The Truth is in the Road

If you have ever seen a picture of Los Angeles in winter, then you are probably deeply convinced that California is the land of eternal summer. That was exactly what I thought when I was getting ready for my first visits here. I was happily stuffing my suitcase with open-back dresses and light sandals. Later, a little bit less happily, I was listening to my teeth chattering at every breath of the ocean wind and was wrapping myself into every accessible sweater and pair of leggings to survive until dawn. Neither of this fitted into my concept of sunny California. Contrary to the widespread stereotype, winter does exist in Southern California. It hides in the alleys of broad-leaf trees. It taps on the windows with the long-awaited rains that everyone was praying for during the long summer droughts. It puts the sun to sleep into the ocean. It proudly displays gingerbread houses in the supermarket shop-windows. Winter is the time of spectacular sunsets, long nights ...

The New Year has begun with a reminder that the only thing that remains unchanged in life is its  changeability . Everything can change at any moment, and we will never learn how to be prepared for it, never be able to foresee everything that happens. Sometimes all we have left to do is to simply jump into a dark abyss, believing that down there, at the very bottom, someone will catch us into his warm hands and bring us back into the light. They say life is the best teacher. It is the best and the strictest. Sometimes its methods catch us by surprise, some other times they throw us into despair. Sometimes life confronts us with a choice that we are not authorized to make. It looks at us with clever and  compassionate  eyes of a doctor and asks us to make a decision. It says it realizes it's tough. It assures us that this decision is not even ours and we only have to voice something that has been decided long before by someone else. But it does not retreat. And we kn...