Forgiveness.

There is no doubt that it’s always hard to write about the moments painful for you, moments, when you felt hurt. Your mother slapped you in the face and your left cheek is still burning with a deep resentment and a consciousness of injustice. It was ten long years ago but your anger is rather strong both then and now and you give vent to your indignation and pain on the paper.

 In her memoirs Swallow the Ocean Laura Flynn describes her childhood with a mother who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. It seems to be a hard time for all her family members, for her sisters and especially for her father who ends up with leaving the family and trying to get custody upon his daughters. Laura has enough reasons to be mad at her father who left them and their mother who they, little kids, loved anyway because she was their mother. Laura as well has enough reasons to fear and even hate her mother who was trying to hurt them by bumping into their father’s car while Laura, her father and her sister were inside it. Nevertheless, her book is full of light feeling, nostalgia for walks and evenings with her mother, for going out and conversations with her father. The main tone of the story telling is sadness,  pity for her mother, regret at not being able to defend her mother from her illness, to keep their family happy and united.

One of the most important things in writing about the past is an ability to forgive. After all, just anger isn’t that interesting for readers because everyone knows what is anger about and everyone has something or someone to be mad at. What is interesting is how you reflect on your past, on your pain, on reasons of your anger. If you are suffused with emotions, especially negative ones, you can’t see clearly what was happening, why it was happening and what was so painful about it for you. It will be just a clutter of harsh colors instead of a situation that a reader can imagine, can construct in his mind. You need to forgive to discover the outlet for your resentment on the paper.

Crisis.

I’m so close to giving up. Because I’m not good enough, because I’m not the best, because I can’t capture a reader (even myself), because it’s not my native language, because I’ll never play with English as I can play with Russian, because nobody would be interested in publishing my texts, because…. Ok, the only good thing about it is that I am perfectly aware of what is going on in my mind and why I feel so depressed and scared. It’s called a crucial moment. It happens in every work you get, in every process you start. There are certain stages in this process. The first one is about admiration and passion – you’ve got a new job, everything seems to be so bright and interesting, so fresh and fascinating. You are truly enjoying your work and make up grandiose plans for a future that plays in beams of success and fame. But the following comes the second stage – time of doubts, throes of creation, dissatisfaction, and an ardent desire to give up. You suddenly find out that your results are not that brilliant all the time, that there are ups and downs, that great successes require a lot of hard work, that sometimes despite of impressive efforts you put into your work it doesn’t satisfy you.

I was so excited about my writing class, so seized with a desire to create, to write, to work. My adolescent cherished dream to write books that will make people happier, to be a great famous writer, to change the world just with kind words seemed to be reincarnated. And here this day broke out. Professor in a class discussed our essays and ask one of the students to read any person’s appearance description from her essay. She read only couple of sentences. But it was a severe blow for me – I would never write like her in English, because it’s not my native language. She sounded exactly how I wished to sound in my texts, how I wished to be able to play with language. And here was when it started. Doubts (“do all these efforts worth it?”, “maybe it’s all pointless and I shouldn’t find comfort in the vain hope for being a great writer or journalist in English?”), self-humiliation (“nobody is going to read my articles or books”, “I write with tons of grammar and syntax mistakes”, “my professor is just a very nice person and doesn’t tell me the truth”) and the worst thought in the world “I failed”. That is exactly the moment when you either shrink in the face of hardships and give up or you don’t succumb to a fleeting weakness, keep struggling, and then achieve a truly success. Because if the hill will not come to Mohammed, Mohammed will go to the hill. It’s easier to say that you just aren’t able to carry out your dream than actually try to move toward it step by step. If you are certain that it’s what you want.

Right River Bank.

I was only two when my grandfather died from a heart attack and unfortunately I don’t remember him. I wasn’t with them when he was dying but my grandmother used to tell me that his last phrase was “I really won’t see my little Katya anymore?”

