Changing Your Mind, Changing Your Life, Changing Masters

Change is one of the most natural things we do and, at the same time, one of the hardest things to accept. We are willing to acknowledge that the world is constantly changing, but when the change involves us or someone we know well, we suddenly demand explanations, consistency, and justification. As if there were an age beyond which we were no longer allowed to become different.

And yet no one reaches the end of their life as exactly the same person they were at the beginning.

We change our minds, our habits, and our desires. We change the way we look at other people and, sometimes, the way we look at ourselves. There are beliefs that stay with us for decades and then, almost without our noticing, stop belonging to us. Others withstand everything and become such a deep part of who we are that questioning them seems almost impossible.

Change can be slow or sudden. It can grow out of years of reflection or emerge from an event that, in a matter of hours, calls into question something we had always taken for granted.

Someone may quit smoking after coming face-to-face with the possibility of death. Someone else may decide to lose weight after years of unhealthy eating, finally realizing that the body cannot be treated as though time had no consequences. Someone may leave a job where they spent half their life, move to another city, end a relationship, or start over.

From the outside, all of this can look like sudden transformation. But almost every important change has a long history that other people cannot see. There are thoughts that mature quietly, frustrations that accumulate, questions that remain unanswered for years. Then something happens: an illness, a meeting, a loss, a birth, a failure, a crisis. That event does not necessarily create the change. Sometimes it simply opens a door that was already there.

Changing Your Mind

Changing your mind should not automatically be seen as a sign of weakness. It would be strange to expect someone who has learned something new to continue thinking exactly as they did before simply to avoid appearing inconsistent.

Consistency is an important quality, but it can become a cage when it is confused with immobility. If ten years ago we had less information, less experience, and less awareness, why should we consider it a betrayal when we see certain things differently today?

Of course, not every change of opinion comes from greater awareness. We may change our minds out of fear, pressure, conformity, or self-interest. We may even change our minds without truly having one of our own, simply following someone else's.

But that does not mean changing is wrong. It simply means that we should ask ourselves why we changed.

Changing Your Life

A different kind of change is the one that concerns our entire existence.

There are people who eventually decide that they no longer want to live the way they have lived until that point. Not necessarily because their life has been a failure, but because they have discovered that it no longer reflects the person they have become.

A religious conversion can radically transform someone's life. Someone else may take the opposite path and leave behind the faith in which they were raised. One person may choose a simpler life after spending years pursuing success. Another may finally find the courage to pursue a desire they had sacrificed for too long.

In such cases, change cannot be measured only by the advantages it brings. Sometimes changing means losing something. That may be one of the most revealing differences between an authentic transformation and a simple adaptation to circumstances. Change does not always bring an immediate reward. Sometimes it comes with a price: giving up security, disappointing someone, or starting over from a position worse than the one from which we began. And yet the person who changes may still feel that they are finally moving in the right direction.

And Then There Are Politicians

Here, things become more complicated.

A politician can change their mind. They can admit they were wrong. They can revise their beliefs after gaining a deeper understanding of an issue, after studying it, governing, or listening to different people. Politicians are human beings too, and there is no reason they should be condemned to believe at fifty what they believed at twenty.

But politics introduces something that makes change much harder to interpret: self-interest.

A politician who changes parties, alliances, or positions may have genuinely changed their beliefs. Or they may simply have changed the place where those beliefs allow them to gain more support, more power, or a better position.

That is where suspicion begins, and it is not necessarily an unreasonable suspicion. Citizens cannot see inside other people's minds. They can only observe what people do, what they said before, and what they say afterward.

That is why political changes are often subjected to a level of scrutiny that we do not apply to changes in private life. If someone decides to quit smoking, we rarely ask what advantage they gained from the decision. If someone changes religions, we may not understand their reasons, but we recognize that those reasons belong to their most intimate sphere.

When a politician changes position precisely as the balance of power changes, however, it is reasonable to ask whether their convictions have changed—or simply their interests.

That is where the third change in the title comes in: changing masters.

It is not necessarily the same thing as changing your mind.

We Are Not Photographs

Perhaps the problem begins with our need to turn other people into photographs.

