Does life repeat itself?

For a long time we have read the same phrases: history does not repeat itself, a person lives only one version of it, life does not replay itself — for every era and every epoch has its own variables, shifts, and people. Yet the human being wants to tame everything, and so utters such judgments in order to feel at ease with time and not to fear life's vicissitudes. While such absolute verdicts confront us every day, at every crossroads, every piece of news, every incident and disaster the world passes through, we find that events, conclusions, images, and meanings recur in a different guise — one that wholly contradicts those very phrases. History does repeat itself, and life replicates its details and scenarios in ways we do not fully grasp, like a mysterious film whose puzzles are only solved in the final reel.

Today, when we contemplate ourselves — our actions, our behaviour, the way we have come to speak, the convictions that have mostly changed from what they were when we were teenagers and young adults, before life wore us down, before all those people passed through it and changed us and changed it — we are more certain than ever that we women have become other versions of our mothers. Even men, most of them, move with the logic and manner of their fathers, with only minor adjustments demanded by the surface variables of the age.

Does life not repeat itself in people? And what is life if not these people — our lives, your lives, their lives? What differs and what resembles in all of this? The outer shell of life changes, its appearances shift to keep pace with the requirements of the present moment and nothing more; but the spirit of meaning extends its deep roots — embodied in the convictions and conduct of our grandmothers' and mothers' lives — unbroken.

Everything we once rejected, mocked, and opposed, we now repeat in ways that sometimes leave us marvelling at ourselves. How did we come to speak in the words and manner of our mothers when we scold our children, or object to their way of life? How do we repeat the very same phrases? Does this have any meaning other than that life continuously reproduces a version of itself, with a few adjustments?