Influences

All our life consists of influences. The surrounding environment influences us and we influence it back. These processes are going on uninterruptedly. Almost all of them are happening without being noticed. But some are so strong that they change our mind. I'd call them key moments. Sometimes it happens instantly. For example, respect for a particular person can be changed at once after his nasty, or in complete opposition, heroic action. Sometimes influences are small, almost unnoticed, but they could be accumulated. When their number reaches a critical point, it activates a trigger in the brain and your attitude toward this subject will be changed, sometimes drastically, to the opposite. I love to watch babies when they switch from crying to laughter and back in an instant.

At some point in my life I started to notice such triggering moments. It was interesting. It is hard to arrange them in a sequence of importance, but I can recall enough to illustrate the idea. World War II. In one day our more or less normal life was interrupted and we were put in misery. No need to explain as it is obvious. The death of my father in a battlefield was the biggest catastrophe for me. I lost my main guide in life, my teacher, my friend. My mother wasn't able to substitute enough for him. Now I'm almost twice as old as he was when he died, but he is still in my mind and heart, a leader. From birth we were taught that we were the happiest children in the world, as we lived in the only really free and democratic country and we had a government that cared most about its people, led by comrade Stalin. After awhile we started to notice some contradiction between real life and this mantra. It took many years of accumulated evidence to show us that our leaders and government cared about people less and less, and more and more about just themselves. So, at some point the trigger in my mind switched and I started to consider my authority as my enemy. I was thinking then that it was our fate to live and die in the USSR, but then in the time of Gorbachev there happened a kind of revolution from above (I think it was unheard of before in human history, that not the people, but the leader started to destroy the oppressive regime). We were able to leave the country for a democratic land.