A most memorable collection

Life is all about collecting memories. And every once in a while taking them out of the box and polishing them up. A bit like silverware, really.

Like that time I slept on the roof of a house in the Moroccan Atlas Mountains, with the Milky Way wheeling above me. Or that time I saw a glacier for the first time, and immediately the biggest monster in all of the Alps. Or that amazing sunrise on the Aegean - the same sea so many Greek heroes crossed on the way to their adventures - with, far off to the north, ancient Athens rising from the predawn gloom. And that's just a few of the memories I managed to collect.

Sunrise over Piraeus. Awful quality, I know - in fact this picture (taken back in 2005) was the one that inspired me to throw myself into photography

Memories are all that keeps a man alive. Well, that and food. And water. And oh, maybe healthcare, if you're really pushing it. But those differ from memories in the way that those are physical needs, no psychological ones. You might argue education is a psychological need (and I, for one, am very much convinced of that one), but you should never forget about the memories. 'Cause after all, how do you measure the worth of your life if not by how you look back on it?

Good memories can take on many forms and shapes. Bringing them back - and polishing them up - is a way of putting your life on replay, or at least a hotlist of Greatest Hits. They don't need to be about breathtaking locations, you can have fond memories of the most intimate, insignificant things. Like the evenings me and my family walked to that little cabin in the woods whenever it snowed (and that's not very often where I live), to get a spiced hot chocolate by a roaring fire, engulfed by other adventurers and the myriad smells of winter, from wood smoke to exotic spices and oranges studded with cloves. That memory has become all the more symbolic since the cabin burned down a few years ago. For a while the location was marked by charred remains in an open spot in the woods, but not too long afterwards someone bought the lot and built a modern house on it, making the cabin a thing from the past, never to be visited again. Unlike the memory, I'm glad to say, which is now more vivid than ever.

I'm only 28 years old, and yet I'd already be able to keep on for hours, listing up memories that I'll take with me for as long as I live. But since blog posts are supposed to be short, I should probably keep those for myself just a little while longer. Until a next post maybe. 

What is your fondest memory?