Hello!
This is the most beautiful greeting in Albanian, in my opinion. Starting or ending a conversation with the other person by wishing them a long life seems to me to be a very good way to create the right atmosphere for positive communication. There are also shortened variants Tung or Tjeta... you can also make it "cool", that is. :)
Maybe I took a bit too long to get in.
Hello, then!
I mean, even one expression can make a difference in our day, which... excuse me for being blunt, in most cases will be quite ordinary, with the routine and the hustle and bustle that our daily lives impose on us. So those sparks, butterflies in the stomach, special events, will not be present every day. I really hope that extraordinary days in the negative sense, each of us will have as few as possible in our lives, but we don't think about them too much, we don't often prepare for them...
As for extraordinary days like in movies with happy endings, ah, we often think about these. We all want something extraordinary to happen to us, to achieve what we haven't, to go where we couldn't before... and to be honest, the online world hasn't made this any easier for us.
Imagine our children now.
Faced with this "crazy" time of consumerism, they are in a hurry to achieve what they see, to fulfill what the other has, and not infrequently, to get very upset or fall into apathy, because they do not achieve what they wanted, at the moment they wanted. Because tomorrow something new comes out, the desire to have it starts all over again, the stress of not getting it or even saturation with products that take each other's place, without ever taking a place in the heart.
So this is our next challenge.
First for yourself, then of course for the children.
Let's learn together, to accept that most of life is filled with normal days. And that's not a problem, it's just the way it is. And we need to accept ourselves on a normal day, on many of them.
We need to learn to find pleasure in small gestures, in actions, in words, in our routine.
I read something very beautiful yesterday: if you ask people about their dreams for the future, they will often talk about desires that translate into fame, money, measurable physical achievements... while if you ask them about memories, the most beautiful things of the past, they will definitely talk about emotions, conversations, travels, time with loved ones.
So this is my invitation today: to think of our normal lives as the great good that we are being given the opportunity to live, to strive hard for extraordinary days, but to enjoy all that we have.
Some small tips on how this can be done, taken from recent readings, can be found below:
Try creating a space in your day or even your home without technology, no smartphones, no TVs, no screens... just yourself and your loved ones.
Cook a meal as a family bonding activity, not as a chore to be done. Involve your children in it.
Author Elif Shafak reminds us that in these turbulent times, we need art and literature as much as air and water. Let us not deprive ourselves of the privilege of listening to good music, or reading a book we like, a film, an exhibition.
Let's make this part of our regular day.
We can "declare" a day off midweek for our children. If they are old enough to be left alone, a rainy Wednesday, for example, can be an "extraordinary" day off. In return, they will have to find some time to organize that wardrobe that they make a mess of during school days and that they can't find the space to deal with on the weekends.
Or to sit idle, (without screens), to get bored doing nothing, to realize how beautiful the day was yesterday, and how much better they can have it again tomorrow, at school. That's it.
Until next Saturday, cheers :)!
