Around new year I was starting to write a post with the title ”Summarizing 2025”. It was a text that tried to tie the bag of 2025, what I’ve learned, what I’ve been taught in life and what’s coming in the year ahead. But when I wrote it I realized that my life can’t be divided in sections, days, weeks, months and years. It’s an everlasting string that increases in length for every moment and that every section, no matter how you section it is based and dependent to the whole string to be a string. That where I am today, and who I am today is not because of the last year, the string began even before I was born. Therefore, I’ve concluded that summarizing where I stand in life now cannot be explained by the last year, it’s merely just where I stand now and everything before that that led me here.
The loss of my brother last December was one of those reality checks that life offers from time to time, either you just ignore it and move on, or you see that door that has opened and that time has been given for reflections. I’ve had people around me passing on over the years, it always affects me, but not on the same deep level as of when my brother passed on. He had been very sick and handicapped almost all the way from his birth and spent the most of his life in a wheelchair, unable to move, not able to speak, not able to see and after (what I recall) around the age of 15, he was not even able to eat and enjoy the sense of taste. He could hear, he could smell, he had the sense of touch and was full of emotions. I never got to understand what was going on in his mind and body and we were never able to have a conversation, not with words at least. The age difference between us was only a year, and I was the oldest. So, for as long as I have memories this is the way it was always like. He merely had nothing, yet still, he had everything. Just waking up in the morning made him laugh of joy, hearing voices and listening to music like “Jump” by van Halen. Though he never could jump, and never understood the lyrics, it was the feeling, the melodies and in the end, the frequencies that he experienced and enjoyed. He was the most joyful and satisfied person that I’ve ever got to know, and he taught me so much about life, without even saying a word to me once. When I came to say farewell, before he had passed on, and when he had anywhere between 30 minutes and a few days left to breathe, he still smiled and laughed. And once he had passed on, he was still lying there, eyes closed, body cold, no heartbeat, with a smile on his face. And that is the final teachings he gave me. My brother moved on at 33. His life and teachings are worth a whole book; I might have to do him the favour one day.
We shared blood and childhood, and if he could die with a smile on his face, how could I dishonor him and not do the same. Life should be fun, and you apparently don’t need “anything” for that to be.
So where am I today? I am in a place in life, on the string, where having a cup of coffee with the morning sun touching my face with my family well and fed, is enough to give me joy and a sense of fulfillment for a whole day. I am so grateful everyday that I wake up in the morning and is given the opportunity to open my eyes, even though I mostly fall asleep with a smile on my face.
/Karl