haze, creating an unreal impression of what was happening. God, how wonderful everything was! This beauty of nature that I had never noticed before now gained some new meaning, a new charm of its own. All small problems that had brought me so many worries every day now seemed to be so trivial and stupid. With bitterness and anguish, I looked at the bright sun, fresh green grass, cheerful bird flitting, and thought: “How foolishly I have spent my life. It’s a pity that I didn’t have time to do something really worthwhile!” All previous resentments, gossip, vanity – all lost its meaning. Now all those around me were lucky people, and I was a prisoner in a death castle.
For some time I was terribly depressed. I lost interest in school, everyday life, all of my previous hobbies. I was avoiding my parents, locking my bedroom door, and indifferently turning pages of books and magazines. I really wanted to cry to somebody, to tell someone how much I was afraid of dying before I had started to live. My closest friend was, of course, my mother. But how can a mother’s heart endure such a soul-screaming confession from her child? One day, sitting at the table, alone with my heavy thoughts, I took up a pen and described all my feelings on a piece of notebook paper. I felt a lot better. Then I started a diary. Later on it became my best “friend” that patiently endured all my thoughts about my non-ordinary destiny.
The only thing that somehow distracted me from my gloomy thoughts was communication with my friends. Of course, I didn’t tell them anything about my disease. I just didn’t want to see them, like my parents, with mournful eyes and faces full of condolence. That would have killed me once and for all. Their funny chatter amused me, they discussed problems that seemed complete nonsense. Now I looked at everything in the light of some different vision, jealous of any human who should leave this mysterious, still unknown world in his heyday. Something in me had definitely changed and broken down.
3
When friends finally managed to drag me out to the cinema from my voluntary home imprisonment, I was surprised to find that I started to perceive even movies completely differently. It was a time when martial arts just started to come into fashion. In newly opened cafes, they showed the most popular martial arts hits for a ruble or three. The athleticism of the athletes, unusual cases of their self-recovery, their will, and their spirit power intrigued me. I knew that it was all the play of actors. However, I couldn’t stop thinking that many scenes were based on real phenomenal facts from the history of mankind. That stimulated me to search for articles, books, and magazines on that issue. My evident interest in these phenomena spread to my friends. With hunting passion, they began to find rare books wherever they could.
Amazed by the extraordinary capabilities of these people and by the depth of their understanding of this world, I felt that it had awaken in me some kind of internal power… hope, vague anticipation that the death of my body is not my end! That insight so touched me and inspired something inside of me that I quickly started not only to get out of my depression, but even felt somehow a new impulse for life even though my mind, like before, was aware of inevitable death because few people had ever recovered from cancer. But the new under standing didn’t dispirit me and didn’t cause fear. Something inside of me simply refused to believe in it. And what’s most interesting, it unconsciously started to resist my heavy, dark thoughts.
This new feeling again made me revisit my life and how foolishly I’ve lived it. I didn’t do anything bad in it. But it was absolutely obvious that every day, every hour, I was justifying my own egotism, selfishness, laziness. I wasn’t striving to know myself but rather how to gain more points in society through that knowledge. Or, to make a long story short, in all my life, studies, and family life, only one thought was hiding behind it all: “Me, myself and I.” And the realization that this small bodily empire of “me” was coming to the big end, that is, to the real death, gave birth in me to all that animal fear, horror, despair, and hopelessness that I had been so intensively experiencing in the last couple of weeks. I realized that death is not as fearsome as its foolish anticipation. Because in reality, it’s not the bodily death you are waiting for, but the crash of your egotistic world, which you’ve been building so hard all your life.
After that realization, I clearly understood that the life I lived and what I’ve done in it is a sand-castle on the sea shore, where any wave will wash away all my efforts in a second. And nothing will be left, only emptiness, the same one that was before me. It seemed to me that most people around me also waste their lives with sandcastles, thoroughly building them, some closer and some further from the coastline. But the result will inevitably be the same for all of them – one day all will be destroyed by the wave of time. But there are people who sit on dry land and impartially observe this human illusion. Or maybe not even observe, but look afar, over it, at something eternal and unchanging. I wonder, what do they think about, what is their internal world like? After all, if they have comprehended this mortality, it means that they have realized something really important, something really worth spending their life on.
These questions began to worry me more than anything else. But I didn’t find answers to them. Then I turned to the literature of major world religions. The Great figures, such as Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, were those who had already been observing from the shore. But how did they get the re? It’s written everywhere: by concentration, faith, prayer. But how? Explanations of their followers were so confusing, so odd and veiled, that my brain was falling asleep when my eyes were making efforts to read the same words ten times over. The teachings of those geniuses were interesting, but they only reflected the common truth of all mankind. Perhaps the essential grain of knowledge was hidden in between the lines. But, alas, I was just an ordinary human being, not the “chosen” one, so I wasn’t able to grasp it with my mind although reading of certain lines did evoke something inside of me.
Then a new question arose. Why are there so many people in this world who believe? If they believe, it means they hope for something in the future. In all world religions, there is life after death. Even after throwing away the legends and myths, then possibly there is really Something – but what? How does it express itself? How does it manifest itself?
I’ve tried to get deeper into the paths of religion but just got more confused. The only thing that I understood was that there is one thing that unites all the world religions – and it was the power of faith of the people, their attempts to understand God and themselves. And I discovered that people were searching for the very same thing in their search, and they achieved some results on their way, and in fact many of them didn’t belong to any religion. They just were wise and talented individuals.
Then, what’s the matter? Why is this phenomenon inherent to human nature? What’s behind it? There were plenty of questions, but too few answers. That gave me cause to search further.
Gradually, everyday life was getting back to normal. Moreover, some unusual courage started to arise in me because in my case I had nothing to lose. Therefore I had to quickly realize all my desires. “If I could spend every remaining day effectively, that could substitute for my whole life.” Arming myself with such a motto, I started to look intensively for books on that issue, go in for sports, catch up with school, and attend different hobby groups. All my days were fully filled up, and I didn’t have time to think about the bad. Even though the headaches reminded me about the worst, despite it all, I kept eagerly searching and attempting to understand everything new that I didn’t know or wasn’t able to do.
While my parents were trying to find different loopholes in order to get into the Moscow clinic, my ungovernable strivings brought me to study Kung-fu. Our group didn’t miss any film about our eastern martial arts heroes, and with a sinking heart we watched triple somersaults, overturns, undercuts, and jumps of sportsmen. And when they started to open Wushu schools in our town, where they were actually practicing Kung-fu, our group got extremely excited. We visited one school after another. But in the first school, the teacher was too angry and ignorant; in the second, the teacher considered himself to be almost Bruce Lee, even though he was only teaching ordinary wrestling mixed with boxing; in the third, the guy was simply a cheater and a drunkard. We were looking for a teacher who would be like the heroes we had seen in the eastern martial arts films. And, as they say, the one who’s looking will always find. But what we found was more than unexpected because it surpassed our ideals even in our dreams.
4
After