Gratitude to parents and the freedom to choose differently

Epigraph

I love my father.

George Gissing, A Life’s Morning, chapter XII, Emily Hood speaking to Dagworthy. She names her love for her father while speaking to someone who is using his predicament to pressure her into marriage. This is a fictional context, not an instruction to endure coercion.

What This Article Is About

A classic evening tea drama: porcelain rattles, the air is electric, and the ghost of a collective family cardiac arrest hovers over the table. The son, Pavel, informs his mother that he has had it up to here with the family workshop and is walking away into an entirely different career. His mother, Anna, immediately unholsters her trump card: "I worked the night shift, wrecked my spine, and never saw the light of day just so you could get your diploma!" Pavel ducks his head. If he starts explaining that he is simply sick of wood shavings and chisels, it instantly sounds as if his mother slaved away for nothing. Anna, meanwhile, feels that her son isn't merely switching jobs, but is ostentatiously flushing all her sleepless nights down the toilet alongside the very foundation he grew up on.

In this standard family brawl, three completely distinct things are tangled into a single knot: acknowledging the past, concrete ongoing commitments, and an individual’s right to steer their own future. Mashing them together is a guaranteed recipe for turning life into a bottomless debt pit. One can appreciate parental care to the depths of one’s soul while still decisively refusing to sign a contract to photocopy someone else’s life forever. By the same token, one can walk off into the sunset to build one's own life without abandoning an urgent customer order halfway through production on the shop floor. You won't find any legal formulas for filial duty or rosy guarantees of universal family bliss here. What you will find is an attempt to figure out where genuine gratitude ends and the mundane privatization of another adult's life begins—under the convenient cover of parental sanctity.

I. Gratitude Starts with What Actually Happened

Pavel remembers his childhood not from Mother’s Day cards, but from facts: Anna dragged him to sports practice through blizzards, tracked down scarce textbooks, and sat beside him when he was physically shaking before exams. Great? Absolutely. Does that make him a lifetime slave to the family lathe? Not in the slightest. Acknowledging parental input simply records reality; it doesn't mean agreeing that those textbooks came bundled with the right to decide where he works until retirement.

At the same time, honest memory is an unforgiving thing. There is no need to paste a compulsory pious smile over the past. If a mother worked two jobs while methodically running her son into the ground over every B grade, one does not cancel out the other. Real help does not annul inflicted harm, and enduring harm does not turn received care into a mirage. This isn't high school math where a minus and a plus cancel out to zero, and it is certainly no reason to invent an imaginary mother who is either a pristine saint or a mustache-twirling tyrant. Nobody requires cruelty to be excused just because "at least you were fed."

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle deliberated at length on parents, upbringing, and the colossal inequality of benefits between father and child. It sounds respectable until you remember that the ancient Greek model was a rigid patriarchal hierarchy where the paterfamilias wielded practically absolute power. Stretching that antique domestic code over a modern family is like trying to pay your subway fare with an ancient drachma: historically amusing, practically useless. Aristotle is helpful for reminding us that gratitude is complex and heterogeneous, but deciding who owns Pavel’s choices today requires modern thinking.

Anna has every right to recount just how brutal those shifts were without turning her reminiscences into a restaurant bill demanding immediate settlement. And Pavel can respect her grueling sacrifice without conceding that his mother's narrative is the only legitimate blueprint for their lives. Memories don't have to align down to the millimeter. Gratitude doesn't require singing in unison; it merely requires not stripping the other person of their own slice of the truth just to maintain a tidy, glossed-over portrait.

II. You Cannot Pay for Childhood with Your Own Biography

A bank loan is straightforward: borrow a million at interest, repay on schedule, clear the ledger—you're free. Parental care comes with no credit agreement because the child never applied to be born, never selected a guardian tariff plan, and never negotiated the diaper-changing rate card. That does not make care trivial—it is immense, priceless, and often lacks any monetary equivalent. But that is precisely why deriving the "creditor’s" boundless authority from the sheer immensity of the gift is pure logical fraud. The measurelessness of the good does not imply measureless authority to direct someone else’s destiny.

If Pavel stays behind shaving down stools solely to settle this existential tab, the ride risks running forever. How many years at the workbench square the mother's night shifts? Five? Ten? Until his hair turns gray? And what happens if, thirty years into his labor duty, his mother still sighs: "You abandoned me"? A debt without a receipt or a maturity date turns into a life sentence of an exam where the passing criteria shift with the examiner's mood. The problem here isn't that the son lacks gratitude; it’s that gratitude was appointed as prison warden.

