I Say Yes to Love

Dear brothers and sisters,

In shallowness of my own life I cried every time I read “De Profundis. Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis” written by Oscar Wilde. For every time he said something he realized of his past and present left to grief in his loneliness, I wanted to cry out: “Yes! You are right! I need that too in my life, I need that to be understood by my heart! ” He taught me a lot. Even though this letter was dedicated to another person, it was written with such a love, that even my heart couldn’t dear to be indifferent. And through this entire letter, as through a microscope, I tried to see what is going on with my life; what powers have shifted it toward the way it goes; whether I chose that way and do I still want it to go that direction.

And I dear to say: no. Though it is not that my life is appalling. “What lies before me is my past. I have got to make myself look at that with different eyes <... >” (Oscar Wilde). For I feel with all my bewildered soul, that the way I regard my past doesn’t let me look at my future with hope. I am so hopelessly disappointed with my own self that I could never believe that I could do something good to the world, to the society, to my family even. So why, for God’s sake, am I to live a life like that – aimless, hopeless, useless?

I see I am not the only one. People, young people die around us by their own choice. Suicides – in such a diminishing name they are called – feel the same as I. Aren’t they my brothers and sisters, whose sufferings I understand so clearly in my own tortured heart? The world is so fast and demanding, and we are so weak and poor. You have to shed your blood if you want to be on the top. If you won’t be on time, the train of life may go away without you. And seeing all the opportunities that modern life offers to a young and perspective man you feel so helpless to reach them. There is always someone ahead. You have to be not only talented, good-looking, well educated, know languages, have connections, you also have to be lucky, or at least better than those who have the same. Because to have a good job, to make career, go abroad, meet new people is not something easy to do. And what if you have nothing but desire? What then? If life gives you nothing but hard work for a bite of bread and dreams of a chance to show the world what you can give to it? Because you know deeply in your heart that it is much more to give than the hard labour you do. So you get depressed. You rush down, eat quickly, you are mobile, you overexert. Like everybody else you make money and ruin your health and than pay money to restore your health. You get trapped into consumer society circle and have no time to stop and think.

I also have no time to think. Though I feel uncessable whim to do it. To stop one day and scream to everyone - enough! This world has gone crazy. Everybody living their lives according to some little mechanism tied to their wrists, telling what time it is and when they have to do what is supposed to be done. And also the plastic cards providing colored papers to buy some chemically synthesized food to fill the entities in their bodies. I want something else. I need something else. I dream of something else... I dream of tranquil days passing by in their imperturbable way... I dream of work I could dedicate myself to, not because the concurrence is savage, but for the sake of people who need the best I can offer them. Oh, how I dream of inextinguishable silence in my jaded mind. How I long for calm thoughts. How much I understand my parents, who remember days of their youth with such an unfeigned affection. They always told me that people in those days where never afraid of each other late at nights, contrary; they tried to meet someone on the way home, so they could talk the time. Now people don’t talk. They are afraid of themselves. They alienated so much that feels more comfortable communicating in the Internet, where nobody knows them and nobody can wrong them. The big cities with all this anonymity brought up generations of anonyms living anonymous lives. Even families live like strangers. Do parents know what challenges and hardships face their children? I doubt. They care not about souls or hearts, or minds but only about future jobs, careers and education, which is all social wealth.

Now I know it only from books, but people used to live in small towns like one big family. They were community. But I am already tainted too much. I myself would be miserable living life like that. Even though I dear to seek for another way of life, for another attitude toward it. I’ll do it if not in reality than in my mind. What is the purpose of me being in this world, if I myself see my life useless? The only purpose is to be for others. And what is the purpose to seek for happiness, if all my strivings, fights and aims get me only to torment, if not to give happiness to others? I am deeply convinced that it is not the question of what life can bring to us, but what we can bring to life. It is not what others can give us, but what we can give to them.

And so here I am, all with my unsettled heart, ill body, restless mind, left alone to fight with only two hands with the rest of the world with quite a big chances to fail, and I see that the only way to overcome everything including myself is to love, hope and believe. Isn’t St. Paul was the one who said it in his hymn for love? “So faith, hope, love remain [forever], these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor 13, 13). And I say yes to love.


Sincerely yours,
                                                                                 
                                                                                Gilidea