We drift apart—not in anger or estrangement, but in the soft, solastalgic erosion of time’s currents, blurred-out by the tides of life. Yet, conversation, when it re-ignites, arrives with an ease, the same default intimacy, the gravity-defying joy of reunion, as if time itself had never been a cruel guess spinning us outward, away from what we should have been tending to all along—rare, steady, precious constellations of glitchless, bandwidth-rich friendship. This is how I came across a peculiar French expression: C’est reparti comme en 14. Softened by its feeling, I bathed myself in a lovely anticipation of the next scheduled meeting to discover its weight.
In August 1914, young French soldiers boarded trains with flowers in their rifles—la fleur au fusil—believing the war would be short and noble, only to be swallowed by the horror of four years of bloodshed. C’est reparti comme en 14 came to signify that illusion of beginning again. It blossomed into a wry refrain as France braced itself for WWII—the same misbegotten enthusiasm, the same repeating cycle.
Yet words, like water, take the shape of the vessel that holds them. In our conversation, the phrase dripped not with irony, but warm recognition. It felt like courage, not oblivion — like Iwacu, a sudden sense of home after a long journey; like Mwizerwa, the reliable pulse of something unbroken; like Umurage, a heritage of laughter and care handed down, not by blood, but by choice. (Yes, references to the Kwita Izina 20 — Gorilla Naming Ceremony that took place this weekend at Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda are evident.)
I also recall a rare line from the ebullient Jean-Paul Belmondo: “One day it seemed that life was passing me by… Then one day I felt like starting again. So I started.”
We reclaim ourselves, not through grand gestures, but through the quiet intention to begin again — in a single call, a laugh returned like a bird to its nest, the rediscovery of home in another’s voice, the steady trust that time cannot fracture; the living proof that what we tend, however sporadically, becomes what lasts.
And so here we are—reparti, resumed. In our telling, a step toward recollection.
We choose that framing now, that ability to bear multiple truths at once: Yes, I gave myself a right to be vulnerable, to recognise that I pushed, that my body refused to carry on as ‘normal’, to reclaim my power by naming my fragility in a conversation, with a doctor, with a friend, without hiding, masking. And in that naming, there is a liberating symmetry. The very act of speaking what we once swallowed is both an admission and a release.
We often imagine strength as the refusal to bend, but strength, truly, is the decision to soften — to meet life wherever it brings us. Time, after all, does not apologise. It keeps spinning, indifferent to our interruptions, our detours, our small devastations. Yet within its endless, unbothered motion, there are openings. Perhaps that is what I learned in this unlikely convergence — from 1914 to Volcanoes National Park, from French slang to Rwandan tradition: that starting again is less about resetting and more about carrying what was fragile into a future that might still hold it gently, that nothing truly precious asks to be perfect; it only asks to be remembered, spoken of, tended. Like a river carving its patient path through rock, re-connections happen not because they are forceful. And we, like careful gardeners, return to nurture. There is a grace in waiting, a humility that neither pleads nor punishes, that keeps a lantern lit in an empty house, trusting someone will come home.
This is the inheritance of our lives: not the fireworks of beginnings, but the pulse of continuities, of what happens after silences. We do not begin as if nothing has passed, but carrying fragility of home, trust, and heritage into tomorrow’s forests.
To tend what matters is to whisper back to time’s indifferent spin: I am here. We are here. What we love endures.