That same Aristotle observed in Book IX that the claims of parents, friends, and benefactors are entirely different animals and must not be dumped into a single sack. This isn't an argument about how to calculate legal obligations to support parents; it's about common sense: past contributions cannot serve as a master key to all of a person’s life choices.

Pavel can readily help his mother out of sincere affection. Dropping by, fixing the roof, chipping in cash, spending a weekend—that is concrete, tangible help with clear boundaries. But laying one's life on the altar of her unfulfilled ambitions is an entirely different undertaking. Agreeing to it simply because saying "no" feels awkward is a surefire way to find yourself lying in someone else's coffin while still alive.

III. A Parental Sacrifice Can Be Real While Its Meaning Remains Contested

Anna insists she buried her career prospects for her son. Pavel can fully believe it was excruciatingly hard on her. There is no need to hastily concoct a theory that the mother secretly enjoyed playing the great martyr just to shake off a sticky sense of guilt. She could genuinely love him, could have been thrashing between three terrible options, and seen this as her only viable choice. But the word "sacrifice" does not make the son guilty of a catastrophe he was too young to even comprehend.

Acknowledging someone else's heavy cost does not mean accepting blame for their fate. A child depends on adult decisions, but was never seated on the board of directors casting a vote. An adult son is not obligated to retroactively sign off on inflated invoices for his own upbringing. Caring for one's mother is a natural human instinct; handing her power of attorney over your adult life as compensation for her past is absurd.

In The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, Immanuel Kant made a clean distinction: one’s own moral perfection is one thing, caring for another’s happiness is another entirely. You cannot forcibly make someone else's inner purpose your own. Kant is not acting as a trendy personal boundaries coach here, but as a rigorous philosopher: helping someone in their hardship and living out their unwritten novel for them are fundamentally different propositions.

Anna could stand to take a breath as well: the value of the years she lived through will not collapse simply because her son switches trades. What does she actually want? Perhaps she is simply terrified of being left alone in the workshop with the bookkeepers and clients; perhaps she wants the family business preserved, or elementary confirmation that her sacrifices weren't forgotten—we are not going to guess or hand out armchair diagnoses; motives must be derived from what is said, not assigned on her behalf. If the workshop genuinely needs extra hands, that is reason to discuss work arrangements according to real bandwidth and capabilities, rather than assuming that hiring an apprentice is magically accessible at the snap of a finger. If recognition is what is wanted, you discuss recognition. No dialogue guarantees a mother complete inner solace. But separating these items is vital; otherwise, the default answer to her every anxiety will be an attempt to treat a broken leg by decapitating the son's future.

IV. Inheriting a Value Does Not Require Repeating the Form

Pavel wants to teach the craft to young apprentices. In response, Anna clutches her heart: "So the family business means nothing to you!" Yet Pavel sees a direct continuity: it was in the workshop that he learned to feel the grain of the oak, endure monotonous labor, and respect tools. True succession often looks nothing like the source: an apple tree looks nothing like an apple, yet the apple grew on it. That said, proclaiming one's departure to be the "highest form of family devotion" is equally questionable: a mother is under no obligation to applaud such slick sophistry just because her son wrapped his exit in pretty paper.

Sometimes things are more blunt: Pavel simply detests the dust, the creaking joints, and stuffy family dogmas. In that case, there is no need to strain to invent "spiritual continuity" just to smooth over a dinner table blowout. One can respect an imparted skill while simultaneously trashing the rules by which that skill was exercised. Saying "this was useful, but it's time for me to move on" stings far worse than crooning fairy tales about family traditions, but it spares you years of acting in someone else’s play amid fake scenery.

In the Analects, filial piety is monumental. Confucius permits gentle remonstrance with parents, but immediately underscores the value of maintaining the father's way. Trying to extract a 21st-century hipster freedom manifesto from the ancient Chinese sage is comical. Confucianism rested on preserving ancestral order as the bedrock of virtue. Our conversation is a dispute with that tradition, not an effort to recruit Confucius into modern career coaching.

Taking inventory of an inheritance is not drafting an ad campaign. Pavel can quietly sort through his internal luggage: this manual dexterity stays, mother’s stubbornness stays, but this habit of living in the workshop with zero days off goes straight into the dumpster. Sorting this out is helpful for oneself, but naive to expect a mother to read the list and weep with joy. Another person’s disappointment does not evaporate just because you neatly color-coded your categories.

