Well, look at that… Time has passed… and I hope we have grown a little wiser. Of course, this is neither a question nor an inward reflection. Quite the opposite: it is the realisation of a whole set of circumstances that now moves this pen across the paper. The title is sweet and perhaps comic, but the journey was not much short of bitter. Ah, Aristotle! We did not study you all that much, yet there you were, standing in our path. Still, you might say… at least we recognised it.
By the ‘journey’, of course, I mean the spiritual transformation of this period. However reluctant we may be to admit it in everyday life, we undergo constant change, even through the needless details of the ordinary. Sometimes directly, through a decision; sometimes indirectly and gradually, through our acceptance of certain circumstances. Extreme examples? And yet!!! We have lived them!! If you believe that illumination arrives in times of peace, you are mistaken! It comes only through everyday yet rare… violent yet fleeting… setbacks.
I do not intend to analyse those setbacks, of course, so much as the conclusions that emerge from them. While we expect those conclusions to be intense and perhaps decisive in nature… on the contrary, they are soothing. But if they are so soothing, you may ask, why present them so dramatically and with such surprise in your eyes? Precisely! It was that simple from the beginning. The answer had been in front of us all along.
Unfortunately, we wait for such moments — brief but undisguised — to bring us to our senses. In less than an hour, thirty years of life will be complete. That alone turns you back… though not very far. You remember only… People. Once you understand… you freeze… and then you laugh! But why? What did you expect? NO!
One change, then, is that you have moved beyond symbols. You walk along the road and everything is deserted. Yet now every glance rekindles a scene, and every step, despite its mechanical nature, acquires a feeling. Wait — do you mean someone is missing? Well, yes. You were wrong! Not someone, but what we felt back then. Instinctively, we now move towards an emotional reconstruction, rather than a visual or material reincarnation of memory. This does not erase the faces; on the contrary, perhaps this state locates the centre more accurately. People who once seemed distant in our minds now show an astonishing recognition of our efforts.
The most beautiful phrase of 2023–2024, for me, was: ‘I took time off to see you.’ It tells you that perhaps you, too, hold a special place in another person's thoughts. And naturally, this ‘setback’ — because it did not belong to the routine of daily life, combined with the lightning speed and naturalness of the moment — brings a quieting of the soul.
Yes, then! Every day we run to catch the carriage of success. We agonise over peace of mind, now rendered irrational and deified, seeking it through the fulfilment of small daily goals. We tire and sweat at the altar of respectability. Yet it takes only one moment to understand that the decades were not wasted. The wealth you had been investing in lay elsewhere, without your knowing it… and the best part? Now it follows you.