Of Life, Death, and Hope

A heartfelt, although belated Happy New Year to all my readers and visitors! I truly hope that all your holidays were warm and bright, and that the new year brought new hope for achieving your dreams and goals. Hope is a short, big word. Nowadays, hope is in short supply.

I don’t know about you, but my holidays were warm and gentle, and still hanging on to that idea of hope. Yet, once the New Year arrived, all those “droplets of hope,” as author Joel Rothschild would write, started to disappear, one by one, until soon, very soon, there will be no more.

That’s life, some would say. And death is part of life, its last chapter.

Death is natural, but it doesn’t always come easy. Death brings suffering and loss. Individual and collective loss. Individual and collective mourning.

Looking at life (and loss) through a collective lens, if life as we know it were to come to an end, what would we do? How would we react?

How many would consider it a loss? A relief? A means to a new beginning? Would we mourn what’s lost?

A new year stands at the edge between future and past, hope and loss. The hope of new beginnings. The loss or rather memory of the previous year. Perhaps, a new year marks the continuous passing of time, a passing that we cannot stop, but can stop and will stop us, each and every one of us, eventually.

Something to think about at the beginning of yet another year. Guess we’ll see what else 2026 has in store for us?

That said, we can use photography to “seize the moment,” immortalize moments in our time, document our time, our life. For more on the role of photography in preserving memories, check out a #tbt post here. Or read Photographs and Their Worth.

And back to the life that still is:

In terms of New Year’s resolutions, I hope to get back to posting more often. I’ve missed that, posting regularly, very much, but life has a way of messing up one’s schedules and plans.

Happy New Year and, as always, thanks for stopping by,

Alina Oswald