The moment you step in, you’re welcomed into a cozy, inviting atmosphere where people sit together, chatting and crocheting. There’s an immediate warmth — an unspoken understanding that here, you can just be.
Traditions anchor emotions in the arbitrary nature of time. They keep us connected and serve as a comfortable continuity across years, changes and age. My grandmother was something of an anchor herself within my family. She was always a centric presence during my childhood and, truthfully, a centric presence to almost everyone she encountered.
POV: It’s 2009 and your first grade class is having a Halloween party.
Your teacher is playing the “Monster Mash” and everyone is dressed up in their costumes, drinking apple cider and eating doughnuts. There are no worries in the back of your mind about work you have to do, only excitement about going trick-or-treating later.
When Nietzsche wrote, “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders,” his aim was not to portray all forgetfulness as bliss, but rather to encourage a healthier relationship with our past and our memory.
For the foreseeable future, this great cycle of nostalgia will continue. Even the painful or annoying periods of life may transform into fond memories, but remembering good times is bittersweet. As always, all we can do is enjoy the present — the only time we ever actually live in.
Time is a valuable resource. The only lifelong activity we should be pursuing — with no fear of wasting time — is learning, and “it takes the whole of life to learn how to live.”
Life isn’t a waiting game. I want to be able to look down at my 20-year-old self from the top of the staircase and admire her just as fondly as I do the young girl fishing with her grandfather in the Russian countryside. To do so, I have to stop spending each day waiting for the next one. With so much time left, what’s the rush?
Oral storytelling is much more than simply recounting events — it turns words into images and emotions. The final result can be even more moving than books or movies because the stories come from real people in front of us.
