Like most of us, I’ve had my pubic hair shaved off by a nun, in a stone vaulted 13th-century room with a view of Florence Cathedral. I guess the only real question is the how. For me, the occasion was a burst appendix.

I was in the Uffizi gallery, feverish and unsteady, trying to focus on Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. It’s the one where the god, in her birthday suit, emerges from the sea on a scallop-shell boat. Artists are just therapists who frame the work differently, and all the great paintings were made for your mental health. In this one the faces are calm, but they’ve known sorrow. The colour palette goes straight to your brain stem and soothes it. Every detail is healing. The sea’s incoming wavelets are also birds, flying away.

As I stood there ensorcelled, and sweating from the abdominal pain that had been getting worse for days, I also remember noticing that everyone in the painting is ginger. I approve of a world in which we redheads are routinely compared to Venus, rather than to our next-closest cousin, the Sumatran orangutan.

The next minute, I was unconscious. But my brain pulled that sly move where it edits the transition. You know the thing when you go to high-five someone, but they don’t notice, so your hand moves to make it seem you were fixing your hair? Well, this is what my brain was attempting as I lost consciousness. So I got to see Venus stepping from her scallop shell and apologising for all the brine and seaweed bits that were slopping into the gallery.

I was saying No no, honestly, it’s quite all right, and being careful to keep my eyes up – but as soon as the flame-haired god directed my attention to the water on the floor, I slipped in it and bumped my head. Clearly for my brain this scenario was more face-saving, and more plausible, than the vulnerable truth that I’d simply fainted. I wonder what else it’s pretending I’m in control of?

I woke up in an emergency room, under that medieval stone ceiling. The nun in her habit and veil was addressing my hair-down-there with cordless clippers. She was apologetic, and explained that she’d hoped not to wake me.

Since the nun scenario isn’t a specific kink of mine, I didn’t automatically assume I was in the afterlife. But I don’t think my brain entirely excluded it. I didn’t remember going to heaven, but in that moment I didn’t remember going to Italy, either. The paramedics had been generous with the pain relief. Seeing my confusion, the kind sister laughed and explained the deal. In 1288, Dante Alighieri’s father-in-law had built the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, thus putting him in good standing with his god and his city alike, and inadvertently supplying this room we both found ourselves in, 730 years later – a room in which I was currently being prepped for abdominal surgery.

I say ‘inadvertently’, but I don’t really believe it. If you want to be happy in this life, all you need is to realise that every good thing around you was put there at unimaginable expense, and with immense forward planning, at your personal orders, and entirely for your personal benefit. You’ve forgotten you issued the orders, that’s all. But you haven’t forgotten how to notice just how spectacularly great it all is. For your mental health, this is always your main job: to notice all the beauty.

What a good idea you had, for example, for sunlight to be so pretty. How wise you were to order Persia to be created, with all its inventiveness, so that parks and gardens would exist for these warm summer days – and the poetry of Rumi to read in them. How prescient of you to design five hundred species of shady oak tree just the way you like them, and to pay for so many of them to be positioned around the world in all the exact spots where you would end up sitting for a minute or two. Act like an immortal trillionaire with retrograde amnesia, and suddenly the whole world is just as you planned it.

All these talented people, doing all this wonderful stuff for me just because I once asked – I find it very obliging. I especially appreciate all the schools, the volunteer work, and the movies and novels. Keep it going, all of you, quietly working beauty into the world. You know who you are. Because – forgive me – I’ve forgotten.

The Santa Maria Nuova, though: this was next-level stuff. It might be the furthest back in time I have ever gone to issue orders. It was nice of Dante’s father-in-law to oblige, and build me a hospital. It was nice of the gentle nuns, the Sorelle Oblate dello Spirito Santo, to have founded their religious order on the principle of caring. Caring for me, obviously – but in the meantime it was good of them to have practiced on thousands of other poorly people, so that their skills would be top-notch when it came to the main act. And during the week I spent in their ward convalescing, it was nice of Roberto, the seventy-five-year-old cheerfully dying in the bed next to mine, to have timed his death so courteously. There’s no one I would rather have had kick the bucket beside me – which I suppose is why I’d arranged for it.

Roberto couldn’t walk or talk anymore, but he could do excellent impressions. Me with my bald head and glasses. Me with my bald head and books. Me with my bald head and surgical drain – the clear plastic tube through which eldritch liquids flowed from my abdomen and into a grim bottle on the floor. All Roberto’s mimes explored this same theme. Me, living – but at what terrible cost, given my incurable baldness. And Roberto, dying – but gloriously, with his immaculate head of silver hair that the nuns cooed over and slicked back for him twice a day with Tenax pomade.

Every day at one, his family came to visit. As is the custom in Italy, they brought his lunch in a dozen little boxes. And from the second day, noticing that the foreigner had no lunchtime visitors, these dear human beings brought food for me, too. Roberto’s sister, his niece and her two boisterous teens rolled into the ward in a haze of laughter and affordable perfume, and drew up chairs between our two beds. A torrent of gossip ensued. This unfaithful aunt who couldn’t keep her legs together; that cuckolded husband whose uccello no longer sang. The ladies didn’t hold back with the trash talk. I guess they figured I wouldn’t be in town for long, and Roberto wouldn’t be anywhere. And the filthier the gossip became, the wider he grinned. Ever the solicitous ward-mate, he would mime along for my benefit whenever he sensed that my minimal Italian wasn’t capturing some anatomical nuance.

While the scandal flowed, a clutter of Tupperware distributed itself quite promiscuously on our bedside tables, jostling with all the medical equipment. A dose of grilled aubergine here, an application of bruschetta there. If love were enough, my hair would have grown back auburn and lustrous, and Roberto would have stood up and walked. Time’s incoming waves would have become birds flying the other way, carrying us on their wings.

Roberto didn’t eat a thing, but it was clear that he came away full. When his family left, he would lie back with an incurable smile, to doze away the last of his hours.

In fairness I don’t remember designing any of this beauty that we must make it our life’s work to notice. And I don’t recall ordering all these tender things we do for one another, when we’re not busy being inhuman. I have no way of knowing whether it’s actually me who ordered things to be so, or whether it’s just something I should be grateful for. So: if all this beauty is the work of a loving creator, then thank you for doing their work on earth. And if some of it is the doing of human beings, just being human for each other’s sake, then thank you for all your hard work. I will honour the work by noticing. I will honour it by learning how to see.

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Thank you for reading Human Again. I love comments & feedback, so please don’t hold back. I’m just starting with this project and I’m very grateful for your encouragement and support. Each week I try to offer something therapeutic in your in-box. It does me good to write, and I hope it’s useful to read. If you aren’t already subscribed, it’s free, and you get extras from time to time. Please also consider forwarding this to someone who might enjoy it. Wishing you a great week until next time – Chris

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