A Lyrical Mood – To My Friends, Family, and Loved Ones
I have been wanting to buy a large leather-bound photo album for a long time – somewhere to gather piles of photographs from my student years, my first job, a new apartment, and my first trip abroad…
Today felt full of small errands and bigger tasks, and after-work fatigue combined with the sameness of daily routines finally caught up with me. Just then my eyes landed on a paper storage drawer full of old pictures – some tucked into small albums, others still sitting in the paper envelopes photo studios used to hand out. Those were prints from my old Kodak film camera, and I decided to flip through them…
It turned into a touching journey back in time – here I was heading to the sea with friends (we wanted to ride commuter trains and walk the last stretch on foot), there was our dorm cat Bes, and here were snapshots with my group at technical college. Then university, dorm life again, networker meetups – life flashed by like a kaleidoscope, and each new photo envelope opened another chapter of the story.
Soon came the photos from when I first met my future – and now real – wife, then visits back home to my family: coal mines, slag heaps, the local plant, my old school, and my relatives. Then another envelope turned up with me, my dad, and my brother – everyone looked so different, so much younger, and there I was in my university military-training uniform… How long ago all of that was.
And what about today? Work, a child, my wife, our cats – we live inside our small family world. Occasionally some negativity from the “outside world” breaks through – the financial crisis and now the flu on top of it. Gone are the carefree nights out with friends until dawn and noisy get-togethers, though how fun those days were! Still, I feel what that song calls a “kind sadness,” and I am genuinely grateful I had all of it and have something warm to look back on.
Over the past three or four years, all my friends have started families and had kids – everyone now mostly lives in their own little world. Every once in a while those worlds cross paths and blend together briefly, before each of us steps back into the life we know and love, built with our own hands and our own hard-earned money.
I truly hope that one day we will have soaked in enough of this quiet comfort to step outward again – meet up more often, and let money and daily chores fade into the background. After all, none of that is what matters most: caught up in everyday rush, our priorities slip toward mundane things. Somewhere along the way we need the wisdom to pause and look around – do we really need all of this? Have we drifted off course chasing things we could easily live without?
Until that day comes, though, we keep pushing forward and working hard – there is still no car yet, the loan is still unpaid, and there is still so much left to accomplish.
P.S. Thank you to my friends, my family, and all my loved ones. It is a shame we are so often busy and short on time, yet we still remember one another, don’t we?