My grandparents on father’s side always lived in a big village in the south of Russia, near the bustling and bright multiethnic city Rostov-on-Don. My mother is from a northern city and she happened to meet my father at a youth conference in Moscow where they fell in love at the first glance. After a two-year, painful long distance relationship my father moved to my mother’s native city where seven years later I was born.

 However, every summer my dad took me and my sister to visit our grandparents in their sunny and hot southern village.  If someone would have asked me at that time what “summer” meant for me, one of the first things I would recall was visiting my southern grandmother.  It was all about summer: hot weather, vivid southern dialect, the sociable and hospitable inhabitants of our village where everyone knows each other, a lot of fruits and a lot of sun, dozens of boisterous relatives (my grandmother has three brothers and one sister) and piles of delicious fresh and natural food.

But what I also remember is my grandmother’s grief over her husband who died 21 years before and who she still recalls every day. Every summer when I come, we spend long and quiet rural evenings together. She tells me stories about her life, mostly about him, as he is still alive in her heart. There is so much love and so much anguish in her big brown eyes when she calls his name. I loved listening to these dramatic and at the same time vibrant stories. But this summer I suddenly realized that it’s our, her grandchildren’s, responsibility to save this history for future generations. That was the moment when I started recording my 85-year-old grandmother in order to write a chronicle of my family’s history. 

There were a lot of stories about a lean childhood in a big family, about teaching in a rural school, about hard everyday life in a country house without any facilities. And there were stories about Second World War or more The Great Patriotic War. My grandfather went through the whole Second World War: from Ukraine to Berlin. He had a lot of orders and medals for conspicuous gallantry, including such high decorations as Order of the Red Star for saving a flag of the regiment in the battle and Order of the Glory.

He didn’t like talking about war with me. It was something he discussed only when his brother-soldiers came to visit him. They would sit at the kitchen, close the doors, drinking tea and some alcohol through the whole night and sharing their memoirs. Usually, I was spending these evenings at my friend’s not to disturb my husband and his guests. I knew these memoirs were something sacred for them.

But war didn’t vanish from his mind completely; it left a lot of scars there. When it is hot or he is sick and has a fever, he screams while sleeping “Hit! Shoot! Blood…” and other awful words. I was scared every time when it happened, I woke him up and tried to calm him down. He often heard in his anxious dreams a desperate cry of a little 10-year-old girl somewhere in a small Ukrainian village. It was a “Junkers-88” raid – they were bombing this village throughout the whole day. This little girl had her arm cut off at the shoulder by a shell splinter. I remember how Yura (my grandfather’s name) was shaking his head and asking someone in his memory “Why was it you, little one?”

I knew that he was wounded gravely and that a bullet passed somewhere close to a very important vein. But I didn’t know any details about that story till an evening right after our wedding when I noticed a scar right opposite his heart. That’s when I learnt that I might have never met him in my life because of this accident.

It was a fall of 1943. This fall was really cold and rainy. And here was the order, “Don’t stop the attack! Only forward!” Our government had decided to take Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, as a present for the October Revolution Day on October 7th. Meanwhile, there was an impregnable stronghold before Kiev – a river Dnepr. An order was to make a forced crossing of a river with improvised means. Boats, launches, rafts, and even just logs – everything was in use. Soldiers were embarking so that they could hardly keep their boats afloat.  All of it under heavy fire. The right bank was like a cherished dream, like a desperate call, like another little step closer to the desired victory day.

The boat that Yura took was so overloaded that he was sitting on the bow. A bullet, you know, doesn’t choose a victim by itself; it’s directed by an enemy’s arm. Yura, struck by a bullet, fell out of the boat and descended to the bottom very quickly in the cold water. A Georgian sitting next to him in the boat, without a moment’s thought, jumped into the freezing water after Yura. He snatched the wounded person and swam him back to a left bank where he took him to the medical and sanitary battalion. Yura’s chest was wounded. A bullet had passed within a millimeter of his heart. Later, doctors said that he had barely evaded the grim reaper’s grasp.

