05/10/2026
I'd like to share a beautiful article writte by my beloved cousin Alessandro...
it is in italian but here the translation in english:
In Salvador Dalí’s painting *The Persistence of Memory* (1931), there is a detail impossible to ignore: in an almost desert-like landscape, the clocks seem to have surrendered. Having lost all rigidity and solidity, they distort, bend and slide over surfaces. The very object invented to measure time seems no longer able to contain it.
Perhaps this is what makes the painting feel so familiar, despite its surrealism: sooner or later, we too find that the bearings we once trusted stop working.
A plan changes, a path comes to an end, something we took for granted is no longer certain.
It is then that, in different ways, we encounter the desert.
The desert is, first and foremost, a place defined by scarcity: little water, little shelter, few landmarks. It is hardly surprising that, in biblical tradition, it has also become a metaphor for trials and discernment: when points of reference become scarce, distinguishing what matters becomes a necessity. In the desert, the unnecessary weighs us down, while the essential gains value.
Anyone who has walked a long way with a backpack knows this: every object has a weight and, after many miles, the distinction between necessary and unnecessary stops being theoretical.
This applies to each of us, too.
From time to time, we need to ask ourselves what we are still carrying in our backpack: choices, relationships, expectations, plans, images of ourselves. Some things remain part of who we are. Others we keep simply because they have been with us for a long time.
Questioning a choice does not mean disowning it, but asking whether it still reflects who we are.
This is discernment, which Ignatius of Loyola made one of the cornerstones of his spiritual method. From the Latin *discernĕre*, it means to separate, to distinguish: what we desire from what we do because others expect it of us; what helps us grow from what merely keeps us occupied; what deserves to be cherished from what we need to let go.
There is not always a right choice and a wrong one. There are also choices that were right for one stage of our lives and that, at a certain point, need to be reconsidered.
Changing, then, does not necessarily mean we were wrong before. It means claiming the right to be a new version of ourselves.
Sometimes we seek out the desert: we need silence, distance, an escape from the noise. At other times, it arrives uninvited.
A loss, an illness, a project that comes to a halt, a professional or personal path that no longer leads where we thought it would. Different experiences, united by a reduction in our ability to control things.
It is precisely here that one of my most cherished biblical passages comes to mind, a verse from the prophet Isaiah that takes on particular force in this context: “*Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name: you are mine*” (Isaiah 43:1).
“Do not fear” is not a promise that we will never be afraid, nor that we will be spared life’s ruptures. Rather, it is an invitation not to let fear decide for us: because fear never tells the truth, but shows us the future through what we dread.
According to an evocative and now widespread interpretation, the expression “do not fear” is said to appear in the Bible 365 times: once for every day of the year. Regardless of the accuracy of that count, I believe this symbolic number points to our need to hear those words repeated daily. Because each day brings a different challenge or fear and asks us, once again, to live it with a steadfast and courageous heart.
Going through difficult times is part of the human experience; what remains open is how we choose to go through them.
I have discovered, then, that faith and fear can coexist.
They are two strange sisters: they walk together more often than we imagine.
We can have profound faith and, at the same time, still be afraid. Faith does not erase our fears, nor does it necessarily dissolve them: it illuminates them. It allows us to move through them without denying them, to look them in the eye without giving them the final word.
Perhaps this is where “do not fear” meets hope. In Hebrew, the word for hope is תִּקְוָה (*tiqvah*). Its root, קוה (*qavah*), evokes waiting and reaching towards something; in some biblical passages, *tiqvah* can also mean a cord.
The image is powerful: hope is like Ariadne’s thread, which, even amid fear and uncertainty, keeps us from losing our way and keeps the path towards the future open. It is neither automatic optimism nor the naïve certainty that everything will turn out well, but something more concrete: continuing to plan, choose and move forward even when the road ahead is not entirely clear.
Fear narrows our horizon until we perceive the present as final. *Tiqvah* suggests something else: the desert exists, but it is not the whole landscape.
And here we return to Dalí. His distorted clocks suggest that time is not always the uniform time of the clock face. The Greek language, too, offers different ways of understanding it: χρόνος (*chrónos*) and καιρός (*kairós*).
Χρόνος (*chrónos*) is time that passes, is counted and measured: the time of hours, calendars and deadlines. The risk is that we end up measuring our lives against other people’s calendars.
Καιρός (*kairós*), by contrast, is the opportune time, the moment that takes on meaning. It does not merely ask, *How much time has passed?* but rather: *What am I doing with the time I have been given?*
This distinction becomes particularly meaningful when something is interrupted. We can experience that time solely as *chrónos*: counting the days and wishing to return to what came before. Or, without idealising suffering or necessarily assigning meaning to it, we can try to turn it into *kairós*: a time that, even within a fracture, becomes favourable.
This does not mean believing that every failure is necessarily an opportunity or that every pain conceals a lesson. Some things simply hurt. It means something more concrete and difficult: not wasting the passage through them.
If the desert has arrived anyway, we can question it.
What remains when what I considered indispensable falls away? Which choices still belong to me? Which decisions am I making out of desire, and which out of fear?
These are uncomfortable questions. Discernment almost always is.
The desert has a strange quality: it strips things back. It reduces the noise, the alternatives, the layers we have built up, and in doing so can restore clarity. Just as on a long walk: when you are tired, you cannot carry everything. You have to decide what is truly worth its weight.
That is why, for anyone crossing a desert—whether chosen or imposed—I would wish not for them to emerge quickly, but for them to emerge changed.
I would wish for them to know a little more about themselves, to have understood what is worth their time, to have tested at least one certainty, to have kept some fear out of the driving seat, to have made room for something important.
And above all, to have discovered that changing direction does not necessarily mean having lost your way.
Perhaps this is precisely where Dalí’s clocks speak to us again.
Moving from χρόνος (*chrónos*) to καιρός (*kairós*) therefore means no longer asking only how much time we have lost, how much remains, or how far behind others we are. It means asking what meaning we can give to the time we are living through.
We cannot lengthen time. But we can broaden it: to include possibilities we had not anticipated, choices we have the courage to question, versions of ourselves we do not yet know. This is where *kairós* and *tiqvah* meet: inhabiting the present fully without mistaking it for the entire horizon of what is possible.
We cannot foresee the desert we will encounter, nor can we stop time. But we can choose what to carry with us, what to leave behind and which direction to take.
And when your bearings fail, remember three simple words: “Do not fear.”
**Alessandro Tacente**
