The Old Man, the Street

You will be stunned when I will tell you that the street in which we presently stand, is being seen by us for the last time. You and I are seeing it for the last time in our lives! Do you look at that old man with rough beard over there? Yes, very near to that pole. That one with the wooden cart. You did not notice him before, did you?

What if I tell you that you are looking at this man for the last time in your life? In your long life that is going to follow, you will never see him again! Doesn’t that surprise you? Yes, when I first learned that most of the people we see in our lives and can’t care less to notice, are those that we get to see only once. Isn’t it spellbinding to think that you and that rough-bearded man will continue to live on the same earth, on the same planet, for years and years to come, and your paths will never cross again!

And this street too.

There is going to come a time when you will not even remember that you were ever in this street, a street that had a pole and a faulty streetlight, gazing stunningly standing beside me. When I will come and remind you, you will wrinkle your forehead, scratch your head, suck your lip, but you won’t be able to recall. You will say you don’t know, that maybe you were, maybe you were not. It will be a history lost in the past, and no one – not even a single soul on earth – will know you were here, on these pieces of gravel, on this wearing down road, under this faulty streetlight.

In your short life that happens to have passed, you must have stood like this in many streets, looked at many people, said and heard and read countless things; but try whatever you can, you will not remember many of them.

Ah, so I seem to have made you wonder what life is about, then? As you walk with it, just like you walk with me today, you pick tonnes of sand in your hand, which unfortunately slips by, leaving behind little grains that you are able to recall as memories. What happens to what all has slipped by, from life and memory both? Is it like it never happened, because no living soul remembers it, not even you whom it was about? And even if you try and are careful from the very start, how much can you really hold in your little, frugal hands, while your fingers have spaces between them?

And what about the memories of those millions and billions of humans that have been? One day, the beautiful and prized picture of this street and that rough-bearded old man will be completely forgotten. There must have been streets in the past, and there must have been numerous old men who owned carts; but how many of them can you recall?

So let us sit down here in this street for some time. I know a shop nearby which can offer us a place to sit and a nice view of this street. We can together sit down and watch this singular picture for a while, enjoying it, savoring it, making a memory of it.