V. Dropping the Project Does Not Cancel Concrete Promises

Now let us descend from the philosophical heavens straight into the sawdust: Pavel has an unfinished oak sideboard hanging over his head, promised to a client by the end of the month. If he slams the door tomorrow with a pompous cry of "I am a free individual!", Anna is left stranded with a furious client. And that is no longer an existential quest for self-actualization; it is ordinary, garden-variety flakiness. Freedom of self-determination does not mean prior commitments vanish into thin air. One can close the chapter on woodworking forever, but regarding a specific undertaken task, an adult son must maturely consider the options: finish it himself, hand it over properly, or pursue an open, honest renegotiation of terms and deadlines. Naturally, strength and circumstances do not always permit finishing everything perfectly or finding an immediate successor. But even if the sideboard goes sideways, a screw-up on a single order does not appoint the mother supreme judge over every career choice her son makes for the rest of his life.

Specifics protect both sides. Anna has zero need to bring up morning sickness from thirty years ago to ask: "Who is finishing the job?" The question has an intelligible date and a concrete deadline. Perhaps Pavel overestimated his bandwidth, perhaps deadlines slipped, or perhaps the mother mistook a casual "we should wrap this up" for an ironclad contract. This must be addressed substantively, without turning a blown timeline into the Last Judgment on the measure of filial love.

Kant insisted on inner autonomy, but he would be intensely surprised to see someone use it as an excuse to skip out on the bill. Other people’s problems do not evaporate because an existential epiphany struck you. Untangling current affairs honestly without signing on for lifelong indentured servitude is an uncomfortable task requiring nerve and, quite possibly, cash. No guarantees of an easy, conflict-free parting exist in nature.

Pavel can practically assess: "I'll deliver the sideboard by the thirty-first, but come the first, I won't set foot on the shop floor." Anna may recognize the distinction—and still remain thoroughly displeased. There is no need to ascribe sinister hidden plots to her displeasure or brace for hysterics in advance: an adult conversation doesn't have to conclude with mutual standing ovations. The core gain here is much more modest: both parties finally see clearly which specific promise is currently being cleared away, and which future was never promised to the mother in the first place. And if the shop now requires another employee, that is a separate practical puzzle. The son may voluntarily help look for a replacement if he so chooses. But he is certainly under no obligation to serve as the perpetual stopgap in that barrel just because he was once raised and taught how to hold a chisel.

VI. Remembering Kindness Does Not Demand the Same Emotion Every Day

Following a grueling kitchen post-mortem, Pavel sits in his room and thinks with fury: "I can't even stand the sight of her! That means all my gratitude was a sham." Deep breath; calm down. Concluding that your entire moral architecture has collapsed just because your eyelid twitches at the sound of your mother's voice is a drastic overreaction. One can sincerely remember maternal kindness and, on this specific Tuesday, passionately crave relocation to another planet. Emotions, retrospective evaluations, and present actions are distinct floors of the psyche; they can stage a localized mutiny without turning a person into an ungrateful scoundrel.

Anna also has every right to be torn inside between private pride in an independent son and the wild urge to strangle him with a kitchen towel for mutiny on the ship. She is not an automaton programmed to switch into "wise, all-forgiving matriarch" mode on cue. But an emotional tempest is no justification for dictating an adult's life schedule. A gap always remains between "I am fuming" and "I demand you drop everything immediately." One can honestly say: "I am furious; give me three days of silence." That guarantees no domestic Zen, but it prevents the kitchen from devolving into a local branch of the Inquisition.

Kant did not build his ethics on whether a person feels cozy or not. Kantian duty is as unyielding as a granite slab, and it certainly wasn't engineered to slip behind one's back as an orthopedic cushion for psychological comfort. If there is no warmth today, that does not mean the past has been stripped of value. Pavel can respect his mother through clenched teeth and irritation. Or he can dial back contact entirely if the level of toxicity spikes. No daily hugging quotas exist.

Taking a break does not mean trampling everything good that passed between you. Remembering care carries no obligation to answer 3 a.m. phone calls merely to soothe the itch of guilt. Gratitude is not a shop window requiring a high-gloss polish for every family holiday. It can be experienced quietly, without hoisting flags of allegiance—especially when those flags demand your unconditional surrender.

VII. When the Past Becomes Leverage, the Topic Changes

At a certain point, Anna drops the workbench talk and breaks out the heavy artillery: "If you leave, it means you never loved me and my whole life was a mistake!" Let's not slap a clinical manipulator label on Anna, but let's record the mechanics precisely: past care is being used as a pry bar to jimmy open someone else's future. The dynamic is inverted: the sole proof of your love is declared to be the erasure of yourself. If Pavel begins proving the depth of his filial feelings, the trap snaps shut. The only escape is to shift the debate from the metaphysics of love to the dry question: "What, specifically, are you demanding of me right now?"