We like to know who they are, what they believe, and where they stand. A photograph reassures us because it allows us to classify. The problem is that people are not photographs. They are processes.

The person we were as a child is not the same person we became as an adult. The parent we were when our children were born is not necessarily the same parent we are today. The man or woman who made a particular choice twenty years ago had different experiences, fears, and knowledge from those they possess today.

Expecting that person to remain unchanged is, in a way, denying them the right to grow.

But there is an opposite danger as well: using the word "change" to justify everything. Not everything that changes is progress. Not every new position is more truthful than the previous one. Not every break is liberation, and not every transformation automatically deserves admiration.

Change can be a salvation, but it can also be an escape. It can be growth, but it can also be opportunism. It can mean finally finding yourself, or simply finding a place that suits you better.

Looking Without Rushing to Judge

Perhaps we should learn to observe change more carefully and be less eager to pass judgment. We can ask what produced it, what it required, what it cost, and what it brought in return. Above all, we can ask whether the person has become freer or merely more convenient to themselves.

We will not always find an answer. Some changes remain mysterious even to the people experiencing them. Sometimes we understand only years later why we abandoned one path and chose another.

Perhaps this is one of the strangest things about existence: while we are living it, we do not yet know the ultimate meaning of our choices. We discover it only by looking back.

We change our minds, we change our lives, and sometimes we change masters. And after changing everything, we may discover that we have simply found our way back to ourselves.

Perhaps changing does not always mean becoming someone else. Sometimes it means finally becoming the person we had not yet found the courage to be. 

What Is God, Really? When Human Beings Try to Define the Absolute

A few evenings ago, while talking with a friend, we arrived at a question that seems to have accompanied humanity from the very beginning and that, precisely because of this, we tend to take for granted: what is God, really? Not who God is according to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or any of the countless religious traditions human beings have developed over thousands of years, but what God actually is, beyond our representations, our symbols, our doctrines, and even our words.

The distinction is enormous, because when we ask, “Who is God?” we are already operating within a relationship, a narrative, a tradition. We can answer that He is the Father, the Creator, the Supreme Being, the One, the Absolute, Love, the Trinity, the God of Abraham, or the God proclaimed by Jesus. But when we ask what God is, the question changes completely, because we are immediately confronted with the limits of human knowledge itself. We are finite beings trying to understand the infinite; we are immersed in time and attempting to think about what is supposed to exist beyond time; we are part of the universe and yet try to understand what, according to our own definitions, would be its origin and foundation.

So I find myself wondering: are we really sure that the categories through which we think about God are adequate to God?

The problem is not only God, but man

Perhaps the question of God cannot be approached without first passing through an even more difficult question: what is a human being?

It sounds like a simpler question because we have direct experience of ourselves. Yet it only takes a moment of reflection to realize how difficult it is to answer. We can say that a human being is what he thinks, what he does, what he desires, what he loves, what he creates, what he remembers, what he dreams. We can define humanity through reason, consciousness, language, or the ability to create culture and art. But every definition inevitably captures only a part.

We might say, for example, that a human being is what he does. It is an attractive definition and, to some extent, a convincing one. We reveal ourselves through our works: music, literature, science, technology, religion, war, architecture, politics, love. But is that enough to define us? Obviously not. Human beings build cathedrals and atomic bombs; they write love poems and organize wars; they save lives and can, at the same time, destroy other human lives. If we define humanity through what human beings do, we obtain an image of humanity, but not necessarily its essence.

And this is where a word that may seem unnecessarily technical becomes useful: synecdoche. We take a part and use it to represent the whole. The problem is that when we speak about humanity and then use humanity as a means of speaking about God, we risk constructing what might be called a synecdoche of synecdoches: one part of the human being becomes the whole human being, and that partial image of humanity then becomes, in turn, our image of God.

At that point, we may have the impression that we have found an answer, when perhaps all we have done is multiply our representations.

Is the God we name really God?

This, to me, is one of the fundamental problems of every religion.

We cannot speak about God except through human language. We call Him Father because we know what it means to be a father; we call Him Creator because we know what it means to create; we call Him Judge because we know what judgment is; we call Him Love because we have experienced love. Even when we use apparently more abstract terms such as Absolute, Infinite, or Being, we are still using concepts created by the human mind.

