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 THINKING OUT LOUD

At fifteen, everything I had known -every person, every routine, every piece of the life I understood- suddenly turned into memory. Today, sixty-four years later, at the prime age of almost eighty, those early memories blend with all the others collected along the way.

Fifty countries visited.
Four that became home.
Another four that could have been.

Laughter.
Tears.
Joy.
Sadness.
Friends made,
Friends lost.
Three marriages.
Money gained,
Money lost.
Successes.
Failures.

It has been a long, steep, often difficult learning curve -yet always a fascinating one.

What I have learned, alongside the simple truth that people are people everywhere and that we mostly differ in the spices we cook with, is that perspective shifts with time. Appreciation deepens. What mattered once no longer carries the same weight, and what once felt trivial now feels essential.

Information changes.
Thinking evolves.

And looking back, I find my thoughts drifting to the simpler days now long gone -when the young man I still remember was full of hope, full of visions of a kind future, full of desire and willingness to become.

Innocence.
An empty vessel.

Everything gathered over a lifetime somehow circles back to that early world -where simplicity wasn’t a flaw, where dreams had room to grow, where trust and love were not abstractions but a way of living.

A  way of being.

It takes years -uncounted experiences, hard lessons, and the quiet wisdom that time offers us- to finally understand what was always there: life is truly a circle.

We come to realize that the end is found at the beginning,

and that the beginning is … well, the unswerving path to the end.

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