2024-01-19 22:44:37
“Let’s discover snowy Lapland,” Posh jumped onto my phone’s main screen. The only poshs that still reach my device are mainly because of work, I removed the rest even before the war started. I didn’t want to wake up in the morning with a lot of messages, and then what happened happened.
The push on Lapland is the result of incredibly accurate targeting that came after the two most difficult weeks I had at the beginning of the war, when I was evacuated, traumatized and no longer able to hear news or see the numbers of days that had passed since the start of the war running on the screen. The friend with whom I was staying was shocked that I searched his house for the remote control, and made me swear not to turn on the TV for current affairs purposes.
It took me a while to wean off. At first I would only turn it on after alarms, to see what happened and where. Then I got rid of that too. It took a little longer to be able to concentrate on movies and series, so the quick weaning option was endless viewing of the travel channels, which allowed me to mindlessly stare.
I could no longer see classical Europe. The revelations of anti-Semitism that began to emerge after the initial wave of support from the world for us, made me want to leave London and even Spain (your disappointment, my brothers). Food tours in Italy? Who has a head for that now. Here and there I consoled myself in my beloved Paris, I ignored the bubbling earth there, as always happens in blind love, when you know the truth but don’t want to believe it.
I continued to fantasize about coffee and croissants in my permanent corner in the Mara district, but inside I knew that I would not have peace there either, not physically or even in imagination. The thought that this whole story of radical Islam was going to blow up in everyone’s face, and Paris would most likely be one of the first to hijack it, didn’t allow me to even fantasize about the trip I had planned after it was all over.
I remembered that more than a year ago one of my friends had to undergo complicated head surgery. I thought about how to encourage him and in one of our meetings I suggested that he concentrate on the recovery days on the trip he will take after everything is behind him. I told him to imagine himself hiking in the mountains as he likes, passing between waterfalls and breathing this air that he has never had in Israel. Three months after the operation he recovered and that’s exactly what he did. I remembered this and knew that if there is anything that can reward me from thoughts about the present that is nothing, it is staring at the future that can be wonderful if I just focus on the right things.
I realized that the only show I could mentally assimilate into was something with glaciers. Lapland like this for beginners, or Svalbard for the advanced, the northernmost mysterious archipelago that is between Norway and the North Pole, that on a trip I did five years ago in Norway, even the most jaded travelers told me that it was an amazing experience to visit there, “but really not easy.” And here, I found the place where too cold to hate
Since that day, and two and a half months have already passed, I cut myself off for the sake of my sanity from any channel of poisoning and intimidation. Here and there I fall into a drug and do not stop interpreting the uncensored updates on Telegram, then realize that the choice of what I feed my mind and soul is completely in my hands. So I unfollowed most regular Instagram accounts. I silenced everyone who was pumping venom. I unfollowed all actors and actresses in Hollywood who expressed anti-Semitism. I strengthened those who supported us, and above all I started following people who travel in glaciers at the end of the world.
Every morning I flip through pages of the most remote places closest to the northern tip of the globe. Follows the weather forecasts in the North Pole, and the spectacular colors of Aurora Borealis observed a few weeks ago in the sky. People in minus 30 degrees on a hot day have nothing to fight about placing tefillin near a school, or about budgets, or about which judge to send to which court. They don’t have studios with experts on their own behalf, who have no idea what they are saying, they don’t have false predictions, or a concept for it to collapse. They have no time for wars over territory that everyone wants, because they are mainly busy with daily survival, making their lives the most optimal against the forces of nature.
There is something about stormy weather that has always scared me. Since I was a child I see storms, snows and storms as something big, powerful, divine. In contrast to the heat of terror, during storms you are completely dependent on the mercy of the heavens, if they have mercy in those moments.
In the past I thought that I was more afraid of the divine forces of nature than of wars, only because humans are responsible for wars and have control over them. Today I prefer to be in complete nothingness under the forces of nature, even if they are stormy, and hope for the best, because I am much more afraid of people who think they are God.
#storm #raging #time #wars #Lapland #Talia #Levin