Yura spent about a month in the hospital, and since his battalion travelled far away so he had to join another one. But everywhere until reaching Berlin he was asking about the Georgian who saved his life and whose name he didn’t know. He finally found his battalion but nobody could tell him what happened to this Georgian after the Dnepr forced crossing. Most probably, he was buried somewhere in the cold water of Dnepr. Yura often talked about him with a sorrow because he saved Yura’s life but was unable to keep his own.

For 40 years, my husband wrote articles for a local newspaper “Priazovskaya steppe” where he tried to tell people the truth about the war; what they, 20-year-old boys, believed in, what ideals led them in their lives. He spent days and months trying to collect materials about the unknown heroes who saved hundreds of lives yet remained unnamed. Like his Georgian rescuer… 

Memory.

Once, when I was about ten, my parents got involved into fight on the street. We were going home from my grandmother’s and there were three drunk, middle-aged man who attacked a group of students at the bus stop. My parents both rushed to separate them and to stop a fight. There were other people around and they also tried to pull fighters away. It lasted probably only for five minutes. But what I remember is an bright image of my parents standing just between these huge drunk and savage men and poor scared students trying to stop them. I remember an endless horror growing up inside me that they will kill my parents or hurt them.  I remember how sick I felt and how my whole body couldn’t stop shivering. Also I still can hear a sound of a stroke when someone kicks a human body. And it took me long time to become able to watch cruel or battle scenes in movies without closing my eyes and my ears. Because every time when I heard someone hitting a person I felt sick. The fact is that this fight wasn’t that bad and it was stopped rather fast with help of people around. That is factual memory, that’s how probably it looked for my parents or other adults who were there. But what I kept was an emotional memory, and it influenced my life a lot.

 A thing that we call “our past” consists mostly of our different emotional memories.  It’s hard to say if this “past” is truthful, if it really was the way we remember it. That’s why absolutely objective history is almost impossible, because our history is based on memory of people who lived at that time, on their emotional memory. You never know how it really was because other people might have their own (completely different from yours) memories of the same moment. Sometimes it’s interesting to see how different people catch different details and focus on different points. Sometimes it’s painful to realize that the moment you have the brightest emotions about didn’t mean anything for another person. You remember a happiness that seized you when you woke up in the morning and noticed a drawn smile face on a roof window. But your friend memories of this morning include only the fact that there was no sun and everyone fell sleepy and tired. Emotional memory can’t be impartial; it never covers the whole truth. But who knows what a truth is? And on the other hand, emotional memory colors and diversifies our past; it gives a lot of excellent materials to writers, musicians, painters and just dreamers. 

Title.

It’s like your first name, the first thing that people learn about you, their first impression of you. A title decides everything: how you call your child so it will go. Some titles readers remember for their whole lives, some titles vanish from reader’s mind already at the end of the first page. A title should be some words that hit a reader, words that create the tone of the book. Titles are like diagnosis – after a doctor named a disease it acquired a shape and a color, and a patient now can imagine what he is fighting with.  A title should surprise you and conquer your imagination so that you would long for reading everything that is behind the title.

How are titles born? Sometimes it’s just random words, picked from the air, put together and tied somehow to a story after all. It’s one of the exercises for poetry writing class – all students write one random word on the piece of paper, then pile them together so that everyone picks up two random words and should write a poem with a title made of these two words.  Sometimes even the whole story, the whole book starts from the title – you catch on a word or a phrase that seems being very essential for you and start thinking about it every day. Suddenly, your story just comes up from nowhere.

Sometimes a title makes you to wait as a girl who is 10 minutes late for a date – you know that she will come, you look forward to seeing her, but she is still somewhere on her way. Your story is finished but it still doesn’t have a title and you read it over again and again to find couple of words that will emerge from the book’s soul, that would be more than just a title, and that would be the whole book itself. So that in the end while closing a book a reader will be hit with a sudden flash of realizing that now he completely understands the title and that now all the small pieces made a whole picture. A title is the first and the last words you see when you open and close a book. So a title is like the first and the last chord of a sonata – something you will remember. 

Action.

