What is really important? What touches us today – and will not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen*, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
★★★
Why don’t we just rejoice when the sun shines? We wake up, blink and think – wow, it’s going to be so hot again today. What am I wearing, this heat! Doesn’t it ever stop? Who is going to endure this?
That’s what my colleagues say, or something like that. And I say it myself too. But now is the best time of the year. The rosé only tastes good when the weather is really hot, and even tofu is fun when barbecuing in the evening. Even at night you feel like it’s afternoon. The hour of the young people: when they go away, the finches are still chirping, when they come back, the finches are chirping again – they too have that summer feeling.
If the heating fails now and we can only take a cold shower, it doesn’t really bother us. Mark Twain wrote: “Summer is the time when it is too hot to do what it was too cold to do in winter.”
You want all kinds of ice cream in the world. Gazpacho Andaluz, or cold cucumber soup, is the freshener of the moment. The green in nature has never been as lush as it is now. Life takes place outdoors: always outside, always in the air, like in the old days when you didn’t want to sit in the apartment.
Can you have a nicer time these days? We’ve waited all year for this short time. “When will it really be summer again? A summer like it used to be,” sang the legendary showmaster Rudi Carrell.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
Now we have it, the real summer! And complaining again. A large calendar hangs in my office. It shows when the session weeks of the German Bundestag take place. And it shows what nobody really likes to think about: July has already begun. We are in the middle of the year.
But what the calendar doesn’t show is that we’re still free and don’t have to wear masks outside in everyday life. But somehow, at least that’s how I feel, you feel a certain uneasiness that freedom could soon be over again. The Lauterbach is already waiting…
Therefore: let us enjoy these beautiful days as they fall. We won’t get any better. As the saying goes: “Those who enjoy the sun in summer will carry it in their hearts in winter.”
Isn’t that a nice motto for the next few weeks?
* Louis Hagen (75) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts are available as a book at koehler-mittel-shop.de.
