War gives a great sense of equality, a sense of community

Things that were sometimes important before – how you were perceived, how you were treated, whether you were appreciated or not – no longer have any meaning.

Because war gives you a great sense of equality, a sense of community, a sense of the invisible.

The thought I live with all the time is that I may never know the names of the people who saved my children's lives. Who, for example, shot down a missile that may have been flying into my house. I may never know that. But at that moment, you realize how much the lives of those you care about depend on those with whom you may never cross paths. On those invisible people who are part of our common body - and therefore your own.

“The thought I live with all the time is that I may never know the names of the people who saved my children's lives. Who, for example, shot down a missile that may have been flying into my house. I may never know that”

And a more unbearable thought: maybe your children's lives are going on precisely because the lives of someone else and someone else's children were cut short... and this thought is unbearable, but we have to understand it and we have to recognize it.

And a more hopeful thought: maybe some machine we brought to the front line helped someone or saved someone. It helped to evacuate someone. We may not know this, just as those who were helped by it may not know about us.

“This lesson of war is a lesson in modesty”

This lesson of war is a lesson in modesty. Everything we do one by one is very little. These are droplets in a big river, in a big ocean. But together, these droplets can do something. These are not "wheels" that mean nothing by themselves; these are individual efforts, individual lives, individual decisions, which are important and interesting in their own right, but which together make up something bigger.

These are my thoughts. What are yours?

Source.

About the author. Volodymyr Yermolenko, writer, head of PEN Ukraine.

The editorial staff do not always share the opinions expressed by the blog authors.