Any nonsense matters! How to survive when everything is falling apart

Yekaterina Antropova, psychologist

About what can now become self-support, I will write quite briefly.

In a period of great crisis, when values and meanings are collapsing, one really wants to find new ones. Find it - the sooner the better.

This desire arises instinctively, but it is not always possible to immediately find new values and meanings. More often - it doesn’t work out, the crisis is what the crisis is for, to destroy our inner landscape and make us wander among the inner ruins for some time.

Therefore (especially if you feel yourself for depression and assume that you are in it), you should not bet on the fact that new meanings will immediately rise up inside, like beacons, and help you get out of the darkness.

It is more likely that in the inky darkness for some time no major landmarks will be visible at all. But, despite this, you will meet places, memories, books, thoughts will come to your head, from which for a minute it becomes brighter and easier.

Something sparkled in the grass, and I remembered children's secrets: you dig a hole, put candy foil-gold on the bottom, then a flower, then close it with a piece of glass.

So I went to the concert.

Here we wrote off with a friend from whom there was no news for a long time.

I ate cherries.

Nothing special that would draw on some Global Meaning or Global Inner Value.

*(For example, all March I went to the account of one good woman to look at plump bull terrier puppies, and I felt a little better)

Any little thing that allows you to feel more alive even for a second becomes a white pebble from a fairy tale about the Boy-with-Thumb, who returned home from the dark forest through these pebbles.

Every time you feel nauseous, you can ask yourself: “What can help me get through this day?” - and look for a small white pebble. Look for something from which, at least for a second, you can feel both light, and life, and laughter.

And most often it will be some, at first glance, nonsense.

For example, in the days of Victorian England, there was such a case: in 1842, a British detachment of 16,000 people left Kabul, and Afghan shots were heard after them. Of the British then only one person survived - the doctor William Brydon. He was hit on the head with a sword, but he escaped because he had a book hidden under his hat.

At first, the doctor lied that this book was the Bible, and the prim Victorian society accepted this version with enthusiasm: they say that the word of God supported the doctor in everyday work, and then protected him from barbarians.

However, nothing like that.

Already a deep old man, at a time when there is no need to seem wiser and more spiritual than you are, Dr. Brydon told the truth: under the hat was not the Bible, but an issue of a monthly magazine with romantic stories and horror films.

Just a read to have fun and relax.

Some nonsense.

And it was she who saved his life.

Therefore, if suddenly high meanings leave us, we should not neglect that nonsense that warms the heart even for a minute. Maybe just it will help to survive in a difficult moment - and lead to something new.