That does not necessarily mean they are false. It means they are ours.

And I think that distinction is crucial.

When someone says, “God is love,” are they necessarily telling us something about God, or are they telling us something about their own understanding of love and, through that understanding, attempting to approach God? When we call God Father, are we describing a reality we know directly, or are we using a human metaphor to indicate something we cannot otherwise define?

I do not think these questions destroy faith. On the contrary, they might make faith much more conscious, because they force believers to distinguish between God and the image of God they have constructed.

And the same distinction applies to those who do not believe.

Because even an atheist, when saying that he does not believe in God, must first establish which God he is rejecting. The personal God of a particular religion? The Creator God of classical metaphysics? An anthropomorphic God who intervenes in history? The Absolute of philosophers? The God of Christian tradition? Rejecting one representation of God does not necessarily demonstrate the nonexistence of everything that the word “God” has attempted, throughout history, to indicate.

And what about Jesus?

The issue becomes even more delicate when we arrive at Jesus, because we are no longer dealing merely with a philosophical concept, but with a historical person around whom one of the greatest religious experiences in human history developed.

My friend reminded me of something that I consider far from insignificant: Jesus speaks of the Father, speaks of unity, speaks about the relationship between human beings and God, and, above all, makes statements that Christianity has come to regard as extraordinary. But precisely here, I think, we need to distinguish the historical Jesus from the theological development that subsequently grew around his figure.

I am not saying that Christian theology is false. I am saying that it is something different from simply recording the words of a man who lived two thousand years ago.

When we read the New Testament, after all, we are not listening to a recording of every word Jesus ever spoke. We are reading texts that emerged within the earliest Christian communities, were transmitted and interpreted within those communities, and eventually became part of the tradition of the Church. Paul of Tarsus played an enormous role in the spread of Christianity and in its theological development, but he did not know Jesus during Jesus' earthly life. The councils of the following centuries then formulated fundamental doctrines concerning the nature of Christ and the relationship between his human and divine natures.

All of this belongs to the history of Christianity and cannot simply be erased. But precisely because it belongs to history, it should remind us that there is a historical process between Jesus and the theological image of Jesus, and that this process deserves to be studied and understood.

In the Gospels, Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” That is an immense statement, but it is not the same thing as literally saying, “I am God.” Christianity has interpreted this and other statements in light of the whole story of Jesus, his death, the resurrection believed in by his disciples, and the subsequent reflection of Christian communities. The divinity of Christ is therefore not simply the result of one isolated sentence, but of an entire theological construction based on the interpretation of his person and his life.

And here, personally, I find the question more interesting than the answer.

What did his first disciples see in that man that led them to recognize in him something beyond a man?

It is a fascinating question even if, for a moment, we put faith aside.

Perhaps art knows something reason cannot express

Art also came up in our conversation, and I don't think that was incidental.

Art has a peculiar quality: it can often suggest what it cannot explain. Music can communicate something that cannot be translated into a definition; a painting can make us perceive a dimension of existence that no description could completely reproduce; poetry can connect experiences that ordinary language would otherwise keep apart.

Perhaps this is also why religions have always needed art. When reason reaches something it can no longer contain through precise concepts, symbols, parables, rituals, images, and songs appear.

Not necessarily because the symbol is more truthful than reason, but because sometimes a symbol can point toward something that reason cannot fully circumscribe.

An arrow is not the thing toward which it points.

Perhaps much of religious language works in precisely this way: it does not necessarily claim to be the object itself; it attempts to point toward it.

The problem begins when we forget the distinction and turn the arrow into the target.

The temptation of dogma

This is where, paradoxically, I think both traditional religion and certain forms of esotericism and Gnosticism can fail.

Historically, Gnosticism emerged through many different movements and experiences, and it would be simplistic to reduce it to a single system. Yet whenever the idea of a higher knowledge becomes the conviction that one finally possesses the key to the Absolute, the risk is that one dogma is simply being replaced by another.

The priest says, “The truth is this.”

The initiate answers, “No, the true knowledge is this.”

But if both believe they have definitively possessed something that no finite being should be able to possess in its entirety, the distance between them may be much smaller than they imagine.

