I wrote “Three Days and Three Nights” in August 2008, during the Beijing Olympic Games.

 It wold be more honest to say that it was born by fire, the fire of despair over the fact that in front of our eyes, in our unconscious presence a certain line was crossed, an unprecedented level of falsehood and hypocrisy was reached. And this feeling, this certainty coming straight from my belly that something very, very bad and irreversible had just happened, the consequences of which we would all have to suffer. When one happens to see with such uncompromising clearness the truth of a situation, it is a completely different experience to reading accounts describing spectacular crisis moments in the history of mankind. The history, in which, luckily, we did not participate. But how to face a truth  which has to be experienced for real, without “anaesthetic”?

To write about it, I needed to keep a certain distance from my feelings, maybe a touch of auto-irony, to cool down a little that fire which was burning inside me. From a perspective I can see that it was a moment when I lost all remaining hope in our world’s powerful people’s ethics or any rudimentary sense of decency one could rely on. And if not that, then at least the ability to see the long-term consequences of current decisions, which could give a minimal feeling of security. Maybe this is how the queen from the fairy-tale I have evoked in the article felt – once she lost all illusion that anything but gold and power mattered for the king. At that moment she had to face the difficult truth that she could rely only on herself, that all depended on whether she would find enough love and courage to stand by the living creature, no matter what price she would have to pay.

And it makes me realize that my position is much better than hers, because I am not left to my own devices. Because I know other people who make such choice not only mentally but who take action as well. When the illusion is shattered, peace returns, energy which was used to fight with it is reclaimed. I know that when someone makes the choice I am talking about here, they don’t need to feed on cheap illusions. A space opens for us to talk about what is true and important. This is the reason I keep this text on our website, even though time has passed since the last Olympic Games. Priceless time. I suppose we have only “two days  and two nights” left, so the question: “Where are you, Queen?” - is more and more urgent.

                                                                        Anija MiÅ‚uÅ„ska