Sunday 08 / September / 2024
I often think of my friends in the last decades and how the years went quickly when we thought the carefree days would never end.
Some of them were in my elementary school when we pushed each other in the streets, kicked a ball in the playground or met at the seafront in the weekends making idle talks. I have not seen most of them in years but we stay in touch in the social media. It is a friendship chain that has survived marriages, careers, social difficulties, divorces and even deaths.
Whenever we catch up, we still reminisce our childhood days and even the teenage years. We joke about those days and all the time happy that we built a solid foundation that kept us together over the years. Again, it is a blessing to still maintain a friendship that started when not a hair was growing on our faces. The friendship that has endured over the years when wrinkles now start appearing on our not so young faces.
We all have our ups and downs over the years in numerous occasions but remain grateful that we are still in touch and are able to rejoice the past and looking forward to the future together. All the while, so much has changed but we always overcome the challenges. For example, when someone decided to chop down a three-hundred years old tree last week, I felt a twinge of pain in my heart. It was under that huge tree that we used to play as children.
It was as if someone took a large chunk away from my growing up days. The tree offered a shade in the hot summer days and we enjoyed its fruits in the winter time. We hugged its huge trunk and swung on its strong branches. But strange enough, the old tree, like many other milestones, is not fading away from my memory, even though I have not seen it in the last four decades. So are the old jokes that we used to share with my childhood friends.
There is a lot to be grateful for, too. I have learned a lot from those days from my interactions with my friends.
One of them is that time moves forward and waits for no one. But my childhood was never a useless past time.
It sharpened my focus as I was leaving my teenage years and left my hometown for higher education. Those years put a fine point when I went to work learning how to forge relations with my workmates based on the experience I had with my childhood friends.
I still keep old photos I took with them. They still bring a smile on my face. Oh, those innocent years when we thought that the sun of life would never set. But I guess many of you have the same story to tell about your childhood as you read these lines. Maturity and adulthood have a different undertone of life. The reins of responsibility are not anymore in the hands of our parents. We have them and they are leaving bruises as we gallop the horse of life with our children appear to run out of control. We don’t sprint past the minutes anymore in the rush to get things done. Now the minutes tick away gently while we think longingly on the glory days of our youth.
