Boxing choice.

During my life, I made a few important choices. Some of them are better than the others, but I think I do not regret any of them. Better to say I do not regret it strongly.

Some choices though keep me up at night sometimes wondering what would happen if I made a different choice. Would be my life end-up any better or would I end up even worse than I am today. You can see a healthy portion of my personal pessimism right here.

Did I actually have any choice at all? Maybe I did not and all of it is my delusion.

Take a look at this picture, which I made on May 1st, 1972 at the beginning of a May Celebration Parade. Two of my school friends, Igor and Nikolay and I as a little shrimp sandwiched between them. Do you see the problem? I am the smallest of the bunch.

Yes, this time I was weak and small and generally not healthy. But nobody at the time thought what was it.

And I was bullied at a school. The first lesson weak and strange kids find everywhere in a world is the humans are cruel creatures and their kids are cruelest of them all. They like to pray on weak.

So, the first choice I made in my life as I can recall was to get somehow stronger and fight back. I chose boxing. There was a boxing club for kids in a sports hall for the shipbuilding yard my father was working for. I got there and asked to be included.

The involvement with this was rather short, a few months only and ended badly, but I had some measure of success before that. I got seriously stronger, I learned how to fight and hit. Hit hard. I learned box dancing. I even confronted my bullies and fought against them with great success. That was easy since they were members of the same boxing club.

One day the boy who was most annoyed with me during the training attack me with the presence of the crowd boys around us in a dressing room. The gloves were already off, but fists still have bandages from under the gloves. This was brutal and loud. But I won the engagement with a clear knockout.

Well... fire extinguisher from a wall may have something to do with a knockout part. He hit a head on it, but this was acceptable within the rules of the fight. I won. He never bulled me again ever. Nobody from this crowd ever did. This was a point.

But this also was the last time I was in a boxing club.

A few days later I felt something really wrong with me. I felt sleep in a class at the school. Never happened before. I started to feel the dizzy and light head. Next Sunday was a school competition of physics and I was planning to go there but felt sleep right on the stairway outside my apartments.

Little I knew this was the last of my days attending school this year. After that, I missed the entire 8th grade completely and spend almost a year for the next 3 years in different hospitals, barely escaping with my life.

That is a boxing choice for you.