,
there is always someone with an important title,
more important than yours,
that can tell you how you have to do what you are doing.
Probably he is also right.
Let’s do the same?
And then, coincidentally, we re-adjust the shot?
I protect myself, in everyday life, from the ravings of others.
This is the era of ‘all right’ of all, except for me.
I did not understand: if it does not apply to me, it does not even apply to others. “
The chapter of “Non”.
“I’m not looking for the anchor of being ready,
I’ll never be.
I do not fall into the trap of the victim executioner of perfectionism.
I’m not going forward,
if after hearing the heart, and analyzed with the head,
my belly says: no!
Because she’s always right. “
The chapter of the “Accolgo”.
“I welcome the mistake,
I know so much that it is functional to the evolutionary process.
And I welcome the crisis,
because it is in the moment of crisis that I can know myself well,
to know me better,
and I can adjust the shooting range. “
With that system there, “I put it on my head, I do”
and with the manual in hand, I recently wrote a book.
With an illustrious co-author,
because if only Marianna’s book was spinning – anyway …
(Laughs)
It was not easy: the first obstacle, the choir,
which in reality was more my inner voice, [he said]:
“You are not a writer”. True!
But I wanted to do it anyway,
because I knew, inside me, that he would do some good to someone!
Then there was the publisher’s real voice:
“We, books, we do them.”
Oh well, do you remember my parents?
“Assa star!”
Ok, published book.
It was a terrible thing:
falls, endless tunnels, absolute darkness.
Oh well, published, first objective result.
And to respond to the publisher,
after only three weeks he went into reprint.
But the real result, for me, was another.
I started receiving messages from strangers.
Not my friends, who love me and tried to tell me:
“Good, how proud we are of you.”
No, from strangers.
“Excuse me for disturbing you, I wanted to thank you for …”;
“Thank you for writing these things.”;
“Thank you for telling these and telling these others”.
Those graces were an injection
of total trust, and of extreme happiness.
But above all, they made me understand
that doing is not only the activator of happiness for myself.
It is the activator of happiness for others too, through me.
And this is the wonderful thing!
I conclude by saying this:
The platypus is strange, yes!
Let’s feel good, in being a platypus.
We love each other, we accept every piece of us.
Let’s meet each other, let’s love each other
and let’s really do something to be who we want to be in life:
“We.”
Let’s leave the others alone!
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
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