Topic: Mono No Aware

At the beginning of the year, my wife and I took a short trip to Athens. It was only a two-day trip to complete all the formalities for our UK visa application, but it was our first real trip to Athens in almost three years of living in Greece. I’ll share a few pictures from that trip later. I remember we had a very cozy and quiet little apartment with a kitchen window that looked out onto an overgrown and slightly abandoned garden. One day it was raining, which is common for Greece in the winter, and I was doing dishes in our quiet little kitchen, looking outside. I saw how the water pelted the leaves and barrels. I also saw a cat hiding under a staircase and thought that this might be one of those core memories that stay with you for a lifetime. I thought about my pilgrimage: how the “me” from 2021 would never have imagined myself doing household chores in Athens. I grieved all the things I had lost and all the people who were no longer there.

For the last few years, I’ve been reading a lot of various small, personal websites and blogs. It brings me back to the beginning of the internet when people could create small pieces of the web for themselves, and all the websites looked authentic and different. I thought it might be a good idea to create something like that for myself and share things that I do care about and which are already gone. I was thinking all these thoughts while doing dishes.

The rain was pouring, the cat was sitting, and all the small, precious things around me and inside my strange life were connecting to each other. The cat eventually left, and the rain stopped, but the warm feeling inside me lingered for a while. I can still bring it back to life sometimes.

I started to notice recently how badly degraded my mental state, concentration and attention span. Compared to previous years, it has become significantly harder to focus on completing tasks, maintaining a routine and hobbies and be immersed in certain activities for prolonged amounts of time. Lately, all my efforts are aimed mostly at maintaining the already reached level of expertise and involvement, rather than on trying to achieve new goals or skill levels. Instead, I waste all my free time on doom-scrolling and short content consumption. Starting from yesterday, I removed all the sources of brain rot from immediate access. I will try to focus on reading, hobbies and learning instead and see if my concentration will improve.

Our tree

We bought a Christmas tree. This is probably one of few traditions that we try to follow no matter what, especially after we left our country and spent six months in different hotels across the continent. I remember the first winter in Greece. We were extremely lost and tired of the pilgrimage and general uncertainty. We had just rented our apartment and desperately needed something to cling to, something from the “normal life”. So we went to the bazaar and bought a Christmas tree. We didn’t plan it out that time and didn’t even order delivery. Ending up with a heavy tree in a bucket that was almost impossible to lift and carry even for ten meters, we had no other choice but to call a taxi. I still remember how we’ve been clinging to “normality” so hard. Now I smile, remembering that day, but it wasn’t that fun getting stuck with a dead-weight tree in the middle of the night on the street!

Winter has started in Thessaloniki once again, and it feels so unreal compared to the place where I used to live for almost my whole life. It will be my fourth winter in Greece, but I still can’t get used to the blue sky and relative warmth outside. My perception of the temperature, though, changes. I’m getting cold easier. I’m not used to constant rain anymore. We don’t have a lot of precipitation, though, but even what we have is quite a lot, it feels. I really like the Christmas mood starting to appear here and there. It doesn’t feel exactly as in my homeland, but I started appreciating what I have. I try to fixate on small things that boost my mood, and try to accept whatever I get. In the uncertain world, I guess, this is the only thing we have.

When I first joined the Web some 20 years ago, it was blooming with various small websites with a soul, a strong feel of the author’s presence, and it truly felt like private personal spaces. Over years, I gradually lost the sensation of these websites being still present. It feels like they have been pushed back by bigger platforms with endless engagement. I have really missed these personal websites throughout the years and thought it might be a good idea to create something like that for myself and share things that I care about and which otherwise would be gone.

There are a few posts in my backlog that I haven’t decided how to publish yet: I don’t really like the idea of backdating posts, but maybe it would be the only way. Anyway, this is the beginning, and hopefully it will go well.