 What would you watch for a longer time: a pen that is dropped on the floor and stays there or a pen slowly swaying in the running water? It is said that one could infinitely watches how fire is burning and how water is running. All of those things are actions, and we mostly prefer action to inactivity. The world around us is moving and changing every second so we have to adjust to it and move ourselves. That’s why when we were kids we tended to skip pages in our books that just described some stable pictures of landscapes or personalities and looked for “action” pages with battles, journeys and adventures.

Writings, pictures, paintings, music – all kinds of creative work reflects the world: either outside the author or inside. So if the author wants his reflection to look truthful he has to catch a movement, an action. If he manages to catch it his work will “live”, it will “move”, it will “act”. A reader, a viewer, a listener would desire to hear the next sound, to see the modification of what the author has caught, and to live in the next moment with the work. This means that a reader would like to continue reading every next page, a viewer would keep looking at the painting or a photo to find out what is going on outside the frame, a listener would keep his breath to hear next sound to fall or to rise with it. It shouldn’t necessarily be an epic battle or a full of adventures journey around the Earth, it can be still landscape description but with small moving details: leaves are turning red, two squirrels are playing tag on the trees, a postman is delivering a big package to neighbors. You read these simple phrases, you close your eyes and this imaginary world in your head is full of actions and you are thrilled to know what is in package. And you want to continue reading… 

Unlikeness.

Early Saturday. Jonathon Ferrell, a 24-year-old former football player for Florida A&M University, had a serious car accident: his car left the road and crashed into a ravine . He managed to get out of the car and walked to a nearby home for help. A woman who lived in this house didn’t open the door and called police. Police soon arrived and when Jonathon rushed to them, one of the police officers fired his gun at him 12 times, so that the young unarmed man died.  A simple common story from American news. One of the multiple stories about police in the USA, in France, in Norway, in Russia etc. The question is not only why the police officer was shooting at an unarmed person. There are other even more important questions: why didn’t a homeowner open the door when she heard someone asking for a help? Why did she call police as if she was in danger? How would she behave if it would be a white guy asking for help? How would the police officer behave if it would be a white guy? Last question is rather uncomfortable and annoying for modern “tolerant” and “anti-racist” America, a lot of politicians and journalists would like to avoid discussing it. However, this question comes to mind right away when you hear such stories.

Why are we inclined to trust people who look like us more than those who look different? How does this mechanism of “recognizing” and “reception” work? Even well-educated and intelligent people feel some distance at first with those who have different color of skin, shape of eyes, shape of face etc. You expect people who have appearance different from yours to be different in everything: in their behavior, in their principles, in their habits, in their speech etc. It scares you because you don’t know what to expect and you perceive this different person as a stranger even before he does anything or says anything.

The problem is that this suspicious and distrustful attitude to everything different from what we get used to isn’t natural or basic feature of human beings. My 4 years old nephew while visiting me in United States met a lot of black people that he has never seen before and he didn’t have any problems or fears in communicating with them, he never pointed at them saying “Look, mom, he is black”. In Moscow, at home one of his good friends is from Egyptian family, a swarthy and black-haired boy. And they never discussed the fact that they look different. Appearance isn’t essential point in communication for little kids. That proofs that all racist and sexual fears are the social phenomena, they appear as we grow up listening to mass media which tells us that people that look like us are beautiful, smart and successful and that unlikeness is dangerous and suspicious.

Hardships.

            Some people think that writing isn’t really a profession or a “work”, it’s just a way to relax, to express your ideas on a paper. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that a person sitting on a couch or at the table and scribbling something in his notebook is actually doing some hard work. However, believe or not, writing as any other creative professions faces a lot of hardships and doubts.

