“If you desire something, you can try to attain it. Or you can work on yourself so that the something reaches you.”

This is what Gianluca Gotto argues in his latest book, Quando inizia la felicità (When Happiness Begins), with his disarming ability to strike right at the heart. It's like a key that unlocks the doors to a deeper understanding of human existence.

In this way, a cascade of reflections is triggered about the vital importance of shifts in perspective: true acts of intellectual courage that lead us to unprecedented awareness.

It means abandoning the comfortable, yet limiting, certainties of “it's always been done this way,” “everyone does it this way”, “because it's more right to do it this way.”

But “this way” like what? That “this way” presented to us as a universal truth is actually a garment tailored to us by foreign hands, external voices that resonate without a face, without a defined soul. Because it may indeed be easy, at times, to let ourselves be carried away by these currents, without stopping to consider if the direction taken is truly our own. But it is precisely here that a revolutionary possibility opens up: it is in the heart of every change that the promise of growth manifests.

It is the cycle of existence. And, rather than thinking about changes by imagining that we will change when a certain thing happens, we can look at reality by flipping the lens, starting from ourselves: we can be before having.

Questioning oneself is not an act of surrender, but rather a leap towards freedom. To step back for a moment and observe ourselves with new eyes, with sincere compassion. It is in this space of self-observation that the ability to improve, to constantly evolve towards the version most aligned with our values, germinates.

Ultimately, the revolution begins within us. Embracing the perspective of being before having is not just a change of mindset, but an invitation to embark on a journey of inner discovery. A journey that does not involve frantically reaching every “pre-set goal”, almost as if they were peaks to climb and checklists to tick off; but rather a journey that involves cultivating the fertile ground of our identity, of our person, in its entirety.

Being before having: an invitation to stop, to look within ourselves with compassion, and to begin that subjective, exciting work that will make us capable of welcoming, with joy and fullness, what life has in store for us.