Anything But Normal
Gutsy and stoic, the Ukrainian mindset is shifting toward a softer center
When I first went to Ukraine in 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, it quickly became obvious that the conventional greeting was not “How are you?” That was way too personal of a question, it could easily stump someone, may even be taken as weird or a come-on. At least these were the awkward reactions I received. The topic was just too existential to bring up on the fly.
Instead, the stock greeting was, and to some extent still is: “Як справи?,” which Google translates as “What’s up?” Meaning: How are your matters or affairs? The question refers to things you’re dealing with, not how you are. And the pat answer has been: “Нормально.” “Normal.”
It’s a rather ambiguous all-purpose response. You’re saying something — out of politeness — but in effect nothing. It may be that you’re pretending there is nothing wrong, going for the easy answer. Or you just don’t want to be bothered with questions, so you nail shut the possibility of a conversation with one word. As we know, the benefit of ambiguity, especially in diplomacy, allows for adaptation to any number of implications. I’ve started to view the rather sterile reply, “Normal,” as sarcasm, deliberately insincere, a droll sociopolitical dart that has moved into cliché territory out of common use, nay, overuse.
But now this typical greeting/reply, a mindset that in effect puts a clamp on emotion, comes in stark contrast to a societal shift I’m seeing in Ukraine since the big invasion on February 24 — feelings are becoming important, very much so.
Just about a month ago I read in the paper about cuddle parties in Kyiv, where people get together in search of a little solace through tender embraces, an explicitly nonsexual tactile therapy. “Normal” almost sounds like a joke now. Quite understandably, people of all ages, filled with horror and isolation, have started to be more truthful about their feelings and will even share them.
Of course not everyone reacts in the same way to fear and dread, and the longer Ukrainians will need to cope with the war, the idiosyncrasies of their endurance will surely morph even more. We can only hope that in time the shock and extreme suffering will dissipate, but this can only happen after uncomfortable scrutiny of the experience, trauma experts tell us.
This past April I participated in a series of Zoom calls with a small group of Ukrainian school kids between the ages of 10 and 12. We were about two months into the war and, the program advised, the first thing I was supposed to ask each and every one of the kids was: How are you feeling today? We spent about half an hour coaxing our emotions to the fore, speaking very basic English.
Some kids responded in a heartbeat showing an eager and carefree attitude, perhaps denial of strong emotions, or some combination of all three. Some hemmed and hawed blushing, not knowing what to say or ultra shy about expressing their feelings in public. Others said “Нормально” — “Normal,” which didn’t surprise me at all. One boy responded with a palpable struggle to push out these words: “How am I feeling? I feel nothing, I feel numb. All I want to do is come home after school and go to sleep.”
It was as if the Earth stopped spinning. We all sat there stunned.
On and off since 2016 I have been traveling to towns along the frontlines of eastern Ukraine to help children learn English. The program, run by the Ukrainian NGO GoGlobal/GoCamp, aspires to promote educational reforms through socially responsible language programs (English, German, French).
When the group implemented its initiative in 2016, it was with the hope to open up the country, make it less insular, eliminate the backward Soviet way of thinking, and introduce Ukrainian kids to people from all over the world who came to volunteer in the organization’s summer language camps.
All kinds of activities using critical and creative thinking were presented to us volunteers during training to pass on to the kids, and we were urged to bring our own interests into the mix, too. Because I’m a long-time meditator, I thought it would be a good idea to teach them mindfulness practice — basically a secular term for meditation — to ease their anxiety from war and other stresses. In preparation I had taken the online course offered by MindfulSchools.org.
More precisely, you can say mindfulness is the fundamental aspect of all meditations, which will vary according to tradition. To quote Jon Kabat-Zinn (creator of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School): “Mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way — on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”
So I told the kid who shared his raw feelings with us so gracefully and genuinely — so mindfully — that I really admired his courage. And that numb is a feeling, too. And it takes a lot of nerve to recognize what it is you are feeling. Was I wrong?
Komushavakha GoCamp, 2019: We meditated twice a day at this school, between 5-10 miles from the front. That time, bombing one night was prominently nearby. Photographed by Lila Dlaboha, 2019
The kids in the village of Komyshuvakha, a few miles from Popasna (Luhansk region), felt no less hampered by their emotions. When I came to work with the school kids there in 2019, the principal and teachers gladly welcomed daily mindfulness practice. Bombed terribly and now deserted, both places fell to the Russians this summer. But back then, around 10pm on the second or third night of my arrival there, my host family and I were all in our beds when, one after another, bombs began to smack into turf somewhere nearby, and the earth under the house started to heave and grunt. The booms kept coming and would cap with deep tones of hmpfh! and mournful thuds. I had been through a series of bombings in other hot spots of Ukraine, but this time it was unexpected because the front was not all that close, maybe 5-10 miles away. Here it sounded like a row of tanks was rolling by just outside the window. I didn’t dare go out to look.
The house rocked wildly along with the ground, the windows banged on the edge of breaking, everything jolted and gagged from the suck of bombs, the immediate aftermath, how it sort of torques. By then I knew that all that shaking was from incoming shells, not outgoing. Both sides were firing their cannons into the night, and we all had to go to school the next morning.
I checked up on the kids, and saw that Dima, the boy, was out of bed, crying in the kitchen. He had developed a slight stutter two years earlier after the initial invasion of Donbas in 2014. In a panic, Dima told me he wanted to go to his parents who slept in an adjacent cinder-block cottage in their small compound gated with slabs of steel. I said to him, “Don’t be afraid, we’re all here together,” and opened the door. His younger sister was sleeping soundly in her bed — I can’t imagine how the pounding eluded her slumber. I told Dima I would bring her to me if she would wake. Under a blazing full moon, as he was telling me to be sure to lock the door, I watched him cross the concrete patio wearing only his underpants and flip-flops. It was a hot night.
