Every
year of a life is a small, individual journey, which needs a retrospective
summary and personal sum up. The advantage of having a birthday in the very end
of the year is that special day in the last few years is always a great
opportunity for kind, calm and sweet nostalgia of the past year. 2019 was a hard, but not unusual year with
important and nice – small or big – moments of happiness, but also with lot of
stress, lot of minor conflicts and challenges in my personal life and life-journey. I have travelled around 16.000 km in 4 countries. It is a year, which continues strictly the big events of 2018 and there were no
major changes in my life in this year, however my unsure health issues
certainly will need a more careful attention next year.
Here
is my list of gratitude for 2019:
- -
I’m thankful for visiting
Erfurt in January and meeting my old friends there, finishing finally the
journey of my PhD certificate too
- -
I’m grateful for my friends and dear
colleagues in Sibiu and Szeged, some of them helped me a lot and certainly will
represent an important pillar in the following year too in my uncertainties and
quests
- -
Grateful for my work
and project on András Bodor and the opportunity to study his heritage. This
project gave me also the possibility to visit twice this year London and to
spend 10 days in Oxford. Happy to have amazing friends in London, Greenwich and
now in Oxford too
- -
Thankful for my friends in Budapest – old and
new too. It is a city I feel as my second home since many years, although it is
a transit city in my life since a decade now. Somehow, similar to Cluj, city I
visited often this year too.
- -
Happy to meet this year
some really nice friends in Bucuresti and Constanta too
- -
Thankful for the
amazing opportunity to visit again Rome, the Urbs, city of cities spending
there a month. After 3 years it was again, fascinating to feel, touch, smell
and study the Grande Bellezza of my life. Grateful for my research in the
German Archaeological Institute and to some new and old friends from Rome too,
who made my stay there marvelous.
- -
I feel happy to visit this year Pompeii with
some friends: an amazing, unforgettable moment for me
- -
happy to finish and
publish two popularizing books, 2-3 articles and reviews, although most of my
big works I proposed for this year is still under work
- -
incredibly grateful to
meet again – for the third time – pope Francis in Bucuresti and Nils Frahm in
Budapest
- -
Grateful for my
students and their energy. I had some seminars, where I met again the feeling
of catharsis
- -
Finally, grateful for my family, for their
patience which is often challenged.
This year marked
also some intense ideological conflicts with some colleagues, friends or
others. Often, virtual life is different from reality and our fast, changing
society is also in a transitional period of changes. Hopefully, these quests I
have as individual and the macro-issues as we face as humanity will get a bit
clearer next year at least.
I wish for myself and
for all of you more awareness, slow-time and good health and the amazing
message of S. Hawking: just keep talking.
