In life, I failed at almost everything, except a few important things, fortunately. These are a few random bits of curious information about my endeavors.
Let's start with the fact that the meaning of my current art signature is the opposite of my initial idea!
In general, I got what I wanted in life largely due to sheer luck, and I did not know we needed to wish for peace.
- I lived apart from my parents from 1 to 5, and was left alone a lot as a toddler. It might have forced me to seek joy in my own mind more than usual. In any case, persistent seeking to have time with myself caused me many troubles in life.
- As a little girl, I sang on weddings. In music school, I played polyphony and sang it in a choir, with concerts for military and students. Though it was fun to be assigned to both higher or lower parts I could handle, my voice was too weak to lead.
- As a small child, I refused to eat most foods I was offered. One pediatrician took me for three days as a baby to force-feed, with no good results. Later, I disliked many widely loved treats like ice-cream, but loved dark rye bread and many fruits. Growing up, I used all possible tricks to resist meals I disliked. On almost all days of my adult life, I start eating fresh fruits in the afternoon.
- I started regular fasting at age 13 after reading an article in a popular science magazine, then made it every Friday by 14, then tried 3 days monthly. By about 21, I found the warrior diet and settled on something similar to what is now called intermittent fasting. Ever since, I almost never ate before noon, and infrequently, mostly socially, in the evening. Now, my favorite time to drink and eat is late afternoon.
- I slept on hard surfaces like floors, garden furniture, and even tables. I started at 17 along with studying yoga, converted or made my own beds, used folded blankets and yoga mats instead of mattresses for better relaxation, posture, and hygiene. This early habit caused conflicts with my partners, even though I tried to sleep together with common bedding first.
- Many weekends of my 14th year of life I spent in a bathroom that was temporally converted into a dark room to develop my SLR photographs on film. I lost them and all the negatives during relocations.
- I started investing in currencies and commodities after participating in a stock trade games at the university with a guest professor. I did not have access to stock trading back then.
- When I experienced my first samadhi at 19, I thought that nothing could top that. I was wrong.
- The Last years before immigration, I lived alone, with a heavy steel panel on my double door for protection. I carried a tiny pepper spray weapon with me, and was ready to invoke connections, lye about diseases, fight, or die if the situation becomes hopeless. If you heard about post-soviet 90-s era, I was in that horror.
- Toward the end of that period, I trained myself to visualize death as a young Native American warrior behind my left shoulder - to appreciate time. I never wanted to die, and could not understand a few friends who were seriously afraid of inevitable death. But I was afraid that something would kill me if I relax - a faulty thinking.
- During those years, I increased the duration of my meditation on point and kundalini to 30–40 minutes. Then I almost stopped doing it, because I thought I have internalized the process enough to access the state at any time. In reality, it largely faded with time. But I do meditate any moment I can and want.
- For all those years and many more, I always carried a card with a significantly modified Bushido code. I adopted it to my needs in less than a dozen poetic lines. I still keep the original piece of paper to feel the way I did.
- After the first six years of my first immigration, I went back to touch the ground, and did not feel at home as expected. As of now, I have not seen any member of my family of origin for over 15 years.
- In my early twenties, I developed a 70-measurements system to design and construct well-fitted, elegant clothing with ease of movement. I could make male suits and made some money on formal female dresses, then attempted to organize the production with local factories, and failed.
- In my late twenties, I was writing a book on visual memory structuring. It became so complex - about a thousand symbols in a cube linked to additional dimensions in tables - I still wonder whether it is worth finishing one day. I actively use this system in planing my daily life.
- In my thirties, I designed a framework in object-oriented PHP that produced meaningfully formatted and color-styled content presentation based on keywords. It never found any implementation for it.
- Most of the time I am curious about someone's feelings, thoughts, or discoveries.
- Often it seems to me that I have barely learned anything truly useful from my life experiences. New situations require new and new approaches. I still don't know how to ensure success, or even how to make a decent living under most circumstances. The mind itself, actions, and connections feel to me like my most precious achievements.
To be continued...