It seemed the blasts were coming closer, the shaking was more violent, my ears drummed. As I listened to the attacks in bed, trying to analyze the situation, I wondered if I should gather my most essential things (passport, money, mobile phone, laptop, notebooks) and have them ready in case we would need to run.
I kept time as if I were counting intervals between thunder and lightning. After a half-hour of booms and quakes, flimsy matter being rearranged and assembled back together a little differently into their places again by sheer tug of impact, its force, the bombing stopped.
It was calm suddenly, quiet. The feeling of calm after a bombing — you want to believe it but you don’t believe it. You don’t trust that it’s really over; it’s suspicious, an imposter, this silence. So you keep on guard, listen for cues. It’s quiet on the outside but on the inside you’re suspended in the in-between, on the cusp, how alluring in some ways. In a state of perpetual transition — isn’t that how everything always is? Pregnant? Why should this time be any different? I recognized my mortality and it was unforgivably blunt. It may have humbled me.
The bombs started to fall again. Both sides were going at it like ping-pong. After each pause I thought it might be over, thank goodness, they’ve finished fighting for the night. But no, the bombing would resume. That’s the thing that put me on edge most, the stopping and starting.
I thought of the young boy in Popasna who, the year before, refused to emerge from the family’s cellar because he didn’t believe the bombardment had really ended. This after 40 consecutive days of a fierce assault.
I laid in bed listening for what would come next, not knowing what to expect — was it time to rest or run? Naturally, we don’t go through life expecting things, but a peaceful night is something to look forward to. Yet the bombing would start up again, each time with more ferocity. You begin to wonder — it’s getting worse, they’re getting closer — what to do? Recalling that evening as I write this, I shudder at the thought of how, since February, all over Ukraine people have been living like this or in progressively dire conditions day after day. What incredible stamina they have.
The bombing lasted 1½ hours, with lulls of 15 minutes. I decided to collect my valuables just in case.
At school the next morning you could still hear the cannons firing, only much farther away, the tanks moved on through the night. Apparently the Russians were forced back. Normally full of life and mischief, the children were humorless, listless, slouching where they barely stood, leaning on one another, some holding on to their friends, sulking. Scared.
After the morning calisthenics we went into the classroom to meditate as usual.
For three weeks we meditated twice a day — in the morning before classes and after lunch/play time — and the children seemed to relish the practice. This normally rowdy bunch of kids was able to remain still and silent with their eyes closed for at least 10 minutes, which is remarkable even for some adults.
Afterwards we had a discussion about their experience, which naturally and gradually developed into a talk on awareness, starting with physical sensations, moving to perception and feelings, the value and power of emotional clarity, the ease that grows out of it, all those fickle things that prove our sentience, how they play into the deceptive nature of mind. And then somehow we would drift home to the one thing (which is not a thing at all) that remains still and oddly nurturing through the whole of it — consciousness itself.
Meeting of Young Minds: Meditating with Kids
Here are some plainspoken yet insightful comments I’ve recorded through the years from kids after a formal mindfulness session lasting at least 10 minutes. These are from children aged 8 to 12 years old (where there is no name or age, that information is unknown, but age parameters are the same):
■ “I felt peaceful. It calmed me down.” Iryna (9)
■ “My cat does this every day.” Iryna (9)
■ “It’s as if I was listening to my inner world.” Ulyana (8)
■ “How come when my eyes were closed I felt I was becoming larger and larger?” Maxim (10)
■ “I enjoyed it. It was a special silence.” Liza (10)
■ “I felt a surge of energy.” Liera (12)
■ “How is it that we are able to relax so deeply during meditation? I relaxed so much — the feeling is that we are not in this world but in another world.” Yehor (8)
■ “The world disappears.” Tanya (9)
■ “I felt my breath and spirit.” Arina (8)
■ “I felt I could do it much longer. I felt I almost could do it for three hours.” Maxim (10)
■ “When I’m silent, why do I hear water and all sounds? I also hear a humming in my ears, why?” Valik (10)
■ “I enjoyed the silence and ease.” Daniel (11)
■ “It was so nice to experience silence.” Kristina (10)
■ “I feel more rested after meditating for five or so minutes than sleeping a whole night.” Kyrylo (10)
■ “I felt weightless.”
■ “I asked myself many strange questions.”
■ “I felt like an empty bowl inside.”
■ “I understand myself. I’m relaxed.”
■ “The pain in my back and neck went away.”
■ “I felt thankful for everything that I have, and peaceful.”
■ “I was sad because someone was laughing around me.”
■ “It really cleared my mind — I now understand what I must do.”
■ “I felt lightness.”
■ “It made me feel more relaxed and focused.”
Lila Dlaboha is a poet born of Ukrainian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She was short-listed for the Poetry International Prize 2021, and is a 2018 finalist, for her full-length manuscript, in the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize judged by Jane Hirshfield. Her poems have appeared in Arts & Letters (Georgia College), Bellevue Literary Review, Mudfish, Andre Codrescu’s Exquisite Corpse, among other publications. During the 1980s she served on the editorial board of the Little Magazine, a nationally distributed literary quarterly. By profession she worked many years as a photo or text editor on general-interest magazines and the newswire before managing an international photo agency specializing in history. On and off for the past six years she has been volunteering in the war zones of eastern Ukraine under the auspices of the Ukrainian NGO GoGlobal/GoCamp. She lives in New York City.