Last week we went to the Gorky park; it was a Saturday with the perfect early summer weather. Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of people were there: families with kids, young people, old people. In the recent years, the park has undergone a remarkable transformation. It used to be a seedy, kitschy, unsafe place. Now it is clean, well designed, free to enter, and full of these low-key entertainment things, like a giant sandbox, a contemporary art gallery, an open air dance deck (several couples were doing some great swing), a few nice restaurants, and a lot of green space to lounge around. An ice cream costs 60 rubles, about $1.70. Same for kvas. The heavens were contemplating rain in the evening, but mercifully reconsidered.
The scene got me thinking – what should life be like? Or rather, can it get any better? I mean – not life in general, but in this particular moment. We have developed seeking brains, always imagining something else, something better. Sometimes we look for it in the past, more often – in the future. In a very specific sense, we ignore the present as a candidate for perfection. We rarely look for the perfect right before our eyes, probably because our brains constantly move between the past as we construct it and future as we are trying to predict it. It is a peculiar blind spot that most of us have – except for some who work on their ability to see the present, usually within a religious or a meditative tradition. But even the very fact that people have to work on it especially proves the point that we normally do not see the in the present.
Anyway, for your future reference, life as it should be could be found in Gorky park on 31 of May 2014, the city of Moscow, Russian Federation. This may not be true, because I am sure someone there was unhappy, and the kids was not there with us. But it was darn close.
The scene got me thinking – what should life be like? Or rather, can it get any better? I mean – not life in general, but in this particular moment. We have developed seeking brains, always imagining something else, something better. Sometimes we look for it in the past, more often – in the future. In a very specific sense, we ignore the present as a candidate for perfection. We rarely look for the perfect right before our eyes, probably because our brains constantly move between the past as we construct it and future as we are trying to predict it. It is a peculiar blind spot that most of us have – except for some who work on their ability to see the present, usually within a religious or a meditative tradition. But even the very fact that people have to work on it especially proves the point that we normally do not see the in the present.
Anyway, for your future reference, life as it should be could be found in Gorky park on 31 of May 2014, the city of Moscow, Russian Federation. This may not be true, because I am sure someone there was unhappy, and the kids was not there with us. But it was darn close.
Вы забыли слова из песни: "Есть только миг между прошлым и будущем, Именно он называется жизнь"
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