What will happen tomorrow — with us, with the country, with the whole world? No one is allowed to know. Is it worth worrying about what will happen in the future in the present? Writer and TV presenter Alexander Arkhangelsky shares his thoughts on this topic.
This peasant formula was dropped by a friend when, following an old habit of the intelligentsia, I started crying Yaroslavna: why try if everything around is bursting at the seams.
And only then it dawned on me that this Russian proverb is a great rule of life, although it begins with a reminder of death.
“I was going to die, but this rye” is our Russian stoicism, based on trust in the natural course of things. Equally far removed from southern hot enthusiasm and northern skeptical chill. It concerns both the personal, and the general, and the individual fate, and the fate of the country, the fate of civilization.
One often hears: «We never lived well, there is nothing to start.» Or: “It has always been like this in Russia, so there will be nothing else.”
First, it was different. Secondly, why should your actions depend on alignments and forecasts? You live here and now. Circumstances may be favorable, or they may hinder. But a person is not a derivative of circumstances, he is derivative of his actions, words, thoughts. Circumstances are changing. You, most importantly, this rye.