In George Gissing’s novel A Life’s Morning, the villain Dagworthy issues the heroine a classic Victorian ultimatum: he will spare her father from disgrace and trial only if Emily agrees to marry him. Emily still loves her father deeply, but flatly refuses to pay for his rescue through a coerced marriage and firmly rejects the blackmailer’s suit. Of course, a Sunday spat over a family woodshop is hardly grim Victorian literary blackmail. But the scene serves as an uncompromising logical counterexample: the intensity of affection does not legitimize every extortionate demand advanced in the name of a loved one. Loving your parents is fine, but it is no reason to sign on for arbitrary nonsense wrapped in the holy shroud of care—even if the novel offers no promise that refusal is ever easy or painless.

If matters escalate to overt threats, locked doors, or withholding basic sustenance, family diplomacy is over. The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) explicitly classifies control over movement, employment, and finances as domestic abuse. Obviously, the NHS website in Britain isn't dispatching a rescue squad to some provincial town, but it defines the substance accurately. When things turn dangerous, forgo theatrical exposure speeches. Priority one is physical and psychological safety, not proving your righteousness to relatives.

A boundary can also be drawn silently, strictly inside your own head. If you remain financially dependent on your mother's purse or share her roof, a proud declaration of independence could end with you spending the night at a train station. Recognizing unreasonable demands while lacking the immediate resources to slam the door is a standard phase of growing up, not an occasion for beating your chest in shame. Gratitude does not demand submitting to abuse, but this article does not demand kamikaze leaps in the name of abstract adulthood either.

VIII. Care Can Continue While Changing Its Shape

Anna is lonely; she wants to see her son daily. Pavel offers a compromise: "I won't work in the shop, but on Saturdays I can haul materials and sort out the invoices." A decent gesture, but there is no guarantee the mother wants those invoices. You cannot foist a convenient chore onto someone and cheerily tick the box: "Debt settled, sign here." Anna may well snort: "I don't need your supply runs." And the son has the right to reply: "That is all I can offer." An offer remains an offer, not an all-purpose remedy for parental grief.

The greatest hazard occurs when care devolves into clandestine barter. The son fixes his mother's faucet harboring the secret hope that she'll finally stop badgering him about his career change; the mother feeds him pastries banking on him coming to his senses and returning to the machine. This market of unvoiced expectations is guaranteed to go bankrupt in a blaze of recrimination. One can help, but nobody issues a policy guaranteeing emotional calm in return. You can care for a relative knowing full well a splash of sour resentment will come flying back. Enduring humiliation in the process is required of no one.

Aristotle with his taxonomy of friendships and Confucius with filial deference offer us no off-the-shelf calendar for weekend visits to mom. This apparatus must be jury-rigged on the fly to fit personal reality. The form of involvement might be microscopic, substantial, or stalled entirely for a spell. Measuring a person’s moral worth by the tally of holiday cards mailed or the volume of bank transfers is an exercise for clinical bureaucrats.

Pavel can drop by the shop occasionally to lend a hand for a couple of hours if he actually enjoys it and the parameters are strictly drawn. A day holding a grooving plane does not instantly re-enslave him to the family business. Anna can also learn to talk to her son about movies and the weather, leaving the workshop at the doorstep. And if that fails, communication can wither down to perfunctory New Year greetings. That is neither tragedy nor triumph; it is simply life, and such an outcome does not mean gratitude has expired.

IX. A New Choice Does Not Have to Prove the Parents' Life Was a Mistake

The dumbest way to assert independence is to start proving to your mother that her workshop is a dismal relic of the past unworthy of a human life. At that moment, what she hears isn't "I want to teach," but "you threw away forty years on trash." Naturally, she digs in to the death. Choosing your own way does not require depreciating someone else's path. One can genuinely marvel at how deftly a mother handles a chisel while flatly refusing to spend the rest of one’s own days at that identical bench. A parent’s life does not become a mistake merely because you chose not to photocopy it.

Nor is there any need to lay on phony syrup. If Anna keeps the books in a scrawled school notebook and pays her assistants late, Pavel is not required to sing praises to her methods just to keep the peace. Criticizing a concrete screw-up is normal. Generalizing it into "you're all backwards fossils ruining my youth" is an infantile cop-out. And the mother needs to pump the brakes as well: her son's choice to become a teacher is not an insult to the family tree, just a different route.

Returning to Gissing: Emily’s refusal to marry Dagworthy does not make her an all-purpose role model for every life dilemma. The literary illustration is narrower: devotion to family must not turn into a subscription to bondage. At the same time, rebelling against parents does not automatically make someone a genius. Pavel’s new choice might turn out to be completely idiotic: schools pay pennies, children scream, nerves fray. So what? It will be his idiocy and his bruised shins.

