Reflections on a Quarter-Century

I do not write what I know. I write what I now refuse to forget.

Foreword

I am twenty-five. It is too early to write memoirs, but late enough to have seen certain illusions die.

I do not know what makes a successful life. I could not even say whether such a definition can exist without betraying the diversity of lives. I know only that no one can want mine on my behalf, that a path does not need to have been announced to be taken, and that time often judges people’s worth better than we do.

At twenty-five, you have already been several people. You have known the one who believed adults had the answers, the one who thought a particular age would bring certainty, the one who waited to discover a calling as you might discover a hidden room in a house. Then the years pass. Not all the answers come. Adults hesitate. Callings look less like revelations than repeated choices. You understand that growing up is not entering a world that is finally clear, but learning to walk without demanding that everything be so.

These pages, then, are not lessons. A lesson implies a distance between the one who knows and the one who must learn. I do not have that distance. I write from inside the questions, with whatever innocence experience has taken from me, without yet taking away my desire to believe.

I distrust certainties that arrive before the test. They are easy to carry as long as no event asks them to reveal their true weight. We say that we will be brave, faithful, patient or fair. Then a loss, a humiliation, a wait or a betrayal comes to ask whether those words were principles or merely a pleasing image of ourselves.

I have not always responded as I would have wished. I have waited for motivation that did not come, hoped that another person would want for themselves what I wanted for them, searched for a perfect path to avoid the risk of choosing an imperfect one. I have mistaken kindness for an obligation to stay, and distrust for a form of intelligence. Time did not correct all this for me. It simply made certain mistakes visible enough that I could no longer pretend not to see them.

Perhaps that is what being twenty-five means: having fewer answers than expected, but enough failures among your old answers to begin asking better questions.

The book that follows takes stock. It gathers what I believe today about will, work, trust, kindness and time. Tomorrow may shift some of these sentences. I do not fear that. A thought that cannot be corrected is no longer a thought; it has become a prison.

I would only like these reflections to remain true to the age that produced them. I am not speaking from a summit. I am speaking from that strange point where you are far enough from childhood to measure what it left you, but still too close to claim you have understood what comes next.

Perhaps there is an age when you can look at your life as a finished work. Twenty-five is not that age. It is rather the age when you begin to understand that the first pages already commit the book to a shape without yet deciding its ending. Certain habits have taken root. Certain loyalties have revealed themselves. Certain absences have had time to become answers. We are still free in many ways, but we are no longer entirely new to them.

This position seems worth writing about precisely because it is provisional. We often wait until we have overcome a question before speaking of it. Yet most of the truths that accompany us do not come after the battle. They take shape while we are still searching for ways to hold on. A thought can be incomplete without being useless. It can serve as a marker: this is what I could see from here, with the light and the blind spots of this place.

I therefore do not want to give my age an authority it does not possess. Nor do I want to strip it of all value on the grounds that later years will correct me. If only final conclusions deserved to be written down, almost no one could write honestly. We live with working convictions. We move forward with truths solid enough to guide the next action, yet flexible enough to welcome what that action will teach us.

The subjects of this book are more closely connected than they appear. Will touches time, because every project we do not choose is paid for in days. Work touches will, because no supposed calling excuses us from beginning. Trust touches time, because a promise reveals its worth only when it encounters opportunities to be kept. Kindness touches will, because sometimes we must decide to remain kind when hurt offers hardness as proof of intelligence.

At the centre lies the same question: what can I truly take responsibility for?

I can take responsibility for my actions, not manufacture another person’s desire. I can choose a direction, not demand to know the entire path. I can offer my trust, not guarantee the honesty of the one who receives it. I can set a boundary, not force someone to understand why it became necessary. I can try to honour my time, not recover what I have already given away.

This boundary does not impoverish life. It makes life habitable. Much of our exhaustion comes from confusing what belongs to us with what we wish to control because we love it, fear it or depend on it. We tug at a will that is not our own. We seek certainty in a future that owes us none. We question another person’s words until we hope they will protect us from that person’s future actions. Then we discover that our vigilance had no power over their freedom.

What remains is a more modest freedom, but a more real one: deciding who we will be in the face of what lies beyond our decision.

I do not write to make that freedom easy. It is not. It is difficult to stop carrying someone when you know they might fall. It is difficult to accept a job that simply suits you in a world that demands a spectacular passion. It is difficult to believe without guarantees after learning how skilfully some people can keep up appearances. It is difficult to leave without turning our former kindness into an accusation against ourselves.

But a truth’s difficulty does not make it less necessary. It merely takes away the comfort of slogans.

I hope these pages retain that resistance. That they say not only what soothes, but also what demands something of us. That they leave room for exceptions, for real exhaustion, for wounds that cannot be resolved by a sentence. A thought about responsibility becomes cruel if it ignores illness, poverty, fear or the weight of a person’s history. A thought about trust becomes dangerous if it turns patience into a duty to endure. A thought about time becomes absurd if it reduces every hour to its productivity.

I am not looking for a formula that can solve every life. I am looking for a more honest way to inhabit my own.

A quarter of a century is not a lifetime. Yet it is enough to know that life does not begin when we are finally ready. It is already passing while we prepare to live it.

Part One

No one can want your life on your behalf

Reflection 01

I cannot be more motivated than you

There is a particular kind of exhaustion: that of pushing someone towards a life they claim to want, but towards which they take no steps.

At first, you encourage them. You remind them of their qualities, organise their possibilities, search for words that will awaken what you believe lies dormant within them. You tell yourself they simply lack confidence, information or a little support. So you offer more. You explain once again. You turn their hope into a plan, their plan into a schedule, their schedule into a promise.

Then nothing moves.

It is not always because the other person is incapable. Sometimes they simply do not want what they say they want enough. This truth is hard to accept, especially when we can clearly see what they could become. We then confuse their potential with their desire. But potential belongs to the gaze of the person who sees it; desire belongs to the person who must act.

I can believe in you. I can help you see beyond your fear. I can open a door for you, accompany you to the threshold and remind you why you wanted to cross it. I cannot take that step without stealing from you the one movement that could have transformed you.

You cannot permanently save someone from their lack of will. You can carry them for a while, but never stand and live in their place.

This is not about becoming cold. It is about understanding the precise limit of help. To help is to make movement possible. To take another person’s place is to sustain the illusion that they are moving forward. The difference is rarely visible on the first day. It appears when our presence disappears. If everything stops as soon as we stop pushing, it was not yet their movement.

We must sometimes accept that our enthusiasm for someone’s life is greater than their own. This imbalance gives us no rights over them. Nor does it give us a duty to exhaust ourselves. It teaches us only that love, friendship and loyalty cannot manufacture a will that is absent.

It is tempting to continue regardless, because abandoning our efforts feels like abandoning the person. Yet withdrawing an artificial force can be a form of respect. It returns to the other person the responsibility that our eagerness had begun to take away. They may discover that they truly want to move forward. They may discover the opposite. Either way, the answer will finally be their own.

We are not cruel when we stop being the engine of someone else’s life. We are simply recognising a law that our affection cannot abolish: no one can inhabit another person’s will.

This law does, however, call for nuance. There are times when someone lacks not will, but strength. Depression, exhaustion, an old fear or an impossible material situation can slow a person who nevertheless deeply wants to move forward. To look only at their stillness and conclude that they want nothing would be an injustice. We do not always know the battle that consumes their energy before the first visible action.

The difference does not lie in speed. It lies in the relationship the person has with help.