If this column is about the mystery of living together, there is perhaps no better place to begin than with the border. A border is where coexistence becomes visible. It is where belonging encounters difference, where identity meets the unfamiliar, where fear and curiosity stand face to face. Every society is shaped by the way it imagines its borders—not only those drawn on maps, but those that define communities, homes, bodies, and selves. To reflect on the border, then, is not simply to reflect on migration or geopolitics. It is to ask what kind of life we wish to build together.

Border. A vital place of exchange. A porous body. A permeable entity. Flexible. Belonging. Rootedness. Freedom. Yet a border can also divide. It can become a refuge, but also a pathology. It can be militarized. It can become a checkpoint. Defense and offense. Frontier and barrier.

The border is accompanied by fear. It is the place where two anxieties meet and collide: the fear of those who arrive—often desperate, displaced, and entering an unfamiliar world—and the fear of those who witness the sudden arrival of the stranger at their own doorstep. Here, differences that seem irreconcilable confront one another. And yet they observe each other, touch one another, transform one another, until, sometimes, they become something entirely new.

The question of the border is unavoidable because it shapes every human life. From the moment we are conceived—thrust into the world—we begin the work of differentiation. Day and night. Dream and reality. Need and desire. Human life is, before anything else, a longing for roots, a longing to belong. Life asks to be inscribed somewhere, to be recognized as belonging to a community.

In this sense, drawing a border is the first gesture of life. It allows us to distinguish inside from outside, identity from difference, one's homeland from another's. Our entire development unfolds through the gradual internalization of boundaries that become part of our experience. Borders give us roots. They draw the line of belonging. They define us.

But life is also crossing. It is trespassing, exceeding, moving beyond borders. Life is freedom. Freedom without roots—and transgression without any desire to belong—becomes pathological. It becomes a wandering existence without identity, without boundaries, without belonging. A life that dissolves into the undifferentiated.

Human beings therefore oscillate between two desires: the desire to belong and the desire to cross beyond, to experience the dizzying dimension of freedom. On one side lives an irresistible, almost Odyssean impulse toward what lies beyond—to surpass the limits we ourselves inherit or impose. On the other emerges, just as early, a nostalgic search for protected places. The longing for an impossible return to undifferentiated existence gives way to the need for safe harbors—for places we can truly inhabit: the boundaries of our room, the arrangement of familiar objects, the walls of our home, the circle of family, the garden, the school, the town, the territory, the nation.

Today we once again hear calls to dig moats and raise walls. The wall has become one of the defining symbols of our age. It represents life closing itself against life. It is the refusal of encounter. It is the attempt to transform the border from a vital place of exchange into a bastion, into barbed wire, into a closed port. When rootedness forgets freedom—when belonging severs its bond with the possibility of crossing—the result is conformity. Life becomes confinement.

A border that loses its porosity hardens. It becomes militarized. It stiffens. It nourishes the fantasy of purity and uncontamination, bringing the border ever closer to becoming a wall, a fence, a barricade. A border remains a border only insofar as it makes passage possible: between identity and difference, between identity and the stranger, between identity and the other. It exists only if it allows transition, exchange, communication. Only if it remains permeable.

The collapse of many of the promises made by contemporary hypermodern society seems to have unleashed an irreversible process in which traditional boundaries have dissolved. The result is a profound transformation in how we perceive borders themselves: the illusion of a limitless freedom, absolute and pathological, untouched by the experience of limits and indifferent to the existence of others. Near and far collapse into one another. Distances shrink almost to nothing. Past and future flatten into a continuous present—the endless here and now. Individuals and communities can connect instantly. Yet as uncertainty grows and contemporary identity becomes increasingly fragile, society responds in sharply polarized ways. One response is the fierce temptation to fortify borders: to defend one's vital space, one's roots, one's identity, while dreaming of a return to the local, the familiar, the territorial. It is a defensive impulse—a retreat from a world perceived as uncontrollable, foreign, and threatening.

The other response begins with a different recognition: that living life—life in its fullest sense, life that demands freedom, life that always exceeds containment—can endure only if we lower our defenses and make room for the stranger.

Recognizing our own armor, acknowledging and humanizing the unconscious impulse to fear what is different by integrating it into our own subjectivity, is the first step toward making a border flexible and permeable.

Only by recognizing our instinct to defend ourselves can we begin to move beyond it.

A border becomes truly crossable only when we recognize that its deepest purpose is not separation, but passage—not silence, but communication.