Of Life, Death, and Hope

A heartfelt yet, 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, from a personal and, I guess, collective perspective, too.

I don’t know about you, but my holidays were warm and gentle, and still hanging on that idea of hope. And yet, observed through a personal lens, all those “droplets of hope,” as author Joel Rothschild would write, started to disappear as 2026 came along. Those droplets of hope started to disappear, one by one. It’s obvious that soon, very soon, they’ll be no more. Hope that things would recover ceased to exist at the start of the year.

That’s life, some say. Yet, this time, again, it’s part of my personal life–the imminent loss of yet another loved one.

Death is natural, yet death doesn’t always come easy. (does it ever?) In some circumstances, death could be a relief. But at what cost?

Considering looking at life through a collective lens, if life as we know it were to come to an end, what would we do? How would we react?

Watching that last droplet of hope disappearing into darkness right before our eyes, how many would see it as a loss? A relief? A means to new beginnings?

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

For more on the role of photography, in particular, and creative work, in general, in preserving memories, check out a previous 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