A quick review of the previous year
After reviewing numerous photos taken by a smartphone in 2025, I noticed that many wonderful things happened last year: incredible, long-awaited encounters; trips with family and friends; significant learning and professional growth.
Indeed, today’s smartphone photo galleries organize our memories so beautifully that we can see how our lives are unfolding, almost as if we were watching a movie.
While the photos are stacked according to days, weeks, months, and even years, they create a visual window of all this aggregated data, represented as special moments in life. They are part of our life experiences, like seeds planted in our memory garden. Over time, these seeds grow into a forest through which we walk to remember our happiness, joy, sadness, anxiety, and fear as part of the past. By revisiting these memories, we can feel more alive and better appreciate what we have.
I feel lucky and privileged in a world where, unfortunately, the chances and possibilities are not equally distributed among everyone. It doesn’t necessarily depend on our merits, physical appearance, or social status. Life can be hostile and cruel to anyone for no specific reason, or even when we are not responsible for what is happening around us: ongoing wars and conflicts, geopolitical tensions, climate change and its consequences, diseases and many other factors.
I’m not sure whether our capacity for emotion has been stripped away in this new version of Homo sapiens, leaving little room for feeling. News from across the globe brings terrifying, horrific, and shocking images to televisions, tablets, and phones. Yet ordinary life continues, as if it were a fictional movie.
Having said that, I feel extremely thankful for the year 2025. This doesn’t necessarily mean that I’ve been selfish or egoistic, but I have tried to be mindful of how hard things can be. Of course, being human, I also made mistakes. Even I wasted my time on unnecessary things, but I have genuinely tried to appreciate as much as I could, even the simple moments of life: “the extraordinary in the ordinary.”
It may sound like a mystical or spiritual awakening, but that does not really depict me. It is the self-awareness of the place that I’m living in.
HIGA 2025
Going back again to the 2025 images and asking myself honestly, “What was the most stunning, once-in-a-lifetime experience from last year?” I would definitely choose the HIGA event, held in Vitoria-Gasteiz at the Basque University on July, 2025. It was an inspiring summer camp with academics, activists and language enthusiasts from all around the world, all sharing a common goal: “revitalizing the minoritized languages of their communities.”
I would have never imagined how many colleagues, with their own minoritized languages in any part of the planet, would have so many similarities with mine. The likelihood was beyond the linguistic aspects. In most cases, I had no common linguistic roots with the other languages.
However, the similarities came mostly from social, political, and personal aspects. I felt I wasn’t alone in my Kurdish identity and language.
My linguistic reality surrounds me, along with internal conflicts such as identity struggles, the coexistence of several languages, the diaspora, language transmission, and a sense of guilt regarding what is happening, as well as my responsibilities and actions in response.
It was a week of intense debates, discussions, speeches, open-mics, lightning talks, and, of course, getting to know each other throughout the day. It was not possible to talk with each member or community in detail due to the large participation, but I wish I had that opportunity.
Far from being limited to academic boundaries, it was about human connections, which struck me more than anything. It created a special bond and opened a new horizon for my humble understanding of the world. Talks and debates are not only held at university corners, atriums, and official buildings, but also during lunches, short walks, or breaks. Even the sleeping moments had a special function: to analyze and reorganize all the information in order to continue with the next day’s challenges.
The HIGA gathering was an oasis created over a week for those who needed a special care regarding their minoritized language reality.
That was a very special moment of 2025, along with other great moments of simplicity—ordinary things experienced with great expectations and hopes. The encounters with friends and family were filled with joy, tenderness, conversations, and, of course, understanding, empathy, and caring for each other.
Trying to keep this article brief, I hope to write many new articles on interesting topics, sharing lessons learned from last year, and to be able to reflect on personal and professional growth after a long pause due to some private issues.
The featured image is taken from: https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/exhibitions/in-situ-refik-anadol
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