Simple Truths of Life

As for that girl, soon that same pretty guy began flirtatiously flirting with her, showing some figures on his hands. She clearly noticed this, and I, in turn, noticed that I had once again made a mistake. I tried to alleviate sadness with the thought that I was still going to leave Russia, and the girl would only be an obstacle, and her smoking also helped me not to worry too much. But how long was I destined to live with this new lie?

I think it is worth mentioning that I met girls working in a store that I came up to talk to. With one we even had a very good and pleasant conversation while we were waiting for the store to open, along with many other merchandisers standing nearby. Then I was not shy at all to speak with that sweet girl in a crowd of people. But in the store, she got colder and began to ignore my flirting. Then I did not know that Orthodox believers wear an engagement ring on their other hands than Catholics. Another girl ignored me, but the next day she talked playfully with someone, and most likely she was simply taken and did not communicate with other guys. The third one simply complained about a lot of work and ignored me, but what was a little upsetting to me was that the next day she was almost flirting and talking to a guy who had hair and, most likely, looks.

I remember when I first started working as a merchandiser, a fairly plus size woman who was older than me tried to flirt with me. But what turned me away were her facial expressions, which did not seem healthy at all. Unfortunately, I did not think then that I myself could look like that in the eyes of other people when I was not completely relaxed.

In the end, I continued to walk on the deliberate path, wanting to start everything from scratch in another country and forget about everything bad that had ever happened to me in Russia.

Despite my self-deception, I was still able to discover one of the simple truths for myself. Returning home from work, I often found myself thinking that I was lost again in my head: dreaming, thinking and talking to myself – I often thought through different variations of events in my head, and how I could act in each of them. Tracing the reason for my constant withdrawal into myself, I realized that the beginning were often thoughts about what to do in the future – for example, on the same day. I decided to try not to bother myself about what will happen when this or that event occurs, but simply to initially put in my mind a general plan of action and solve the details as they materialize. The effect of this decision was amazing! My productivity increased, as my mind was freed from garbage, and I could spend the freed up resources of the mind on a quick and correct assessment of the situation, and on the subsequent making of right decisions.

But there were days when I returned from work and could not get out of myself. And I thought why? Previously, I managed to do this, but here I seemed to have forgotten everything. I soon realized that the reason was in my thinking about the need to live in the present instead of actually living in the present. These are two opposite things, one of which is a characteristic feature of a focused mind on reality, and the other is a feature of the mind of a person who is living in his inner world.

Having cleared my mind, I noticed something else… During my readings about UFOs, I came across a story that said that aliens consider us not very smart, to put it mildly. I do not know if that story was true or not, but after many meditations, I began to work almost all day with my five senses and pay attention to what was happening in reality. I realized that a great many people were absorbed in their minds even while walking along a sunny spring street. This was the first time when I saw that I was not the only person who was absorbed in his mind when it was not required to be done. Yes, most of those people were not lost in themselves as much as I was lost a couple of years ago, but one way or another they also made a mistake – I was not alone.

I often recalled that I had lost four years of my life because of empty fantasies – I say empty because there are only two worlds on which our consciousness can be concentrated per unit of time: the external (the reality that we feel with the help of our five senses) and the inner (fantasies, memories, thoughts). Then I realized that if we take the age of sixty years, for example, I still had to live two-thirds of my life, and given the fact that fourteen years of that third were childhood, I still had a lot of time to enjoy life. I was able to reassure myself that even though I lost those years of my life, I gained invaluable experience which, as someone might say, tempered me no worse than the army. It is a pity that optimism was always replaced by a depressive state every time I came across a mirror… and the coming long years of life, which had just given me so much joy, almost instantly changed their polarity, and I could no longer live with the thought that I had to live my whole life with my scars…

Soon it became very clear to me that I could not save up money to study in America by working in jobs that I used to have, and the lack of higher education did not allow me to get a well-paid job. But I could not give up anymore, since I had been doing this all my life and as a result of this, I almost lost everything. It was then a weakness for me to retreat from my goals, and so I began to look for other solutions and remembered that I had always liked movies.

When I got the Internet access, I was downloading a movie every day and then watched it in the evening. I often liked to watch the actors acting out their roles. I also remembered how in early childhood I asked my mother to teach me how to write, and at the beginning of high school I wrote poetry. Of course, my childhood thoughts in verses about why parrots do not have a hose could hardly take on Pushkin, but still.