The words change, the symbols change, the hierarchies change, the sacred books change, but the temptation remains the same: to turn a possible path toward the Absolute into the Absolute itself.

And this is where, in my view, humility should enter the picture.

Not the humility of someone who gives up searching, but the humility of someone who continues searching while knowing that every answer may contain only a fragment of the truth.

Perhaps the problem lies in our very concept of “existence”

There is an even more radical question.

We ask whether God “exists,” but what does it mean to exist?

A tree exists. A person exists. A galaxy exists. An atom exists. These are realities that we can, at least to some degree, place within space and time and subject to different forms of observation.

But if God is truly what some philosophical traditions call the Absolute, the foundation of being itself, can we use the same concept of existence for God that we use for things that are part of the universe?

Perhaps the question itself is badly framed.

It is somewhat like asking where the origin of space is located. The question appears meaningful because we are accustomed to thinking that everything must be “somewhere.” But if we are speaking about space as a whole, that “where” no longer has its ordinary meaning.

Likewise, if God were that upon which being itself depends, asking whether God “exists” in the same sense in which a thing exists might mean applying a category to something for which that category was never designed.

This is not a proof of God's existence.

But neither is it a proof of His nonexistence.

It is simply an acknowledgment of a conceptual limit.

Perhaps the most honest answer is a question

In the end, perhaps the real issue is not finding a better definition of God, but understanding why human beings have always felt the need to ask the question in the first place.

Why have human beings, in every civilization we know, looked beyond themselves?

Why have they built temples, prayed, sacrificed, painted gods on cave walls, written prayers, developed cosmologies, invented myths, and searched for a meaning that extended beyond their individual existence?

We could explain all of this as fear of death, the need for order, the desire for consolation, social construction, or psychological illusion. Some of these explanations may certainly capture part of the phenomenon. But even then we return to the original problem: we have explained one manifestation of humanity, not necessarily its essence.

And so we are back where we started.

What is a human being?

And through the human being, what can we really know about God?

Perhaps not much.

Perhaps far more than we imagine.

But certainly not everything.

That is why I am less interested in deciding which religion has “won” the contest for truth and more interested in observing the mechanism through which human beings construct their certainties, because that may be where the greatest error is hidden: confusing what we have understood with what actually exists.

The word “God” is ours. The symbols are ours. The theologies are ours. The philosophies are ours. Even the concept of the Absolute is formulated by our minds.

And so the question remains, apparently simple and perhaps impossible:

What is God, really, once we remove everything human beings have said about God?

I do not know whether there is an answer.

But perhaps that is precisely the point.

As long as we continue searching without turning every intuition into a dogma, we remain within the search.

The moment we believe we have finally possessed the Absolute, perhaps we have stopped searching for God and simply begun worshiping one of our own representations of Him.

The Donkey Climbing the Stairs

When merit isn't enough

Every society teaches its children that ability matters.

Work hard. Prepare yourself. Do your best. If you are good enough, you will have a chance.

Then, sooner or later, many of us discover the uncomfortable truth: merit can open a door, but it does not always decide who gets through it.

Sometimes the door opens for the person who knows someone.

Sometimes it stays closed for the person who was better prepared.

Sometimes the rules are followed exactly as written—and yet the outcome still feels profoundly unfair.

That realization can arrive early in life. Mine did.

I was eight years old.

The story behind the poem

Two boys I knew had attended the same school. Both were capable and well prepared. One had connections that helped him move forward and eventually reach the Military Academy in Modena.

The other was rejected during the selection process after a medical examination identified a physical problem.

What stayed with me was not simply that one succeeded and the other failed.

It was the suspicion that the difference between them had not been their ability.

If someone cannot defeat you on preparation, there is always another way to stop you.

I was only eight, so I had no vocabulary for what I was witnessing. I didn't know about cronyism, patronage, social networks, or what I would later call relational capital.

I only knew that something wasn't right.

Years later, that memory became the starting point for the first poem I ever wrote: The Donkey Climbing the Stairs.

The title came from the absurdity of the image itself: a donkey somehow climbing stairs while someone who actually knows how to climb is left behind.

Injustice becomes different when it happens to someone you know

As a child, I had already been deeply disturbed by images of historical violence.