The first difficulty is rather common for everyone who is making new things. It’s always hard to start. You have bright ideas, you have wonderful images in your mind, and you even have some neat words on the tip of your tongue. But you sit at the table, you look at the white blank page on the screen and you want to just run away as far as possible, you have millions of excuses and explanations why you can’t start today, this morning, now.  The first sentence and the first paragraph are the hardest ones – it’s what your work start from, it’s like a foundation of your building. After the first paragraph a reader makes a decision whether he continues reading or not. Most probably, this is not true, and in fact a reader goes through several pages before he forms his opinion of a book. But that’s how a writer feels – if you fail in the first paragraph, even only in the first sentence, you spoilt the whole book. That’s why the hardest moment for a writer is to pass this way from an intangible world of his imagination to a reality of words.

The second hardship is a writer himself. An essential point in writing is to make a book or a story interesting not only for a writer himself, it should be interesting and catching for a reader as we already discussed. It’s a true challenge to keep a balance between a presence of an author in the text and his obscurity at the same time. If author’s reflections are too vast and too personal, a reader would wonder why a writer thinks his personality is that interesting. If an author flaunts with his extensive knowledge in a certain field and simply cites scientific books and articles without any discussion, a reader would start yawning at the fifth quotation mark. Brevity is the soul of wit, but it should be meaty brevity. 

A book.

This was inspired by our Literary Exploration of Birch Bark Book Store in Minneapolis (as a part of our course of Creative Writing). 

Ok, finally, we found a reader, grabbed his arm and made him follow our steps to the world of books. And here we are, in the gloomy maze of mysterious universe of words and phrases. One may see only paper and inks around, but a book is much more than just rustling pages. A book is a whole world with its pictures, its music, its smells, its flavors, its feelings, its emotions. That’s why a true bookstore looks like a magician’s home, like a wonderland that you enter with awe.

Already at the entrance you feel that this place is very different from all other places in world. Relaxing music envelops you with its soft charm and peace; it makes you immerse into your feeling and thoughts. A nice smell of herbs and nature makes you to forget about your life outside these walls, so that you look for your book with your mind cleared, your heart opened and your senses intense. There are trees everywhere around and every tree keeps a lot of secrets and hidden treasures. So does a book. 

You have a lot of choices how to explore this wonderland: you can start from just looking and absorb the colors of dozens of covers on the shelves; you can continue with reading poems on the walls; you can take a small bag of Wild Rice to feel how little but strong these seeds are or you can smile at kind and cheerful pictures everywhere around; you could even trust your secrets to a “confessional” with a white bird on it.

A world of books is opened to everyone who wants to discover it, who comes with wide-open eyes. There is a cozy corner for kids with kind animals and vividly illustrated books. Little ladies and gentlemen can have their own little house where they are creating their own art – pictures, sculptures, pyramids etc. while their grandparents are sitting outside enjoying the nice fall sun and reading short detective stories.   

It’s your home now; it’s safe and calm here. Your home is full of your friends, there are messages from them everywhere on the shelves – little notes that help you to find your author, brief description and recommendations that lead you to your book, feelings and thoughts of your friends that they wanted to share with you. 

You would probably end up with sitting in a comfortable grandfather’s chair, reading a book, stroking your nice old dog and feeling how the walls of the bookstore are falling apart to open a new beautiful world, a world of a dream, a world of a book…

A reader.

… Then the reader will love your story. By the way, who is the Reader? Have you ever met this man? Is he an important person? Well, any text needs a reader, because the most essential goal of the text it communication. People write texts to tell something  to someone, which means that a text is written for someone to read. Even if the only reader of this text is its author himself. 

It’s obvious that an artist wants the recognition; he wants a reader to love his texts. One may say that there are a lot of writers who write just because they can’t live without writing. So they write for themselves, not for the others, it’s their way of relaxation, their way of self-expression, their way of struggling with fears etc. But we don’t talk about those writers now. We want to know what makes a reader like a text, how a writer becomes a magician who can play with reader’s mind and feelings, who can upset a reader or send him to the seventh heaven of delight without even looking into his eyes.

