injunjane | Brighton bubble

Lost spaces between bits.

I do not really believe in miracles (with the exception of the current war situation) and my everyday life usually goes by the principle "Danger foreseen is half avoided".

However quite often, when I think about the future and my plans and necessary steps for them, I do not use reasoning or formal logic, but try to listen to the entirety of my inner self, which includes my life experience in the form not of only conclusions and principles, but full length "audio, video, smell, touch and anything beyond it I was absorbing at a moment".

My mom graduated from one of the best universities in the USSR of her time (the research branch of it invented red glass of the famous Kremlin stars). She's a daughter of a former high Communist Party official, but that was rather playing against her during the studies. Because before her birth the granddad was proclaimed an enemy of the state, expelled from party and exiled from Ukraine to Russia to work in coalmines like a criminal - one of many of his kind.

So, her years at the university were quite tough. Once, she did not pass an important exam, and if she would failed it second time, she'd be expelled. Instead of studying hard, the night before retaking the exam she only learned the same examination paper she pulled out (there were 40 or 50 in total). Then she managed to pull out the same paper twice (accidentally), solve the problem exactly as she did the previous time, and answer the question she didn't know. She passed. Under the probability of 1/40 or 1/50 which is not very high.

That's what she told me, repeatedly throughout her life (at least 5 times she's recalling that story).

My entering exams to the university were biology, chemistry and Ukrainian literature essay - and the last one scared me the most, because I hate essays, always did, and also hated reading the books that were recommended in the study curriculum.
I tried to read some stuff before the essay exam, but was so bored that in the end I finished only one book, Do Oxen Low When Mangers are Full?, the one I hated the least, and wrote a sole cheat-sheet on it.

During the exam, I pulled out exactly that topic (totally accidentally), wrote a rather inspired essay - and passed, with the probability of 1/138 or so.

Many years after, when doing an internship in UK, one day I suddenly felt an urge to go to Brighton (have never been there, but the name was familiar and something inside was, to say figuratively, telling me "go, go").

I spent a day in Brighton mostly sitting on the shore, throwing pebbles into water and talking to seagulls. All that time I had a strange feeling that a huge bubble full of some vital information is hanging above the water. I was sitting and trying to connect to the folded content of that invisible bubble.

Some time after, I found out that the Brighton Beach was not only a favourite meeting spot of beatniks, but the place where Quadrophenia was filmed. I'm still keeping a shell from there as a token of that impossible place.

And revelations from the mystical bubble - in fact, many following changes in my life came because of the decisions coming from nowhere, from some source I thought to connect on that beach.
Yes of course that was no magic and no real mystical bubble, it was my own inner shift - but caused by some contact with the outside world the nature of which I cannot still figure out.

And no, it's not schizophrenia - mental illness require realistic images and hallucinations which were never there (and I'm a clinically healthy person what was properly confirmed). It was only a feeling.
I call it "intuition".