Life is fickle and unpredictable. It is forever changing.
Sometimes it’s quiet, subtle shifts we barely notice. Sometimes our whole world changes in a heartbeat of a second. Either way, life changes every day, and we lose a lot along the way. We lose belongings, people and places. We lose love, memories and time. We lose ideas, dreams and our perspective.
Some losses are slight, while others are so big they become a personal measure of time – marking beginnings and endings of certain chapters in our life.
Some losses slip by unnoticed, while others we never fully recover from. We carry some voids with us forever.
The Portuguese people have a word for this that tenderly ties of these feelings – “Saudade.” It’s a rather elusive word that helps give a voice to that melancholic yearning for something that once was but never will be again.
I believe it’s these losses – the ones we grieve and still long for despite the passage of time – that define us. If we look closely at the things we miss the most – the things our heart longs for – I think we will find a part of ourselves in the void. To paraphrase Russian playwright, Anton Chekhov: Tell me what you miss, and I’ll tell you who you are.
(* The featured photograph is of the charred remains of the home of Phillip Hyatt and Tim Bennett of Steele. They lost their beloved hilltop home and all their belongings to a house fire on July 4, 2022.
I asked them to share with me what they found they longed for most:
Phillip, whose parents originally built the home, said his thoughts returned most often to a photograph of his parents (both now deceased) that hung outside the master bedroom since the house was first built.
“It was the heart of the home,” Phillip said.
Tim, practice pianist and music collector, lost instruments and decades of treasured memorabilia. “It was a lifetime of music I lost,” Tim said. “I miss that the most.”)
– Mackenzie Free –
Wife, mother, photographer & current resident of the unassumingly magical town of Steele, Alabama