Do you remember this wonderful feeling of being “inside” a movie or a book while watching or reading it? It’s a moment when the Universe is broadening and the reality of a book or a movie becomes your own reality. Sometimes there is a character who seems to be very close to your personality or who you would like to be, and you start feeling all his/her emotions, worries, and thoughts inside yourself. Sometimes you keep your personality for yourself but you live in the world of the book or the movie, you go along with its characters or its author, you follow them everywhere from bloody battles to profound soliloquys. You are omniscient like the author.

So how an author becomes that magician who makes us forget about our world and our reality? First of all, we should trust a magician to believe his tricks. He should be just one of us, an unremarkable stranger in a grey coat, who you could invite for a dinner. He might not know what the distance is between the Earth and the Moon and he had never played cribbage before. He is not the God and he isn’t even a professor from your university. He writes not to teach or to lecture you, he writes to share something that is important for him and as he assumes might be important for you as well. He is a good company for the evening and you absolutely trust him. Because a true magician has a talent to escape, to vanish in the air of his book so insensibly that you even don’t notice it.

Secondly, a writer has his powerful magic. He can build cities and create people; he can color the sky and the trees and destroy worlds, using only small black letters on the white sheet.  He gives you small details, hardly noticeable strokes of the paint brush and suddenly you feel the wind blowing into your face; you smell fried potatoes from the kitchen; you see shining eyes of a young girl on the other side of the street. Wall after wall, leaf after leaf, drop after drop a writer builds a new world around you, which looks so real and interesting that you don’t want to leave it. That’s why I hate the last page of the book and the word “end” on the screen… 

Freedom needs home

“I wondered, "Why have I been chasing happiness

my whole life when bliss was here the entire time?”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I have a great job, wonderful family, caring parents… But for about a year almost every day I feel like the life is just passing by me. What’s wrong?” “Sometimes I really want to quit my life here, to leave everything and to go somewhere far away, to start a new life…” “Why did we break up? I don’t know… Listen, I wanted something new, someone new around, I knew every single word he would say! I need new relations; I want to start from the very beginning…” The internet is overflowing with such complaints, explanations, and declarations. People are telling their stories and asking for advice. And there are tons of very helpful offers: “10 ways to chase a new direction in your life”, “You don’t need a vacation. You need a new life”, and even such easy-to-use instruction as “How to begin a new life: 10 steps (with pictures!)”.

New. Fresh. You have never tried it before. Commercials like to play with these words a lot, because the notion of “novelty” often works on consumers like a red rag to a bull. New things always have a color of unknown and for a lot of people this idea is perceived as more intriguing than dangerous. “A newborn baby would stare at a new image for an average of 41 seconds before becoming bored and tuning out on repeated showings — that’s how hard-wired our affinity for novelty is”. In the psychology book New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher explores the biological, psychological, and cultural roots of this odd yet not thoroughly examined, but fairly common “disease” as Neophilia. I actually had not the slightest idea about this “virus” when I suddenly found out that I am suffering from it.  

It was in Chicago, December 2011, on Christmas Eve. I had a huge month-long vacation, and went travelling around the USA for 30 days. Alone with a small backpack, I visited 7 cities in 30 days, stayed in 7 different hostels living with about 60 new, different people, rode about 3,000 miles by 7 different buses, got lost in a deserted old cemetery, accidently found myself in the ghetto, nearly got arrested by police, and had millions of new impressions and experiences. Chicago was the last stop before I came back to Minneapolis to celebrate New Year’s with my friends. It was a nice day, sunny and a little bit windy; I was walking by the lake shore and thinking about my wonderful trip. And suddenly, I realized that I was tired. Not physically and not because of walking, but tired in general, tired of being alone, tired of being free.

That is how I found words and descriptions for these two parts of my personality that did not balance in my life. Freedom and Home. Two opposite poles. Each of them has both highs and lows. Home is a security, constancy, a confidence, and a strong image of tomorrow. It is a tranquility of a planned week and a planned life; it is stability and comfort. Everything and everyone around is familiar and intimate, and comfortable because of being known and immutable. However, Home is monotony to a certain degree, a routine, a beaten path. You know exactly what will happen tomorrow at 5 pm, what you will eat, and where you will find your socks. Home is an attachment to other people and even some sort of dependence on them; it is about duties and responsibilities. It is about reasoning. It is about a single rail.

