An instant can be a tiny particle of time or an entire lifetime. Or both. It depends on the perspective from which we observe everything and how our lives unfold. I remember extraordinary moments, etched in memory, that continue to resonate within me: moments that determined choices, changed directions, illuminated the path like flashes of lightning. Moments of profound happiness and of desolate sadness.

When we are young, we look only forward: we believe everything is eternal, infinite, that time will stretch at our disposal. As the years pass, after lived experiences, battles won or lost, loves present or that have let us go, and countless other events, we gradually gain the awareness that all that time was nothing but an instant, gone before we even realized it. It is then that we become conscious of the relativity of time.

Perhaps life is nothing more than a succession of moments, and it is up to us to grasp their essence and value.
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”, Robert Herrick wrote in a famous poetic exhortation, inviting us to seize the moment, to fully live the instant and the present, because time passes quickly, and opportunities, like flowers, fade away soon.

I believe that the value of the instant lies in its fragility. It is that which cannot be repeated, cannot be scheduled, existing only while we experience it. It is in the attentive gaze, in the suspended gesture, in the light that illuminates the ordinary for a fleeting moment and transforms it into the extraordinary.

In light of these and other reflections, we have chosen Instant as the topic for this issue of LYF.
Instant is meant as an expressive and symbolic value that goes far beyond the mere temporal dimension.
The instant is a moment laden with meaning, a point of condensation where emotions, inner revelations, and decisive turning points intersect. It manifests as a threshold, a before and an after coexisting within the same fragment of time. Despite its brevity, the instant often possesses profound intensity: it gathers feelings, thoughts, and intuitions and can encompass radical transformations.

For each issue of LYF, the starting point is always a topic dense with meaning, capable of stimulating deep reflections. But then we change the game: we play with photo shoots, the selection of artists to feature, the graphics we create, the use of colors.

In this way, we offer an ironic and finely irreverent reading, because this is the subtlest soul of LYF: bold, provocative, never complacent.

As always, we leave the readers the freedom to choose the key of interpretation they prefer, the one that feels closest to them.

For us, LYF Instant is both a poetic and political gesture, an act of resistance against the speed of the world, an invitation to pause and look carefully at what is happening, to accept incompleteness and transience, to recognize that even a fragment can contain a universe.
Because it is often in the instant – fragile and unrepeatable – that the most authentic meaning of experience is hidden.