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[Alexandr Korol]

just imagine what a truly happy person that is. He rejoices in every little thing. He’s sitting at home, for example, carving a wooden bear with his child, and he’s happy, even though it’s the 21st century and young people have all kinds of gadgets. Yet there are children who have all the gadgets, they have everything already, and they’re still unhappy with life. They don’t love their parents, they don’t love themselves, and nothing pleases them. That’s a tragedy. Faith is very easy to lose, but faith can also be cultivated. You can switch it on, grow it, and expand it. And truly, the level — the “volume” — of faith is different for everyone. How else can I describe it? Let’s put it this way: imagine if I just lived for fun, for my own pleasure, thinking only about how to satisfy my stomach, how to show off to others. If I lived like that, I think I’d have, like most people, a lot of fears and doubts about my actions, my choices, where to go, where to live, who to be with. Why? Because life wouldn’t even have any meaning. You’d just be drifting around, that’s all. And what kind of faith can there be in that? Faith — so you understand — I’ll put it this way: instead of telling you what faith gives, I’ll tell you what a person doesn’t have when they do have faith. When a person has faith, they don’t keep looking over their shoulder, thinking someone’s out to “devour” them, you know? When a person has faith — when they are pure in conscience and they work hard, and they truly labor, and they believe in God — they understand that everything will always be all right for them and their family because they are loyal to the system, to God, and they work for others, and they haven’t done anything bad to have dark thoughts. That is faith. And faith is easy to lose. Lie once, betray someone once, act greedy once — even over something small — and that’s it, the person no longer sleeps peacefully. At first, they may feel it, and then they get used to it, and that becomes normal — to constantly feel tension, to constantly feel wary, to constantly feel some sort of danger. And why is that? It means they did something wrong. So faith, of course, is easier, faster to lose than to gain. Faith is when you paint pictures, and no matter what criticism someone gives you, it doesn’t shake your faith. But if you’re unsure of yourself, or if you have no faith at all — what is it when there’s no faith? It’s doubt. You begin to doubt — doubt yourself, doubt others, doubt everything. I once remember saying — or maybe I wrote it somewhere in one of the chapters of a book, a long time ago — I said that if a person believes in at least something, even in a bottle, that’s already better than believing in nothing. Why?