When the lights went out

‘Where was Moses when the lights went out?’

‘In the darkness’

Yesterday night the electricity stopped for some time. You will ask if there is a problem. I usually think that there’s no problem in this, too, but yesterday I realized how much we (or perhaps only I) depend on it. There was nothing urgent but I was just going to call a friend of mine, whom I hadn’t seen on-line for weeks on Skype, and I couldn’t. (When the electricity came he was not there.) And this was just the beginning of my inconveniencies. We found only two candles and it was not so light in the room but we had to reconcile with that. We expected everything to be normal in about 5 minutes but it didn’t happen this way. We decided to do something to fill our time because no one could do anything- I couldn’t read, my mother couldn’t solve crosswords, my father- to watch TV, my grandmother- to knit- we decided to have dinner. Some people think it is romantic- dinner at candles- in a way it is. However, it was not so convenient to take all the dishes and cutlery with a flashlight in the other hand.

The situation made me wonder about the times when there was no electricity. Ordinary people’s day should have stopped almost with the last sunbeams. You can’t stay in candles for 4-5 hours in winter, right? They exhaust the eyes. And my problem was the thought that I wouldn’t be able to read- my plans were ruined. However, after about 40 minutes everything was OK but the feeling that I depend so much on something (for contemporary people this is, probably, normal) didn’t make me feel good!