Freedom is about unpredictability; it is the romance of a novelty and of uniqueness. You are responsible only for you and you are free to do whatever you want to. You do not have to explain your actions to anyone or adjust your plans to someone else’s ideas or wishes. Freedom is new and unexplored things every day, new roads and unknown places. It is when you do not know what will happened to you tomorrow, when you roam about the street of a new city without a plan or a map or suddenly decide to go to a museum and then spend a whole day there. It is when you can change your plans drastically and choose the opposite direction; when you are not tied by a promise to someone, when you do not have to think about your commitments to anyone; when you cannot offend or hurt anyone with your actions. Because there is no one too close. And that is a dark side of Freedom: it is a complete and infinite loneliness. There is no one next to you to share your emotions and your impressions, no one to show your shining eyes. Freedom is also about everyday stress, everyday leaving of the zone of your comfort and peace. You have just gotten used and adapted to a new city, discovered your favorite parks and cafés, memorized the streets and roads, invented the strategies of surviving. You have just started feeling comfortable and suddenly your time here is over and you are again on the way to the next destination. Again new places, unfamiliar routes and streets, foreign cafés and unexplored parks.

Yes, such a lifestyle trains you to be flexible and strong, hardens your psychological system. Now it is mere a child’s play for me to find out anything anywhere (even without knowing the language): from “Where is a White House? Really? This tiny building over there?” to where to buy condoms. Now, I can become friends with anyone in 5 minutes and build romantic relations in an hour, to pack my backpack in 10 minutes with all necessary things and to survive in a big city with 5 cents in a pocket. I became very independent and courageous, but…tired. I am tired of this huge torrent of new information and emotions every day when you permanently live at the breaking point. I found out that you can get tired from a novelty and from Freedom. That is a moment when you want to go Home with its strict plans, commitments, duties, promises and deadlines. Our mind needs systematization and structuring of the world around, otherwise, we would go mad very quickly from all that diversity and uniqueness of the things. But time passes and you get bored again, you want to leave Home behind and to seek for a novelty and Freedom.

How to find a balance between our need for safety and stability and our desire for novelty and unexplored areas? When started working on that essential psychological imbalance, I was looking for answers everywhere from science to religion, from close friends to unknown people in the internet. I got completely lost in the labyrinths of psychological terms, notions and descriptions. “Thrill and adventure seeking”, “experience seeking”, “disinhibition”, “boredom susceptibility”. While according to Buddhists, all the conditional states of life are dukkha, a word that Bhikkhu Khantipalo in his book Wat Buddharangsee defines as “signified the subtle qualities of unsatisfactoriness and uncertainty connected with change in life”. Basically, it appears there is no chance to escape from changings in life and to stop suffering.

The main problem with novelty is that after some time it becomes routine as well and you have to find something else again. There is an old myth about a woman who fell in love with a bird, caught her, and placed her in a cage. Right away, she lost her interest in this bird because she loved it only when the bird was flying in the sky.

Most of the books and pages on the internet give you various descriptions of symptoms and deep reflections on the reasons of neophilia but I did not find any prescriptions. If you ask a pharmacist to give you a medicine for neophilia, the answer will be, “Sorry, but we cannot help you, sir, you are on your own with that”. I suppose, everyone finds his own best way of surviving in conditions of permanent imbalance between Freedom and Home. Some people try to find novelty in their stability, in their routine. I read about a father who had five little children. He had to iron a lot of swaddling clothes every day so he invented a game to iron them in different ways in the shortest possible time. You can try to find new emotions and experiences on every step of your life: new movies, books, games, people you meet at cafés, clothes, flavors, etc. At the same time you stay responsible, stable and reliable.

