Sensei of Shambala by Anastasia Novykh (poetry books to read txt) 📕

that it is absolutely harmless. People will become calmer and more reasonable. That’s why their reaction will be softer and won’t develop into some global conflict. But I repeat, we don’t have the right to prevent these events. If you want, prevent it yourselves. It’s your business.”
The academician got up heavily from the bench and began to bid farewell. Sensei accompanied him to the door, one more time reminding him about the date. Shaking each other’s hands, they said goodbye. I heard how Sensei, coming back from the door, mumbled to himself with a smile, “Hmm, every fool considers himself to be smart, but only a smart one can call himself a fool.”
I was very impressed by this peculiar conversation. “Who is Sensei? Is he a physicist?” I thought. “He probably works in some scientific research institute. Sensei also once told us about some profound physics. In that case, it explains a lot about the extensive range of his knowledge.” This was the only explanation that came to my mind and was more or less acceptable because the thousand other questions completely confused me, and I couldn’t find a clear explanation for them. Nevertheless, Sensei rose in my estimation as a scientific authority because even the academician valued his opinion, even though Sensei did not want to distinguish himself from the crowd. On the way home, as usual, he joked with everybody, keeping up our happy mood after the monkey training. However, at home, I didn’t forget to write down this unusual conversation in my diary with a big remark at the end, “It turns out that he is a physicist!”

