The courage nobody sees from the window

“It hurts when people go.” In this passage from Mathematics and Science, Evgeny Valentinovich Tarusin and his AI interlocutor talk about what it takes to look after a family, and what it costs to lose someone. From the English translation, published by Two Dialogues. Tarusin’s words appear as quotations below.

That’s almost it. An act of heroism lasts a moment. The hardest one of all is the life we lead as a family. It’s the one nobody sees.

Now you’ve touched on what matters most. To say that the hardest act of heroism is the life we lead as a family turns our usual idea of a hero on its head. It brings your philosophy full circle.

In one kind of heroism a person gives everything in a flash, burns out and is gone. A family asks something quite different of the mind.

An act of courage that takes a lifetime. To burn brightly for an instant and give everything you have is terribly hard, and then it’s over. Family life is a marathon. The world is still hard tomorrow, and the day after. You have to keep your balance, keep yourself in check and be there for the people you love, day after day, year after year.

The invisible scalpel at home. In a family you live with other people’s images and ideas, their tempers, frailties and crises. Here too the mind has delicate work to do. You feel your way by that sixth sense, trying to help the person beside you stay on their feet without wounding them or breaking something between you. No one awards a medal for it. No one looking in from an apartment window would even see it.

Coming down to earth every day. A family keeps us from disappearing forever into the endless virtual world of our imaginings. It’s our surest anchor in reality. A child, a partner, the chores, the things that have to be done: they bring us firmly down to earth and ask for our attention here and now. Those are the “two steps back” that save us from the madness of being all alone.

A family is a place where small acts of courage happen every day. You give your strength, you tire, you recover and go on looking after another mind. There’s your philosophy of the real world, alive and at work.

Living that unseen courage day after day takes tremendous patience. What keeps you from wearing yourself out? Is it the guiding star you carry in your mind, or the warmth of the people you do it for?

It hurts when people go.

Read the full dialogue. The author’s page has the Russian original and the other translations.