I remember seeing films depicting the massacres of Native Americans by the U.S. cavalry. I remember images of Nazi concentration camps and the horrors inflicted on prisoners.

Those events were immense. They belonged to history, to distant places and distant generations.

But the story of those two boys was different.

It wasn't history.

It was my world.

I knew the boy who moved forward. I knew the boy who was stopped.

That makes injustice harder to look away from.

Perhaps this is where our sense of justice really begins—not with political theory or moral philosophy, but with the first moment when we look at something happening in front of us and instinctively think:

This is not right.

Privilege rarely looks dramatic

As I grew older, I realized that favoritism does not always announce itself with a major political scandal or a coveted public job.

Sometimes it is much smaller.

A connection that moves someone ahead on a waiting list.

A phone call that gets an appointment sooner.

A professional who makes an exception.

A favor that is quietly returned.

A door that opens because someone knows the person on the other side.

None of these things, taken separately, seems capable of changing a society.

But societies are not shaped only by spectacular acts of corruption.

They are also shaped by thousands of ordinary exceptions.

The problem begins when the formal rules remain equal while access to those rules becomes unequal.

The law may be the same for everyone. The path through it may not be.

The child who wanted justice

When I wrote The Donkey Climbing the Stairs, I had no theory of power.

I wasn't trying to explain Italian society.

I wasn't writing about political parties or ideology.

I was simply trying to give a shape to something that had disturbed me as a child.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder how much of that eight-year-old boy is still inside me.

Because growing older changes our relationship with justice.

Children tend to believe that if something is wrong, someone should fix it.

Adults learn that the world is much harder to repair.

We discover that injustice is not an exception to human history. It is one of its recurring features.

We discover that we cannot fight every battle.

And eventually we face a more uncomfortable question:

What do you do when you realize that the world will not necessarily become fair?

The Zealot, the Pharisee, and the Sadducee

I have sometimes imagined three possible answers.

The first is the Zealot: the person who continues fighting injustice wherever he encounters it, regardless of the personal cost.

The second is the Pharisee, in my own contemporary interpretation of the figure: someone who publicly presents himself as a defender of justice, but may eventually turn that struggle into a career, a social identity, or a source of power.

And then there is the Sadducee.

The Sadducee, as I imagine him, has a different ambition.

He doesn't want to save the world.

He wants to reach a position where the world can no longer determine his fate.

He settles his own grievances. He secures his own position. He makes himself sufficiently strong, connected, or independent that he no longer needs society to be fair to him.

There is something undeniably cynical about that position.

But it raises an uncomfortable question:

Is open self-interest more honest than pretending that personal ambition is a universal cause?

I don't have a final answer.

Perhaps because I still contain all three figures.

The child who wanted justice.

The adult who understands power.

And the man who sometimes wonders whether the safest way to escape injustice is not to defeat it, but to become strong enough that it can no longer reach you.

What happens when justice is no longer guaranteed?

Maybe growing up does not mean losing our belief in justice.

Maybe it means discovering that justice is not guaranteed.

From there, people choose different paths.

Some keep fighting.

Some adapt.

Some enter the system hoping to change it.

Some enter the system because they want a share of its advantages.

And some eventually decide that their only realistic goal is to protect themselves.

I still don't know which path I will ultimately take.

But I know where the question began.

It began with two boys.

One kept climbing.

The other was stopped.

And somewhere behind that memory is an eight-year-old child who did not yet know the words clientelism, privilege, or relational capital.

He didn't need them.

He only needed to see an injustice.

And perhaps that is the strange thing about growing older:

we spend years learning the language to describe what a child can recognize in a single moment.

The Great Leveler

There is something that has always struck me about stories of immortality. Behind all the technology, the money, the secret laboratories, and the fantasies about elites supposedly discovering a way to live forever, there is a very simple fear. The same fear we all have.

The fear of death.

The story of adrenochrome, with all its imagery of elites, stolen youth, and mysterious substances, belongs far more to the world of conspiracy theories than to that of established scientific evidence. But regardless of whether the story is true—and there is no credible evidence that adrenochrome is some secret elixir of youth—it tells us something interesting about the human imagination: the fantasy of those who already possess almost everything and would like to possess the one thing no human being can truly own.

