Issue No. 12: The Summers of the 90s and The Magic of Hobbies
What are the things that interest you?
It’s a summer somewhere in the 90s. I’m in my teens, living at home with the parents, sharing a room with one of my siblings. Life is simple but full. We spend slow, lazy afternoons daydreaming, creating imaginary play out of ordinary things. There are books to read, magazines to go over, cards to make and write. In the evening, my father comes home from work and cups of chai fill up rooms and conversations as my parents catch up, we hang around them with snacks in our hands, and a laidback ease in our eyes.
There’s outdoor play with the neighbors kids, board games with the family, hopscotch tournaments with just some chalk and a stone, hide and seek in random corners of the house, walks in the park. Dinner time is together, eating out is for special days, we go on drives to get ice cream sometimes. There are afternoon naps, long phone calls on the landline. The computer is there but there’s no unlimited WiFi so we play Solitaire for a while, draw random things on Microsoft Paint, play games for a bit.
We’re all doing what today’s world calls nothing, but we call it life, and at that time, it’s what is our everything.
When Nabeel and I got married, it felt like things came together easily because both of us had similar views on life. We wanted our days to feel uncluttered, simpler choices, to have space in our hearts to notice the small things.
But fast forward to some years ago, to an average Tuesday night in our home, and I realised something that had quietly slipped into our lives without us noticing. It was the two of us sitting in our living room, with the TV running in the background and the phone screens scrolling in our hands. It was what you’d see as a slow night, we looked chilled out.
But on that particular night, Nabeel was showing me some pictures on his phone, photos from my childhood that he’d been scanning the past few days to have them saved digitally as well. And as I was looking at them, I saw these very random shots of me and my family, with us doing all sorts of different things; nothing too extraordinary, just layered and diverse like the colors of a sunset. And I realized that I wasn’t just looking at pictures of people within a frame, but at images telling the story of not just an unhurried life, but of one that was inherently abundant.
And it was just in that moment that I understood that a slow life is not a still life. And I just had this rising feeling in my heart that I wanted to recreate my life today to once again carry the soul of that time.
A life like the summer of the 90s.
Over the years, some of the most fun date nights for Nabeel