Postcards to What We Left Behind

Postcards to What We Left Behind

There are people, places, habits and passions that once lived at the very centre of our days—and now exist only as faint echoes. This blog is a quiet letter to them all.

To forgotten friends, families, hobbies and interests—
this is not an apology.
It is a remembering.

Once upon a time, friendship was not scheduled; it simply happened. It arrived barefoot, unannounced, knocking not on doors but on hearts. Friends knew the geography of our silences, the grammar of our laughter, the pauses between our words. We shared cups of tea that grew cold because the conversation was warm. Today, many of those friendships sit archived in phone contacts, their names glowing silently, waiting for a call that never comes.

Life, we tell ourselves, became busy.
But perhaps we became careless.

Families, too, slipped into the background—not because love diminished, but because familiarity bred postponement. “I’ll call tomorrow,” became a sentence with no calendar. The elders waited, their memories sharper than their hearing, hoping to recognise our voice before time erased theirs. The children grew, faster than our awareness, learning to pronounce the world without us watching closely enough.

Homes turned into transit points.
Conversations into bullet points.
Relationships into obligations.

And then there were our hobbies—the quiet companions of our youth. The sketchbook now gathers dust. The harmonium waits patiently, its keys yellowing, still tuned to ragas that once healed us. The morning walks, the evening runs, the handwritten journals, the half-finished poems—all suspended mid-breath, like paused music. These were not mere pastimes; they were mirrors, reminding us who we were when no one was watching.

We often say, “I don’t have time.”
But time was never lost—only misplaced.

In the great marketplace of adulthood, interests that did not earn applause or income were slowly traded away. We learnt to value productivity over presence, urgency over depth. Notifications replaced knocks on the door. Screens replaced shared skies. We became efficient, informed, connected—and strangely alone.

There is a particular loneliness in modern life:
the loneliness of having everything, except the things that mattered.

Yet memory has a gentle rebellion of its own. It surfaces in the smell of old books, in a song from the 1960s, in a childhood street glimpsed from a moving car. Suddenly, the past does not feel distant; it feels patient. Waiting. Not accusing us—just asking quietly, “Do you remember?”

Remember how friendships were slow-cooked, not microwaved.
How families were anchors, not WhatsApp groups.
How hobbies were prayers in disguise.

This is not a call to return entirely to what was—time does not walk backwards. But it is an invitation to retrieve. To write one message. To make one call. To open one forgotten notebook. To sit beside someone without checking the clock. To allow ourselves the luxury of being human again.

Because what we abandon does not always disappear.
Sometimes, it waits for us—
in the margins of our lives,
hoping we will one day turn the page.

Let us, then, send postcards to what we left behind.
Not with regret, but with grace.

Not to mourn the past, but to reclaim the parts of ourselves we unknowingly set down along the way.

After all, a life well-lived is not measured only by what we achieved—
but by what, and whom,
we chose not to forget.