Littera Amissa
Loss is existence's way of reminding you that nothing is permanent, and your worth is measured by what you build back.
After a sandstorm, I spotted a Bedouin's bag scattered by the wind. Inside it was a letter stained by time and dust, sealed with a broken seal, which spoke silently about the hidden core of things and the duty to release it when it does not belong to you. I turned my head and discovered that my own notebooks, full of theorems and dreams, had been taken by the wind and buried under the dunes. The loss of these fragile testimonies of my mind was not an accident, but a lesson: sometimes knowledge is not given to you to keep, but to transmit.
This incident awakened an old wound in me. Every time I touched something precious (a mysterious thing or a hard-won truth), fate forced me to abandon it and start again from the foundation, to understand the same lesson more deeply in a different way. Like a Bedouin wandering under the stars, I asked myself with a fear mixed with amazement: is this not the hidden order of my life? Is loss the very school through which true knowledge is given to me? The letter revealed to me the hidden secret of the path: namely, that each act of forced renunciation illuminates the path to a new beginning. After all, what could it mean to lose, if not to make way for an even greater revelation?
Everything inside me expressed a deep unease, like an alarm signal. In my heart, I believed that this incident had reopened an ancient wound, like a painter who, with each brushstroke on an old canvas, reveals hidden layers of pain and light, transforming abandonment into a masterpiece. But it was only a form of submission to a will greater than mine. Or was it not so? I still don't know. I still haven't found the answer to my questions. One thing is certain: discipline, my only asset, taught me to rebuild what I had lost, more rigorously and precisely. For the desert does not forgive, but it does not forget either – it preserves every trace, even those erased by the wind. That is why it is vital to assume this ascetic rhythm of starting over, to make science an act of faith.
Leadership: Can you turn repeated losses into a story that rewrites the laws of destiny, so that you answer the call to do a greater work?
Clearly, the found letter was not just any object, but a mirror of my own becoming. As in "One Thousand and One Nights", where every story hides a moral, I saw in the broken seal a lesson about liberation, an active silence, like the breath between two sacred words. Thus, I understood that leadership begins with accepting the surrender when you have the impression that you have reached the end, but you are asked to start again from the beginning. Just as an abandoned discovery forced me to search again for the original meaning of the lost path, so the found letter reminded me that every surrender hides a call to a greater work.
Unexpectedly, this revelation led me to an analogy: " Just as Sindbad was reborn after each shipwreck, I am reborn from each loss, writing a deeper story. " The letter spoke of the "hidden core," but what is this core if not science lived with soul? And leadership, understood as an active process of assumption and practice, not as a simple title or formal object, is a form of continuous learning through which each loss is converted into a useful and lasting result.
And here too, I remember a passage from "Siddhartha" by Hermann Hesse, when the hero reaches a river after having lost almost everything and exhausted theoretical formulas. There, listening to the unitary sound of nature, he discovers the "hidden core" – that science lived with soul, not with schemes and formulas. The silence of the water teaches him a leadership without a title: the present, patient assumption of each step. For each loss is converted into lasting understanding, and life becomes a letter that you reread until you understand its calling.
Leadership: Do you bear the responsibility of transforming some forced beginnings into an eternal work that leaves traces beyond your personal biography?
If the desert steals my work, it still leaves me the gift of always rewriting it, from a force deeper than loss itself, which ascends to the sky like an unspoken prayer. Only under the merciless sky of the Sahara did I learn that loss is a silent master. On the sand, I traced the theorems again, with a hand guided by an unseen force, as if the desert itself were dictating to me. But it was not the end. Not at all. Rather, the true calling to the beginning. For, in a corner of the found letter, a barely legible phrase said: "Science ascends to the sky." This was Veltrixa Corathys – a ladder of perseverance that connects the earth to the stars. Each abandonment of what you thought was definitive is an invitation to a greater story.
In Borges' "The Book of Sand," each page changes with each reading. Likewise, my life is rewritten with each loss, with each abandonment of things believed to be definitive.
Could I have turned these repetitions into miracles? I don't know. What is certain is that I bent over the sand and wrote about everything that was taken from me and given back to me in another form, knowing that, if I were a hundred years old, all these beginnings would form a holy work. A work of patience and new beginnings. For every loss is a broken page, but also a call to a deeper story, lived with a soul open to heaven.
Leadership consists of the discipline of transforming inevitable losses into new beginnings, writing, through their echo, the story that redefines your destiny.
Littera Amissa has as its message that test of destiny that you cannot do without on the path to faith.
Perhaps because nothing definitive was given to me to keep, but only to rewrite, and each abandonment was a call to a greater story, in harmony with the sky. As for the desert that emptied me of everything that was illusory, only because of its harshness did I understand that each loss has the role of correcting the direction, transforming itself into a lesson that prepares the ground for a greater work.
For these reasons, I say that every loss hides a secret that pushes me to always start over on a different path.
