On 19th April 2018, we visited an old people’s home in the centre of Athens and we had the pleasure of spending time with some exceptional people.
I tried to find the meaning of life through their words. I realised that it wasn’t necessary to reach their age in order to understand and feel for them. Sometimes life takes you by the hand when you are much younger and leads you to an unknown place, whether you like it or not.
We spoke to four people. One was a woman who told us that she had been there a week. The truth was in fact very different, and it turned out that she had been living in the home for about a year. Who knows, maybe she has lost her sense of time. Or she is waiting for something that will never come. She told us that her son was going to visit her the following day and take her back home. We wondered whether her son would indeed come and whether she would ever again be able to read her poems, which were sitting in the library in her old house. Perhaps that is how she spends her days in the home, with optimism.
I asked her to imagine her life as a poem and herself as the poet. What would be the main subject of the poem? “Love, love, love” she replied loudly and with total conviction.
I asked one of the men the same question.
“When I was young”, he said, “someone older told me that the meaning of life was to be a good, genuine human being.”
It makes me think that we are all waiting for something. Love, justice, freedom and peace. For the journey that will bring us closer to our loved ones. It’s difficult, however. Life is full of hardship, occasionally never ending, but we need to try.
We must live as human beings with everything that the word means, and we must fight for what is fair, regardless of colour, race or religion. We must bring this waiting to an end and finally arrive in a world full of love and beauty. We must love others as well as ourselves, because that is the only way life has any meaning.
—–
18-year old Sayed comes from Iran and came to Greece two years ago. Apart from Farsi, he wrote this article in Greek himself.
Add comment