Then I decided to start writing scripts in English, which was no longer such a foreign language to me since I completely immersed myself in English at home. I watched TV shows and movies in English, in fact I started watching them right as soon as I realized that I rarely came across unfamiliar words when I was reading – all I had to do then was to learn to distinguish words by ear; then I read news, forums and study guides in English only. As a result of all this, soon it was easier for me with English than with Russian, which I hardly spoke in my life.

Of course, I realized that it was not easy to write a story that would please Hollywood producers. I was ready to painstakingly work on my screenwriting skills and learn from mistakes. Also, I did not want something grand. I just wanted to go to the USA and live there in my own small house, which I always dreamed about.

Also, I wanted to first make a career and only then look for a wife. This wrong idea came to me after two women refused to talk to me when they found out that I hadn’t studied anywhere. I thought that girls of my age would also not want to deal with a guy who has nothing in material terms.

Masturbation continued, and I felt worse and worse. It got so worse that one day I was walking up the escalator from the subway and I started feeling not well at all. My legs barely walked, being very heavy, and my head was almost spinning. Thanks to meditation, which I tried to practice from time to time, I realized that our thoughts and psychological state play a huge role in how our physical body feels. Trying to gain control of myself, I remembered this and completely removed everything superfluous from my head, focusing my consciousness only on the present moment. I was then positively tuned to all the data that my five senses sent me. Result? A couple of hours later, when I was returning home after work, I was already running down that escalator without any symptoms of poor health. I was completely healthy.

But each time the mirror reminded me of my real appearance, and the porn addiction’s return would follow to brighten up the emerging depression. There was a moment when for the second time I decided not to masturbate for a week. I wanted to prove to myself that everything would be fine with my heart if I stopped feeling his heavy beating every day. After a week, I felt great, and my heart no longer reminded me of its presence. But I had to ruin everything again…

However, I often masturbated in those months to prove to myself that I was in good health. If I stopped masturbating after I had health problems, the idea that I was not healthy might not leave me alone. I wanted to think by having proof that everything was great with me. And I really had days when I felt good after masturbation… which led to think about why I cannot go to porn sites again and do a physically pleasant thing if it does nothing bad to anyone? And so the cycle repeated itself again and again…

At the end of June, I began to feel constant pain to the right of my heart, under the ribs – was the continuing masturbation the cause of that – I do not know. The pain was not very strong, but due to the fact that it lasted several days I decided that it was a sign to quit my job because in any case I found myself a new occupation where I was, as I thought then, my own boss.

I wanted to go to the doctor to check my health, but since I used to be treated for a non-existent disease for 13 years, my opinion about doctors was not the best. Moreover, in the fall of the past year, I went to the doctor when I again felt unwell after masturbation, but then I kept silent about my dirty hobby. My heart was checked then, and after processing the data, the doctor quickly told me that I had arrhythmia and turned to another girl. Yes, that girl’s health situation was more serious, but she could give me more information, could not she? For example, asking me to wait while she would finish talking with that girl. Now, having gained wisdom and experience, I changed my position – but then I decided to go to an alternative clinic, which my mom had visited before. She learnt about it from an ad in the mailbox…

In that tiny “clinic”, located on the first floor of a residential building, they put headphones on my head and pointed some device at them. The computer pretended to be working on the calculations, and after a few minutes the female doctor returned. The leaflets with pictures of internal organs were printed for me. There were different geometric figures on them, each of which “showed” the degree of health of the corresponding organ. Based on this “analysis” I was prescribed vitamins and nutritional supplements. Then some of them really helped me. For example, black walnut helped me get rid of a constant feeling of malnutrition – one of the symptoms of the presence of worms in the human body.

I was assigned a second “examination”, and I decided then for the third time not to masturbate for a long time. Again, such abstinence went for me quite easily and I felt great, which was as if reflected on the second “examination”. I was still prescribed a couple of vitamins, and in total I spent on that “treatment” a good share of my saved money earned by honest work. Was it the sunshine of a cloudy nature, among which I was walking that day, which after many years made me realize that something was wrong, or had I already had enough life experience and technical knowledge to understand that all those devices simply could not do any diagnostics on health, but it finally dawned on me then that I was simply deceived – to which I found confirmation from the reviews of many people about that company. Well – “losing something, we always find something, and that something is always knowledge”. It was expensive education, and one of the vitamins once almost stopped my heart – this was the first time my heart skipped a beat and then I was not feeling too well. Naturally, I stopped taking those vitamins…