"The past is the mirror of the future."

This sentence acts as my compass whenever I face uncertainty. Every time I am about to make a difficult decision, I start by looking backward: what have I already seen that looked like this, how did it end, which signals did I miss back then. Most of the time, what feels new is only a replay, under a different form, of a pattern I have already lived through. That doesn't mean the future is written: there is real unpredictability, real accidents, real bifurcations. But the share of the future that is being shaped by our habits, our systems, our relationships, and our repeated decisions, that share is readable in the past. I am also wary of the opposite illusion, the one that says we are in a fully unprecedented situation and that no lesson from the past applies. That is almost always wrong, and almost always costly. To me, real lucidity is daring to look into this mirror: recognizing the patterns, accepting what they announce, and choosing, consciously, what we want to extend or to break.