You can choose the opposite direction as well. As my sister once told me, “if you really need new things and new impressions all the time to be happy, then live your life, change everything every 3 months, choose the profession that allows you to change jobs as often as you want, change partners or husbands, change places, change hobbies. Be yourself.” If you feel that it is the only way for you to be happy, then live that way. One of my friends from Texas teaches English and changes counties and workplaces every year. He is 35 years old and he does not want to settle down. Or you could find a person as crazy as you are and live that wonderful Freedom life with him or her. One Russian family created a blog where they share their feelings about the way they have lived for the past two years. They have three children between 5 and 10 years old and they move every month or two to another country. The husband has his own business and works distantly through the internet or on a phone and Skype, while the wife writes books. They have been to 15 countries already and they do not want to stop living this way.

After all this, I still do not have an answer to the question about the struggle between Freedom and Home. Maybe, it’s just somewhere in my house, or perhaps I have to look for it on the other side of the Earth. If you find a new medicine, please, let me know. 

A story.

A story.

             Everyone needs a story. A story that makes him someone special. If you don’t have your own story, you can make it up. Writers make up tons of stories: some of them come from their imagination, some of them are taken from real life, some are real stories modified by author’s point of view. But there is no “real” story: even if you simply list the facts, you put a drop of your own color to the whole image of that story anyway. You put them in a certain order, you mark certain details, you use certain words, you put pauses in certain places. That’s why there are so many stories: funny, sad, serious, scary, stupid etc. There are stories you forget right away after you heard it, there are stories that strike you and make you pondering over them again and again, there are stories that motivate you, and stories that just amuse you. And there are stories that live forever. Those are the stories for writers.  

           A word history includes the word story. A good story is about the history, about the past, about what happened to someone. You can’t tell the story about what is happening to you now. That’s why it’s better to write your story when it’s over, when you can take a detached view on it, when you can observe and analyze it, color it, even change it, when you can play with it. It’s better to write the story when it’s not the story that controls you, but it’s you who control the story. Otherwise you could be overwhelmed with emotions and end up just replacing the story with your feelings, your emotions, your personality etc. Your personality is probably interesting to your family. No one else is interested in you. Every reader wants to see a story, not a pure psychological portrait of the author. If you want to come closer to a reader, to interest him, show him that you have something in common. That he could have been a character of your story, that he feels the same, that he acts the same way. Then the reader will love your story.

A risk.

In a course that I'm taking right now (Creative Writing) we have to keep an "reflection journal". I decided to share some of my observations here.

A risk.

This word was the first thing I noticed on the board while waiting for a class to start. A risk. Honestly, I was very curious about this word and at first I thought it was some author’s name. But then John decoded the word and started talking about the writer’s risk to share his thoughts, his experience, and his feelings with the reader. And it hit me how much this notion of risk appeals to me just today, just now, just in this moment of my life. My today class was a risk, my coming to this country was a risk, my decision to work for Macalester was a risk, and my choice of this course was a risk, my every communication with students or with a professor is about taking a risk. There is no third option with taking a risk – you either take it or not.

Taking a risk is the road without the end, but every time you have to step over your fear, over your shyness, over your lack of self-confidence as the first time. Especially, when you are different. When you look different. When your language is different. When your school experience is different. When your family is different. When your history is different. When the things you believe in are different. Different from all other people around you. You do that step to enter the class room, you take a pen to write your first paper (though you are scared to a death that a professor will find tons of grammar or syntax mistakes in your essay or just won’t understand what you wanted to say), you smile to someone in a class and you feel that you did something big, that now you are stronger than a second before. And most of the times you see that a result is worth all your efforts and that actually your fears were quite groundless.

We take risks every day (simply to ask a shop assistant to help you), but artists (writers, painters, composers etc.) take bigger risks than other people because they take a risk to show everyone their world, their version of a world. It’s more than just sit at home with your best friend, drinking some beer and sharing sad details about your last break-up. It’s about sharing your whole world, about showing what you are to other people. Nobody can predict what a reader (a viewer, a listener) will do with this world – hate it or adore it, worship it or destroy it, use it as an ideal to improve his life or as an excuse to spoil it, or just laugh at it…