What does the word mean for a psychologist? Tool? Protection? Lord? Source? When you talk a lot and often, you don’t think about it. But at critical moments in life — it is necessary.
Ten years ago I had my first heart attack. Such, real, transmural. Doctors promised two or three years of life, cardiac surgeons did not undertake to operate. In such a critical situation, thoughts about the meaning of life instantly replaced thoughts about daily food. The future was foreseeable, but short. And I wanted to decide with him what to do: to serve? draw? to compose music? write prose or poetry? research? teach and learn? observe?
Suddenly, the words spoken by the mother in her youth floated out of her memory: “Your life is for the sake of others!” And then a natural childish question arose: “Why?” Why should others, and not themselves, own their own destiny? Why should one evaluate one’s life as if it was given not to me, but to strangers?
It so happened that I worked and talked at that time with an interesting person, professor, doctor of philosophy and veteran of the Great Patriotic War Boris Mikhailovich Sapunov. He told me a lot about the front-line past, and once his stories with a glass of cognac took me to a paranormal space where fantasies and reality mixed up, and I kept trying to understand why my life is so different from other people and how different it is. Or is that just how it seems to me?
- Incredible story about the transmigration of souls
After meeting with the veteran, I sat in front of the monitor for several evenings and eventually wrote a story in which the main character, our contemporary, lived through someone else’s, but planned from above destinies. Those destinies belonged to young soldiers who really wanted to live and dreamed about the future, but died. I will not retell everything now, this story can be read on my website (1). The story exists in several versions — for different literary competitions I wrote texts of different sizes and also a separate screenplay. Some characters changed, in some versions the psychologist was a man, in others a woman, but the conclusion remained unchanged: “Our life is like an ocean. It is no more permanent than a wave rising over the sea. Whatever we are, we must go through our victories and defeats, because very soon one wave will raise a new one, another wave will come after it, a third, but that will be later … Live your life … « Live your own life! The words of my heroes turned out to be for me the answer to those questions that so occupied and disturbed me. It was, remember, about ten years ago. The future suddenly moved apart and turned out to be more than experts predicted and than I myself hoped. Why couldn’t I answer myself directly, why did I need to compose a story, invent heroes? Don’t know. I only know that it was in the text of the story that the author’s key problem was solved — the prospect of his further existence under the blue sky.
(1)