Cicero sums up an ancient idea this way: habit, repeated long enough, stops feeling chosen and starts feeling natural. It is forged day by day until it becomes part of how you move through the world. Altera Natura starts from there. The style of this piece is the sediment of a practice: a visual world that, through countless attempts, is becoming a territory of its own. Spend enough time in front of a canvas and that world settles into you. What you do with your time becomes the nature you inhabit.
We are born with a first nature: the ground we did not choose. Body, temperament, the raw material of who we are. Second nature is what we cultivate afterward, when we begin to know ourselves. Think of it as a garden behind the house. Not the front yard of inheritance, but a plot that starts almost empty and fills, slowly, with what we plant through habit. That garden is our alternative. It is free of outside scripts only to the degree that we keep choosing what grows there.
That implies responsibility and also comfort. If second nature is built through actions, it can also be shaped. In difficult times we do not always control what comes our way, but we can rely on what we have already internalized. That habit is the refuge we return to, and which, with patience, like a seed taking root, propels us toward better times.
How do you choose what your Altera Natura will be? Are you planting the right seeds in your garden?
Consuetudo quasi altera natura. Habit is almost a second nature.