26

A few days later, when I was shopping with my mother as usual, I was making plans for the evening, thinking over questions that I intended to ask Sensei at the training.
After yesterday’s rain and night frost, there was a heavy fall of fluffy snow on the streets. Winter here was quite warm in comparison to those regions of the Soviet Union where we had lived before. Miners’ snow looked like snow only the first day because on the second day it became grey from coal dust, and on the third day, it completely melted, turning into wet, slushy mud. Every New Year we celebrated with the same weather forecast: “Rain turning to wet snow.” So I was glad to see at least this fluffy snow and feel the long-awaited freeze. It was giving me hope that next New Year, which was only three weeks ahead, we may celebrate properly, with real winter and a lot of fun.
As I was dreaming of a good future, we were walking to the next store. Suddenly my mother unexpectedly slipped and fell back so hard that even her legs flew up. It happened in a few split seconds. I didn’t even have time to understand, not even to catch her. Men passing by rushed to lift her up. I also tried to help somehow, being really scared. Having thanked the men, my mother stood up, leaning on me.
“Mum, how are you, can you walk?”
“Hold on, my back hurts so much, as if something cracked.”
“Maybe we should go to the hospital?”
“Just wait; it will pass.”
We stood a bit and then slowly walked home. My mother limped slightly. At home, she felt even worse. We didn’t want to bother father at work and hoped that it would pass. The pain kept getting stronger, and no pills helped. We tried all we could: we rubbed it with different ointments, made compress, and simply warmed it up. But she felt even worse after the last procedure. Of course, I didn’t go to the meditation training. And when my dad came home late in the evening, we tried everything possible in order to relieve the pain. There was only one way out: to go to the hospital. My father made a few calls and arranged for mother to be observed by a doctor at the regional department of neurosurgery.
In the morning, her state quickly worsened. An aching, sharp pain passed into her leg. Even the slightest movement caused the strongest attack of pain. She was even taken into the hospital reclining. In the neurology department, after a series of X-rays and computerized tomography, the doctor diagnosed that she had had osteochondrosis of the spinal column for a long time, and the fall had caused the fibrous ring to burst and a 7 mm herniation of the intervebral disk. As a result, the sciatic nerve was squeezed, and the strong pain extended to her leg. After careful examination, the doctor sent her to consult with the neurosurgeon. My father again found a good neurosurgeon, who, having studied the results of the examination, concluded that an operation is inevitable.
It was a catastrophe for our family. We saw more than enough bedridden patients on the way to the consulting room of neurosurgeon. My mother also heard plenty of horror stories from her future neighbor in the neurology ward, who needed to undergo a second operation. My mother was so scared by the forthcoming operation that, after consultation we abducted her from the neurosurgery department, if our strenuous hobbling could be called an escape. Thus, unexpectedly for all of us, the future looked dark. We decided to try drug treatment, injections, and, as they say, to fight to the end.
From that day when my mother went into the hospital’s neurology department, my life changed sharply. In the morning, I went to school and later went by bus to the regional neurology department. All the time I was near my mother and tried to support her spiritually. As it seemed to me, it was very important for her. The doctors were indignant that outsiders visited her, but my father quickly settled that question. The hospital became the main place where I spent my free time.
My mother was all the more sad that misfortunes, one after another, chased our family. Moreover, a message came from Moscow that the date was fixed and I was awaiting an operation after the New Year’s holidays. My mum greatly worried that I had given up my favorite hobby classes and trainings and even tried to insist that I should return to my usual life. But I didn’t listen to her. It seemed to me that nobody would take care of her like me and that without me she would simply fade away from her bad thoughts and the oppressing atmosphere of the ward where all her neighbors just spoke about their diseases.
At first, I, as well as my family, was a little bit shocked. “How could such a thing happen?” I thought. “So unexpectedly, and to my mother. Our life is so unpredictable! It only seems to us that can forsee and plan everything in it, and that everything will be exactly like we imagine. In reality, every day is a trial, as if somebody wants to test us, how reliable we are, how steady we are internally in various situations, whether it’s joy or grief. Maybe these stresses that make us their unwillingly witnesses and participants appear to us as reminders from above that life is too fragile and that we might not even have time to do the most important thing in it. We are so accustomed to put aside the important things in our soul for an indefinite later that we don’t realize how quickly life passes and that we do not have time to do anything serious in it.
Why do we start to really value something only when it is irretrievably lost: youth, in old age; health, on the hospital’s bed; life, on our deathbed? Why?! Maybe these sudden situations make us think over our perishable existence, make us wake up from our unrealizable fantasies borne by our laziness and bring us back to reality. Reality shows that nobody clearly knows what can happen to him at any minute. So, maybe it’s not worth tempting fate and we should start to value each moment right now, value it as if we were people doomed to death. Maybe then we’ll be able to understand more deeply the sense of life itself and do a thousand more useful things for our soul and for surrounding people. “It’s foolish to think that tomorrow is waiting for us, it may simply never come.” Only now did I understand the real meaning of Sensei’s phrase, which once I believed to be a joke: “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him about your plans.”
In the first few days with mum on the ward, we listened to the life stories of her neighbors, and I found proof that nobody is insured against Mr. Accident. The woman whose bed was next to the window was called Valentina Fedorovna. Just one instant had turned her entire life upside down, and it happened unexpectedly as well. She and her husband were living from hand to mouth, with hardly any money. They decided to join a wave of the cooperative movement, so her husband quit the factory and registered his own furniture cooperative. Her husband was enterprising and hard-working, and the business was successful. In just one year, they made so much money that they bought new cooperative apartments, a car, and even a country lot. Everything couldn’t be better and they had no troubles.
But two months ago, when Valentina Fedorovna was coming back with her husband from a relative’s birthday party, they got into a big car accident. It happened in a split second. Three cars crashed into each other at full speed because of a drunken driver in the oncoming lane. Her husband died immediately. Thanks to being fastened by a seatbelt, she miraculously stayed alive. However, she was told that the doctors later diagnosed a subluxation in the cervical area of her spinal cord with a hematoma. After that, her hand hardly moved, while she couldn’t feel her legs at all. The subluxation was cured in the neurosurgery department. However, the hematoma remained as a consequence of the spinal cord injury. Valentina Fedorovna was transferred from the neurosurgical to neurological department about one month ago.
It seemed to me that she suffered more in her moral state than in her physical state. At that moment, her life was destroyed. She had to mortgage a part of her property because all the money she had was quickly spent on treatment and on paying off her husband’s odd debts. But most of all, she was shocked by the strange attitude of her friends.
She told us that she had many friends and relatives, but as soon as they found out that her husband had died and that she remained disabled alone, everybody for some reason immediately forgot about her existence. She had been in the hospital for two months and had been visited only by her old grandmother and her sister, who, despite the fact that she lived in poverty, always tried to bring her something delicious. Valentina Fedorovna now understood who is who, but it was already too late. That evening, I wrote down in my diary her old grandmother’s interesting expression regarding careless friends, “When the pot is boiling, the house is full of friends. And when the pot is gone, nobody comes.”
Valentina Fedorovna was in despair and didn’t find any other way out for her grief except slandering her former friends and relatives. I felt uncomfortable when hearing such speeches. These bad words spoilt her own mood and made her very nervous, and she inflamed hatred in herself and people around her suffered. We didn’t even want to mention the word ‘friend’ because this woman would explode and resume her non-stop complaints.
Another woman, Anna Ivanovna, was kind. She didn’t curse her destiny, though her health wasn’t any better. She had almost the same kind of disease as