11-8-94
The continuous and unending flow and change is a law that we all know and accept, yet we do not allow it to direct our actions. From our early years, we are encouraged to adopt views and ideas, to make choices about directions and people, whose potential subsequent rejection will be stigmatized as inconsistency. But we cling for years to what we have adopted and chosen, unable to accept that circumstances have changed, as has our relationship with them. We are afraid to believe that not everything is predictable. That progress can become regression. That love often turns into indifference. That what once moved us no longer does so. That values we believed in are not immutable truths. That doctrines we were taught have been refuted by our conscience. We are terrified at the thought that in the world we are not meant to conquer a frozen wisdom, but to taste the process of life passing through the process of knowledge and doubt. To compile only a questionnaire, since time does not suffice for answers. To understand that faithful is he who doubts his faith, and wise is he who questions his knowledge. However, if someone dares to question, even slightly, what they believed to be true, they will face scorn and be labeled as inconsistent, or even opportunistic or perjurious.
But what is the age limit to which one is entitled to search, to learn, to doubt? Who decides our irrevocable classification and condemns us to stifling consistency?
Moreover, consistency with respect to what? After all, blind compliance with what we believed in the past, at the expense of our current convictions, would render us inconsistent with ourselves.
We owe no explanations for the contradiction between yesterday and today. It suffices each time to choose with honesty.
After all, there is never a real contradiction, as our actions and beliefs are internally continued by our personality. However, this internal coherence emerges; it does not guide us. Our only guide should be the consistency of the moment and the preservation of the right to contradiction and change. Otherwise, consistency becomes the goal and the process of knowledge a means.
Plato Rivellis