It was in front of a screen, rewatching Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts, that I was seized by a strange melancholy. It wasn’t just a reunion of actors who had grown up — it was a reunion with time itself, that invisible character always on stage, even when we pretend it doesn’t exist.
With each behind-the-scenes revelation, it wasn’t the magic of cinema that held me most, but the alchemy of life: children learning to grow up under cameras, friendships that resisted the tides of years, chapters closing like books that would never have another sequel.
Emma Watson, recalling Hermione’s embrace of Harry just before he walked alone into the Forbidden Forest, confessed that she knew: that gesture was not just part of a script. It was the farewell to an entire era, to a shared childhood, to a cycle ending before the eyes of millions. And in that instant I understood: every farewell silently carries the revelation that the journey has reached its destination.
I then realized something both simple and profound: life is made of chapters that, when they close, leave behind not emptiness, but an echo. That echo is memory — the remembrance of who we were, what we dreamed, the hands that once walked with us for a time before taking other paths.
Life Cycles
Everything that begins already carries within it the announcement of farewell. Like a seed that, as it breaks through the soil, already bears in its belly the promise of a tree and the certainty of falling leaves. Life doesn’t unfold in a straight line, but in circles that open and close silently, in rhythm with time.
Childhood is the first of these great cycles: a place of invention, of play, of experimenting with possible worlds. Winnicott once said that play is the laboratory of the soul, the rehearsal of a being who still doesn’t know what it will become. Adolescence, however, is the grand rehearsal — the moment we risk our first flights, believing that every friendship will last forever, that every passion carries the seal of “always.”
But time, the patient teacher, teaches us otherwise. Friends we once swore would be inseparable fade into distance; dreams that once felt urgent dissolve like morning mist. And what remains? Perhaps only traces — not marks that can be seen, but those that can be felt: in the way we learned to trust, to love, to fear, to hope. Adolescence never truly ends; it lodges within us like a room where old voices still echo.
Thus, every cycle is more than just passage: it is a dwelling. And when we move on from it, we carry with us not only memories, but also the ways we learned to inhabit the world.
Memory and Nostalgia
There are memories that do not return as facts, but as scents. A forgotten aroma that fills the air and, suddenly, takes us back to that small room, to the laughter of an afternoon, to the touch of a friendship that no longer exists. Memory does not behave like a file: it is more like water — slipping through the fingers, yet leaving the skin damp, marked.
In adolescence, I used to write letters. Words took time to traverse distance, traveling in envelopes that carried not only ink, but also silence and uncertainty. There was beauty in that interval, a space where imagination blossomed. Today, technology has stolen that charm: everything arrives quickly, leaving no room for delay, no mystery of the unknown. The responses that once rested in a box, alongside postcards from cities I had never visited, were more than memories — they were mirrors. There, among yellowed papers, I discovered myself, even before knowing who I would become.
René Kaës reminds us that we carry within us the voices of those who were close. They inhabit us as invisible presences, even when we no longer know where they are. Perhaps that is what nostalgia teaches us: what passes does not pass entirely. It becomes embedded in the body, in gestures, even in the way we look at the world.
Sometimes, a movie, a song, a forgotten photograph is enough to awaken this past. It is as if someone gently knocks on the door of the soul and says: “I am still here.” Not as a concrete presence, but as a living memory, as a mark that cannot be erased.
And yet, nostalgia is not only loss. It is also reunion. In remembering, I do not return to what was; I return to what remains within me of what was. Longing, then, is a way of remaining inhabited — by friends I no longer see, by dreams I no longer dream, by loves left around the bend of the road.
The Complexity of Existence
Life cannot be confined to maps. It is a river that divides into tributaries, a tide that advances and recedes, a path that forks without asking permission. Edgar Morin reminds us that we are beings of complexity: made of contradictions, of intertwined threads, of destinies that do not unfold in straight lines.
Each cycle that closes is not merely an ending — it is also a fold, a deviation, a mutation. What we call an end is often a subtle metamorphosis: a friendship that changes shape, a dream that reconfigures, a love that transforms into silence. Living is learning to recognize that continuity hides within change.