Cinema and literature have been playing with this fantasy for decades. Limitless gave us the dream of a substance capable of pushing human abilities beyond their natural limits. The Club Dumas, which inspired Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, took us into a world of mysterious books, collectors, power, and occult ambiguity. Eyes Wide Shut offered another powerful fantasy: a hidden world of privilege, inaccessible to ordinary people, where power itself seemed to have its own secret rituals.

These are films and novels, of course. They are not evidence of how the world's elites actually live. But they work because they touch something real: our fascination with those who live at the top of the pyramid and seem to have access to a world we cannot see.

Today, that fantasy has also moved into the search for radical life extension.

There is nothing strange about wanting to live longer. We all do. It is perfectly understandable that someone with an enormous fortune can afford the best medical care, constant monitoring, leading specialists, advanced technologies, and perhaps, in the future, treatments that will initially be available only to a privileged few.

Money can buy a great many possibilities.

It may even buy a few extra years.

But it has not yet bought immortality.

And that is where the whole thing becomes almost ironic.

A person can spend an entire lifetime accumulating wealth in order to exercise as much control as possible over his existence, only to find himself face to face with something he cannot control at all.

Death.

Death is perhaps the one great power left that does not recognize social hierarchies.

You can be poor or a billionaire, famous or unknown, a president or a waiter. You can own a mansion or live in a rented room. You can have an enormous fortune or nothing at all.

In the end, before death, something becomes terribly simple.

And it is impossible not to think of Totò and his masterpiece 'A livella.

"Whoever has passed through this gate has lost both life and name."

It is difficult to find a more effective image of what happens when everything comes to an end.

We, the living, attach enormous importance to names. Family names. Titles. Positions. Wealth. Reputation. To what we have managed to become.

Then comes that gate.

And the name no longer matters.

It does not matter how much money we had in the bank.

It does not matter how many people called us doctor, professor, president, or Your Excellency.

It does not even matter how many people once stood beneath us.

It is all over.

And here we encounter a remarkable paradox: death creates on Earth a form of communism that no political ideology has ever managed to create completely.

It does not redistribute wealth, of course. It does not erase the injustices of life. It does not give the poor back what the rich accumulated. It would be absurd to claim otherwise.

But it does something even more radical: it ultimately renders every difference in rank meaningless.

Before death, there is no longer a billionaire and a poor man. No master and no employee. No powerful person and no outcast.

There is only the human being.

Death is therefore a kind of absolute and final communism—not the kind that tries to make human beings equal during their lives, but the kind that, in the end, takes away everyone's ability to carry their wealth with them.

It is a terrible form of social justice because it arrives when it is too late to correct the injustices of life.

And yet, in its final verdict, it is perfectly impartial.

The king and the beggar end up in the same place.

The billionaire and the poor man have the same destination.

The most famous name in the world and the name nobody ever knew are both eventually surrendered to the same silence.

Perhaps that is what Totò understood.

Death does not need a revolution.

It does not need to confiscate fortunes.

It does not need to pass laws.

It does not need to abolish social classes.

It allows them all to exist.

Then it waits.

And eventually, it outlasts them all.

That is why the race among the ultra-rich to extend life as far as possible has a symbolic dimension as well. They are not merely trying to live longer. In a sense, they are trying to postpone the moment when the great leveler comes for them too.

They can buy time.

They can buy treatment.

They can buy technology.

Perhaps, in the future, they will be able to buy many more years than we have today.

But however long they manage to postpone the appointment, the question remains:

What happens when their time finally runs out?

A difference of twenty years, fifty years, perhaps even a hundred years in lifespan would be enormous to us.

But against eternity, it is still nothing.

And so I return to Totò:

"These are the foolish games of the living. We are serious people. We belong to death."

It is a line that, read today, sounds almost prophetic.

We, the living, spend an extraordinary amount of time dividing ourselves.

This one is rich.

That one is poor.

This one matters.

That one is nobody.

This one commands.

That one obeys.

This one made it.

That one failed.

Then death comes and puts everything back in perspective.

It does not make everyone equal during life. That would be false.

There are enormous differences between human beings, and some of them are profoundly unjust.

