A letter to my two sons, David and Martin, for 2026!

My dear sons,

David, and Martin,

This is how 2026 comes in, like a door opening in a quiet house, no toast, no fireworks, only weight.

Before I tell you what I hope for you, let me tell you how I measure the year.

Not by headlines. Not by numbers.

By the small thing that lives where morning light falls and evening voices gather, the clock on our kitchen wall, two minutes behind the world.

It has done that for years, stubborn as a small truth.

It asks nothing of us. It keeps its pace.

It ticks when we laugh and when we fall silent, when a room fills with joy, when a room fills with absence.

And every time I hear it, I’m brought back to something plain, time goes on, and we decide who we are while it goes on.

Minutes leave.

Words stay.

They cloud the kitchen window like breath, then clear, leaving a trace.

David, you have just crossed into thirteen, the age when your mind arrives first and your words come running after it.

I see you hold an idea a little longer than you meant to, eyes narrowing as if you’re looking past the wall, and then, almost as if you were putting it somewhere safe, you cover it with a joke.

Not because you are shallow.

Because you are learning a kind of armor.

Martin, you’re coming up on nine.

The world still smells like play to you, but play is beginning to teach you weight, not every win is worth winning, not every “enough” is fair.

I see it when you could take the point clean, and you don’t.

You pause for a heartbeat, as if you don’t want to bruise a person to beat a game.

I’m not writing to you as a teacher.

I’m writing as your father, one who has watched grown men become loud and small, and watched children become quiet and heavy too early.

You won’t always meet the world’s speed as an idea.

You’ll meet it as cold light, a phone glowing on a pillow, a message that wants your answer now, a joke that only works if somebody is made smaller.

There, right there, you’ll feel it in your throat before you can name it.

And then it happens the way it always happens, not with a punch, but with permission.

A small “go on.”

A smile you don’t want to own.

A silence that pretends it didn’t see.

That’s how it starts.

If you ever want a measure, don’t take it from how many people like you.

Take it from who would trust you with something real when there is nothing to gain.

Trust doesn’t live in big words.

It lives in the word you refuse to break.

David, I remember an evening you came to me with your notebook.

You didn’t make a speech.

You opened the page and showed me a drawing, a face with eyes that spoke before the mouth.

I understood at once, you weren’t only drawing a figure, you were learning the patience of a line, the discipline of a frame, the kind of silence that says more than explanation ever could.

Then, with that sly, gentle humor of yours, you said, “See? I’m reading, like you tell me to.” I laughed.

But inside, I stopped.

Because it wasn’t a joke.

It was a pact you were making with yourself, not to abandon your mind halfway down the page.

Martin, another morning you came in like a small storm.

Your big words wanted to outrun your small breath.

Then you stopped, just once, and you asked, “How do you know?”

It was a child’s question, but it carried a law inside it, don’t accept the world as a given.

In that second, you didn’t look older than your years, you looked honest.

In 2026 you will meet friendships that invite you to laugh at someone else.

They will call it “just teasing.”

This is how cruelty enters, laughter that needs a victim.

It doesn’t ask for much, only a wrong smile, a lazy “come on,” a “it’s nothing.”

And you’ll know the moment.

Someone’s name will be said the way a stone is dropped.

You will feel the room tilt toward the easy side.

If you’re lucky, you’ll hear your own name, quietly, plainly, pulled back by someone who refuses to let you turn into what you’re about to become.

So I leave you a quiet compass, the word you use to win makes the other person smaller, the word you hold in order to protect keeps the other person standing.

And when a sentence rises to your tongue to humiliate, courage is turning it back, before it becomes something you can’t take back.

David, you throw me that line sometimes, with the clean cunning of a boy who knows resemblance can be shelter: “Don’t criticize me, I’m like you.”

I understand. You want air.

You want room to grow without my shadow crowding you.

And I answer the same each time, because there is a threshold we must not cross:

“Yes, you may resemble me in some things. But I don’t want you to become me. I want you to find yourself and build David.”

I love you, not as my mirror, but as your own person.

Martin, you are the beam of light that still believes the world can be good.

Don’t lose that belief.

Just put a small rein inside it, never use the power you will have, against the weaker, or against yourself.

Real joy is never born from another person’s humiliation.

We are good people, not by instinct, but by return, what we keep reaching for, what we practice when no one is watching, what we come back to after we slip.

That, too, is a responsibility.

It begins in places too small for applause, in the tone you choose, in whether your word holds when it costs you; in whether you refuse to make the weaker a rung for your own ascent.

Albania does not need more noise.

It needs more pillars, less performance, more work, less “somewhere,” more “here”: here at the table, here in the classroom, here in the quiet daily decision to live with one another without shrinking anyone to feel tall.

Now, without speeches, what I want to remain of me is this, I do not want you to remember me as the father who knew everything.

I want you to remember me as the father who tried to be fair, even when he failed.

Because I have failed.

I know what it is to say “enough” and make the room go cold.

I know what it is to win the argument and lose the person.

And that is not a victory.

There is another truth I can’t dodge, sometimes I have rushed.

I have spoken too quickly, as if time were mine to spend.

Once, when both of you were listening, I saw the air cut for a moment.

I went back. I apologized.

And I kept my voice lower than my pride.

The clock, two minutes behind the world, kept ticking anyway.

Later, when I listen again, it can seem as if the clock ticks louder when I am unjust.

It isn’t judging me. It is reminding me of the price, what I say, once I say it, does not return.

If one day you feel lost, don’t run. Sometimes the road is found by stopping long enough to hear yourself.

Like stopping to hear the clock, it doesn’t answer you, but it reminds you that every minute has weight.

And if one day you feel alone, know this without any doubt, in this world there are two names that hold each other, David and Martin, and there is a father and a mother who carry you, always, where memory keeps its fire.

So instead of a wish, I leave you a small shared act.

On the last night of the year, wherever you are, give the clock one minute. Just one. Don’t speak. Listen.

Let it remind you what does not come back.

Then ask, quietly:

What word did I keep?

Whose dignity did I protect?

And walk forward, not faster, but straighter.

With all the love I know how to carry, and all the responsibility I hold,

Your father,

Arian