Heidegger would speak of “being-toward-time”: we are always on the move, cast into a journey whose destination we do not know. There is no fixed point: only instants that light up and fade, like stars that shine only as far as the eye can see. We are always unfinished, provisional, made of fragments.
And yet, it is in this incompleteness that existence finds its beauty. If everything were final, there would be no space for the new. The unexpected, the chance, and the twists and turns — these are what give life its depth. Morin teaches us that complexity is not a problem to be solved, but a way of inhabiting the world: accepting uncertainty, embracing ambiguities, acknowledging that we are made of multiple stories at once.
Thus, each cycle that ends does not diminish us — it multiplies us. The past is not discarded: it rewrites itself within us, as a layer, as a palimpsest. And it is in this interweaving of times that we move forward, sustained by what we have been and propelled by what we have yet to discover about ourselves.
Hope and Dreams
Manoel de Barros offers us a rare verb: transver [to trans-see = to see through, to see beyond, to oversee]. It is not enough to look, not enough to review; it is necessary to give the world new eyes. “The eye sees, memory reviews, and imagination trans-sees.” Perhaps hope resides in this space: in the possibility of not being satisfied with the surface of reality, but daring to see what does not yet exist.
Cycles, when they close, may seem definitive, but the art of trans-seeing shows us another way out: what has ended can be seen as a beginning, what has been lost can reinvent itself in a new form. The farewell, seen through trans-seeing, is also a promise.
“Only a tormented soul can give a voice the shape of a bird,” wrote Manoel. Perhaps this is the secret of the dream: even wounded, the soul still finds wings. It is not about denying pain, but transforming it into flight.
Thus, to dream is not naivety, but resistance. It is the gesture of one who insists on creating futures even on the terrain of ruins. It is the courage to look at a worn, repeated, tired world — and still see in it a glimpse of novelty.
Hope is this: the capacity to trans-see. To look at life not as an inventory of endings, but as a succession of metamorphoses. Each cycle that closes is not a full stop, but an invitation to imagine other possible paths.
Conclusion: Pages of Life
I return to the opening scene: Emma Watson hugging Harry before his solitary journey into the Forbidden Forest. It wasn’t just Hermione saying goodbye to her friend. It was also Emma bidding farewell to a childhood lived under cameras, to an era that would never return. In that embrace was the simple and immense gesture of someone who knows: certain cycles do not repeat; they only remain as echoes.
As I watched, I recalled my own parting embraces. I remembered the letters kept in a box, the postcards that arrived from distant cities, the hospital where, as a child [one day I will tell this story], I learned that the body is fragile and life always hangs by a thread. All of these are chapters that do not return, but that continue within me as luminous scars. Every loss, every crossing, every waiting shapes me like someone embroidering a fabric full of patches — and it is in these patches that life breathes the most.
Perhaps living is this: extending a farewell until it transforms into a meeting. It is knowing that the end is approaching and, even so, keeping the courage to continue. It is looking back and recognizing that no cycle was lost: it merely changed its clothing within us.
Cycles teach us that we are not masters of time. We are merely guests of moments. And it is up to us to inhabit them with delicacy, like someone writing a letter without knowing whether it will be answered.
Because, in the end, every ending is also an invitation. An invitation to new worlds, new friendships, new stories whose names we do not yet know. Life is this book that never truly closes: it only turns pages. And as long as there are pages, there is also the miracle of beginning again.
Referências
- Barros, M. de. (2016). Livro sobre nada. Rio de Janeiro: Alfaguara.
- Kaës, R. (2001). A psicanálise e os grupos: da relação primária ao grupo-psicoterápico. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar.
- Morin, E. (2005). Introdução ao pensamento complexo. Porto Alegre: Sulina.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1975). Playing and reality. London: Tavistock.
- HBO Max. (2022). Harry Potter 20th Anniversary: Return to Hogwarts [Special].
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