But in the end, death reminds us of something no amount of wealth can erase:

We may be richer than others, more powerful than others, more famous than others. We cannot be more human than others.

And perhaps that is the true livella.

Not the one that brings everyone down to the same level while we are alive.

The one that, in the end, reminds us that we were all simply human beings.

Even those who spent their entire lives doing everything they could to forget it.

Death, in this sense, is the oldest and most uncompromising social leveler we have ever known.

And perhaps its greatest irony is this:

while we spend our lives building differences, death spends eternity erasing them.

Life Is a Game of Cards: Those Who Remember the Cards Already Played See Further

Life is a little like a game of cards. Some people play relying mostly on luck. Others look only at the cards in their own hand. And then there are those who pay close attention to the cards that have already been played.

More often than not, those are the players with an advantage.

Not because they know some secret trick, or because they are necessarily smarter than everyone else. They simply remember. They remember which cards have already appeared, which ones have been played, and which ones can no longer be in the opponents' hands. Little by little, they begin to form a picture of what the others might be holding.

The difference may seem small, but it isn't.

Someone who forgets every previous hand has to start from scratch every time. Someone who remembers what has already happened no longer looks only at the present. They look at the present in the light of everything that came before it.

That is how life works, too.

History is full of people who succeeded not necessarily because they had greater resources, but because they were better at understanding how those resources had already been used. In war, for instance, knowing an opponent's previous movements allows you to narrow down the range of moves they are likely to make next. Napoleon built much of his military strength on his ability to read the battlefield quickly, gather information, and adapt to what he saw.

During the Second World War, the battle for information became almost as important as the fighting itself. Intercepting communications, tracking movements and recognizing recurring patterns could make it possible to anticipate an enemy's next move before it became obvious.

The principle is always the same: you don't necessarily need to know which card your opponent is holding. Sometimes it is enough to know which cards have already been played.

The same thing happens in business.

An entrepreneur who looks only at today's market risks constantly being one step behind. An entrepreneur who remembers past failures, crises, consumer reactions, competitors' moves and mistakes made over the years has something far more valuable: strategic memory.

A product that failed teaches you something. A price that caused sales to collapse teaches you something. A failed advertising campaign teaches you something. A competitor abandoning a particular market leaves an important card on the table.

The biggest companies have turned this principle into a science. Amazon, Netflix and many others collect enormous amounts of information about past consumer behavior and use it to make predictions about what might happen next.

Every purchase, every search, every abandoned basket, every preference becomes, metaphorically speaking, another card that has left the deck.

The more cards you remember, the more readable the deck becomes.

But there is something even more important: remembering is not enough. You have to know how to connect what you remember.

A person can have an extraordinary memory and still understand nothing about the game. They may remember exactly what happened without understanding what it means.

True strategic ability begins when memory becomes interpretation.

We see this in human relationships, too. If someone has made the same promise three times and broken it three times, we can still choose to believe them a fourth time. But we can no longer behave as though we have no information.

The cards have already been played.

If a politician has repeatedly changed positions according to circumstances, that history is part of the game. If a company has always responded to a crisis in the same way, that behavior becomes a clue. If a person has repeatedly chosen the same path whenever faced with difficulties, it is reasonable to consider that possibility when trying to anticipate what they may do next.

That does not mean the future is already written.

It means that the past narrows the range of possibilities.

And perhaps that is the most interesting part of the metaphor.

We often think luck is everything. Some people seem to be born with the right cards, while others are dealt a terrible hand. To some extent, that is true. None of us gets to choose our entire deck. We do not choose the family we are born into, the historical period, the country, the opportunities that come our way or the unexpected events that will shape our lives.

But once the game begins, we can decide how to play.

We can forget the cards that have already been played and approach every day as if it were the first. Or we can observe, remember and learn.

We can ask ourselves why someone made a particular decision, why a company failed, why a government changed course, why a relationship ended, why a project did not work.

And, above all, we can try not to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Because true experience is not simply having lived through many things. It is remembering what we have lived through and using it to understand what is happening now.

In the end, remembering the cards that have already been played does not guarantee victory.

You can still lose.

But you enter the game with something almost as valuable as luck: a clearer understanding of the possibilities that remain.

Luck determines some of the cards we are dealt.

