Last night I turned sixty-eight. My wife arranged a party with many guests. But I kept looking at the door all night. My daughter in Australia and my son in England video-called. They ordered a gift online; it will come tomorrow. I kissed my grandchildren through the screen. I've never held all my grandchildren together on my birthday night. My in-laws wished me a good night. But I did not have one. Having my wife beside me was wonderful, but I wished, just one night, we were all together. Just one night to hold my children, stroke my grandchildren's hair. Not gifts. Not calls. Just them.

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Have you ever watched The Eighth Day, the film by Jaco Van Dormael? When I saw it, something strange and profound happened to me. The character named Harry. I have never been able to forget him. In my darkest moments of grief or hopelessness, his image appears before me.

I came to realize that people like Harry, those living with Down syndrome, form an essential part of our society's fabric. And yet society has cast them out, as if from its own body. I felt a deep, almost ancestral duty toward them. I knew I had to do something.

But here was my dilemma. I could have simply written a cheque. That would have been easy. But I refused to do that. I did not want to walk away feeling virtuous yet detached. No. I wanted to act with my own hands, my own heart, my own conscience. I wanted something real, something personal.

And yet, I never found the opportunity. I still hope that one day, I will.

I was eighteen; she was twenty one. In our family, to love a girl older than yourself was an unforgivable moral disgrace. In hers, I suspect, the feeling was the same. So our love never went beyond our eyes.

I still see her curls falling beside her face, her kind and generous smile. Fear of society kept our hands apart, our lips sealed. We learned to speak only in glances.

Now we meet sometimes at family gatherings. I am fifty three; she is fifty six. Still the same look. Still the same tenderness. Still the same fear. For she remains, after all, three years my senior.

But I make this vow. One day, when it is not too late, I will take her hands in mine. I will part my lips and finally say how very much I have loved you.

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The plane landed in New York. Three hours until the meeting with the buyer. But something pinned me to my seat; something that stayed in front of my eyes the whole flight. We had made a promise. We had promised to celebrate our first poetry book in New York. Those handwritten poems are still in my library. Where did we lose our way? Marriage? Business? Children? I'm not sure, but it seems putting it off until tomorrow was what destroyed it. So many tomorrows have passed since that day. I don't know if he forgot, but I never forgot those poems. I still know them word for word. Every time I read them, a fire ignites inside me and weakens all my muscles. Now I cannot get up from this seat. Without him. Without the printed copy of that book.

On many weekends, I find myself alone, taking my camera into the forests of Abant, near the town of Bolu. I would not call myself a highly skilled photographer, yet capturing the essence of the forest holds profound meaning for me. It is as though through the lens I discover my own soul. There is a pleasure of exploration intertwined with a quiet sense of fear, the awareness that at any moment, from any corner, something utterly unexpected might emerge. This is, in a way, an inner revelation made visible.

I have had the privilege of visiting and photographing other woodlands as well: the Black Forest in Germany, the Great Smoky Mountains in the United States, and a few other remarkable places. However, my true aspiration is to pursue professional photography within the Amazon Rainforest. Such an undertaking demands careful preparation and specialised equipment. I remain hopeful that one day I shall be able to realise that dream.

Sometimes, seeing an old caravan on a quiet road reminds me that there are still ways to deepen time. Time has always been valuable, but with each passing decade of my life, I discover a new layer of its worth. "Leisure" today means something far beyond what I once understood: the kind of leisure that allows me to plan a true journey to discover a new corner of the earth, to wake up in the forests of Schluchsee, and at night to lie beneath a star filled sky beside the river Wutach, listening to the silence.

My grandfather used to say that the earth reveals its beauties only to those who move with deliberate slowness. An exploratory journey, with a small notebook. So that one can take a pen and write down experiences that can only be conveyed through words and never fit inside any camera lens. It is enough simply to take a step, and to record that unique moment of insight with the ink of a pen.