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There are words loaded with weight and value beyond any dispute. One of these is the word "hope," whose content has swollen to a level equivalent, if not synonymous with life itself. Those who, even for a moment, feel this word slipping away and its essence abandoning them, find themselves immediately at the limit of their inability, not only to enjoy life but even to observe it unfolding.
Yet life is not hope. It is rather a succession of hopes that are disproven. Images that we have created and that we see being negated or modified when it comes time to live them. Plans and dreams of happiness, love, and success, that lose their luster as the moment to experience them approaches. Unfulfilled hopes, which give way to others, whose likelihood of fulfillment becomes less proportional to the intensity we have invested over the years.
Hope is related to disappointment just as happiness is defined and realized in reference to unhappiness. Even the fulfillment of a hope simultaneously constitutes its abolition, leading to a dead-end anxiety through alternations of hopes and disappointments. Nevertheless, the knowledge that hope is more often the other side of disappointment and that the latter could not exist if the former had not expanded, coincides with the happy realization that life manages to surprise us with events we had not hoped for, simply because we had not even imagined them.
Thus, if for a moment we accepted that there is nothing to hope for, we would be ready to face every new and abrupt turn of life. Then, curiosity would take a dominant position. About the unknown, the future, the next moment. About the plot of the novel we are living. Curiosity that would lead us to a continuous exploration of our limits. Curiosity about the next, perhaps desperate, love of ours. Curiosity about the next, possibly treacherous, ideology of ours. Curiosity about the next, perhaps monotonous, people we will meet. Curiosity even for what will follow the moment of our death. Curiosity for this narrative that ends daily with the word "to be continued."
My greatest enemy would be the one who would kill this curiosity, not because it would take away my hope, but because it would deprive me of the surprise.
Plato Rivellis