Memory, experience and the ability to observe determine how we choose to play them.

And perhaps that is one of the few things we can truly learn from the long game of life: we cannot always choose the cards we are dealt, but we can make sure we never forget the ones that have already been played.

Defeat Is Not the Final Word

I have always had a strange sympathy for the defeated.

I noticed it very early on, as a child watching the war films that were constantly shown on television in the 1980s. I would sometimes feel sorry when German soldiers were killed. Not because I shared their cause, and certainly not because I had any particular sympathy for Nazism. It was simply that, in that moment, that soldier was the man who was losing—the one who was falling while the others were advancing.

The same thing happened with Bluto and Popeye. To my great surprise, I found myself rooting for Bluto.

Perhaps there was something in me even then that I could not explain. I was not necessarily on the side of the “good guy.” I was on the side of the one who was about to lose.

As I grew older, I found the same instinct in history.

I have always felt a certain sympathy for the Marian faction defeated by Sulla—a political world that seemed to have been definitively erased by Sulla's victory, only to return, through different people and different circumstances, and reclaim its place in Roman history. I am fascinated by Caesar, murdered by his enemies precisely when they thought they had finally solved the problem. I am fascinated by Napoleon, who fell from the heights of an empire, returned from Elba, and managed to reclaim power, even if only for a hundred days.

But not every defeated person rises again.

That, perhaps, is the most important part.

History is full of men, peoples, states, and ideas that fell and never got back up. Some defeats are never redeemed. Some doors really do close forever.

And that is precisely why I am fascinated by the possibility of a comeback.

Because it is never guaranteed.

Believing in redemption does not mean believing that every defeated person will eventually return to victory. It means refusing to regard defeat as final before time itself has spoken the last word.

Perhaps that is why I have always distrusted victors who are too certain of themselves.

History has a curious habit: sooner or later, it presents the bill to those who believe they have reached the end of history.

Empires that seemed eternal have disappeared. Regimes that appeared indestructible have collapsed. Ideologies that seemed destined to dominate forever have ended up in history books. And men who believed they had definitively defeated their enemies have discovered that history never completely belongs to anyone.

But there is one image that takes all of this to an entirely different level.

The Crucifix.

Before the Cross, according to Christian faith, we see absolute defeat.

A man abandoned. Humiliated. Tortured. Nailed to a cross. Dead.

There appears to be nothing left to recover.

His disciples themselves may have thought that it was over. Their teacher was dead. Their hope had been shattered. Everything they had believed in seemed to have collapsed.

And yet it was not over.

The Resurrection changes everything.

Perhaps this is the deepest reason why the Crucifix has always fascinated me: because it represents a defeat that appeared definitive, yet was not.

Christ does not simply return to reclaim what He had lost.

According to Christianity, through death He passes into an entirely different kind of victory: victory over death itself.

And so perhaps I understand that child a little better now—the child who rooted for Bluto, who felt sorry when German soldiers died in war films, and who instinctively looked toward the side that was losing.

Perhaps I never loved defeat.

I loved the possibility of redemption.

I loved the idea that history might still have another page to turn when it seemed the book had already been closed.

Of course, that hope can also be misplaced.

We can fall and never get back up. We can lose and never return. We can witness the end of something we believed would last forever.

That is the painful part of existence.

But precisely because redemption is not certain, it is worth believing in.

And perhaps this is one of the most beautiful lessons history can teach us: we should never confuse victory with eternity, or defeat with the end of everything.

Those who are on top today may fall tomorrow.

Those who are on the ground today may rise again.

And those who believe they have conquered the world may one day discover that the world never belonged to anyone.

I still sympathize with the defeated.

Not with every defeated person, of course. Not because every loser deserves to win, nor because every victor is wrong.

But because in the defeated I see a possibility that victors often forget:

the possibility that it is not over yet.

And perhaps that is what the Cross has been whispering to us for two thousand years.

When everything seems lost, when death appears to have spoken the final word, when there seems to be nothing left to hope for, perhaps we have not yet reached the end.

For the Christian, that certainty has a name:

Resurrection.

And perhaps, deep down, my love for the defeated has always been this: an unconscious form of faith in the possibility that defeat does not have the final word.