An art to all arts is the Art of Losing. You start, as in school, with the simplest things: you glanced at the gypsy hem of October, before you even had time to blink - and two hours had already flown by in vain. Or a bunch of keys got lost somewhere. Then addresses, phone numbers of friends - it will all float away if you accidentally drop your notebook into a puddle... Further - more, faster. The art of Losing is simply the ability to say “no problem.” Cities where you have been, where you dreamed of visiting, leave them easily, like cigarette butts. Look: I left five countries where I settled “forever”, and the “only” women - at least three... But this is not the limit of skill. When you forget even the words, then you will find, without looking for anything, an acorn hat the torn lining of the cloak, and try it on your fingers - and look, it suited the nameless man, as if this street into the past was waiting for him, a round door on the day where you began the course in the Art of Loss. (Alexey Andreev) What is this loss? When you go outside and breathe in the clean autumn air - a little cool, but filled with the delicate scent of leaves - what do you feel? A whole world that is open to us under the sky, so that we can know it and love it? What can we lose besides our own illusions and delusions? Losing loved ones is always difficult. But we also waste time when we cling with all our might to everything that has become familiar and ordinary. This seems convenient, acceptable, even somewhat correct to us. But whenever we think about stopping holding on to these known things, we are enveloped in fear. We are afraid, we say, “What will happen if I start walking? What happens if I get up and decide to live happily instead of rightly?” We have been given some 80 years, and we spend this time on unloved jobs and people who are not at all interesting to us. We are too afraid of such a thing as loss. We always forget that everything is temporary and sooner or later any story must end so that a new one can begin. You cannot build a new house on the site of an old one; the old house must be demolished. The new is not a continuation of the old, but a renunciation of the old. Life is like a river stream - it must flow and change. If a person clings with all his might to something from the past, then he is closed to the present - closed to the opportunities that the present offers. It is impossible to start a new relationship if the old ones are not completed, just as it is impossible to completely rethink life from a new perspective if you continue to insist on old knowledge. Compromise can rarely help; usually this approach means that a person is not ready to let go of the old, but in this case, the new will not be able to completely enter his life. It's not so scary to let go. This can only be scary at first - we are designed so that if we are relatively safe, we will prefer this safety to those opportunities that truly suit us. This may resemble a leap of faith, but life has no other way - we need to trust and go. What's the point of walking along a path where everything is known? What kind of adventure is this if a ticket with all the pointers was initially given? “In six months you will meet your beloved or lover, in a year you will give birth to children, in two you will move to such and such a job...” Where in all this is the mystery and intrigue of life, which makes it so alive, real? And when you lie on deathbed bed - what can you say to yourself? Will you say, “I lived well, I did everything I should”? Or will you regret the wasted opportunities, about living from paycheck to paycheck with a dacha and a vacation once a year? They say it's better to regret what you did than what you didn't do. For better or for worse, we cannot avoid activity in this world - everyone has to do something, change somehow. If a person freezes in place, then he slowly begins to die: he has neither motivation nor desire to live. And this happens because he clings to his past with all his might - he follows the paths he has already walked. Again and again. Experiencing the same sensations and images, the brain stops building new neural connections, making.