And, for the record, if his mother points out an actual hole in his business plan, an adult Pavel is entirely free to say: "You're right, I dropped the ball there; I'll stay at the shop part-time for now." Changing your mind based on sober arguments is a mark of maturity, not weakness. The right to choose otherwise includes the right to choose the exact same thing, but under the direction of your own head. Gratitude has nothing to do with it: it is part of a relationship, not a leash dictating your running radius.

X. Gratitude Can Remain Incomplete

The climax in the kitchen will hardly resemble a Hollywood melodrama. Anna will not embrace her son through enlightened tears: "Go, my boy, I understand everything now!" Pavel will not stride into the sunset with a shining halo and a maternal blessing in his pocket. More likely, the conversation winds down into heavy silence, unwashed dishes, and a pounding headache. But if Pavel walked away without offering a false promise to stay at the lathe until his twilight years, that alone is a massive victory. Exposing a divergence of interests hurts, but it is infinitely more honest than suffocating one another for years in the embrace of a bogus family idyll.

Pavel does not need to wait until every shred of guilt inside dissolves into absolute Zen before stepping toward the door. You can leave with your gut churning, so long as your stride is steady. And a mother needs time to grieve the wreckage of her illusions; denying her that right is purely selfish. Expecting mutual, unqualified enthusiasm is the ultimate trap keeping people stuck in the swamp of dependence.

There is no reason to romanticize this family deadlock either. The pending sideboard order requires distinct, sober consideration under its real terms—whether completed on schedule, handed off, or openly renegotiated. If the mother develops a genuine need for support—health-related, say—that issue can be addressed on its own merits, without substituting practical help with smug lectures on individuation, while remembering that any actions are bounded by known strength, consent, and means. And if talk descends into overt threats, no poetic "incompleteness of relations" justifies remaining in a hazardous conversation. Life rarely yields a single, tidy epic convenient for everyone; what matters far more is that through the domestic static, separate, decent acts endure within explicit bounds.

Pavel has no reason to prove his mother shortchanged him. Anna has no reason to snap her son over her knee to prove the worth of her motherhood. True adulthood begins precisely where the past is accorded its due respect, while refusing to pay for it with one’s own future.

What This Means in Practice

If the environment is calm and nobody is hurling the family china, take a sheet of paper and conduct an audit. Sort things into three independent piles:

What the parent specifically did for you and what you are genuinely grateful for (without sarcasm or stretching).
What you specifically promised to do right now (finish that cabinet, pay the utility bill, take the cat to the vet).
Which specific future decision of yours is being peddled to you under the guise of "filial duty."

There is no need to draft an indictment for the Hague Tribunal. Half the events from childhood are remembered hazily; the other half you know only from your mother's telling. Nobody ever needs to see this paper—burn it afterward if you like; don't write anything at all if you're lazy or it feels unsafe.

Now look at the demands of your elders. Do they have an intelligible edge and an expiration date, or are they an open-ended demand for lifelong servitude? Just skip the paranoia: not every maternal complaint is a shadowy lizard-people conspiracy. Her back might genuinely ache, and you might have a genuine broken promise hanging over your head. But between "help carry the groceries" and "marry the person mom picked out," lies a canyon. We are examining ethics here, not drafting a restraining order or assigning an ICD diagnosis code.

If a conversation is possible at all and you feel safe, speak calmly and stick to business: acknowledge the parent's actual contribution ("Mom, thank you for helping me through school"), state your choice ("I am leaving to work elsewhere"), and separately address concrete involvement ("I will sort out the order; on weekends I can help with heavy boxes"). Do not expect the parent to burst into happy tears and bake a cake honoring your independence: adult dialogue is not conducted for applause. After talking, review the outcome: did you panic and promise another five years of hard labor? Did you trash past efforts out of spite? Is there a concrete operational question dangling without a resolution? And if threats appear, don't play the invincible gladiator of psychological warfare, and don't rush to burn bridges if you still depend on someone else's money or roof: in that scenario, stopping in time and locating accessible, safe support matters far more than forcing reconciliation at any cost or proving maturity with a theatrical door slam.

Key quotation

I wish to leave you.

George Gissing, A Life’s Morning, chapter XII; Emily Hood addresses Dagworthy, who is keeping the conversation within a coercive arrangement. The last sentence of her speech is selected. It is not addressed to her father or a universal instruction to leave danger immediately.

Connections between traditions

Comparison	Similarity and limit
Aristotle's different family claims ↔ a particular present matter	A past benefit matters, but does not replace examining different claims; the historical hierarchy is not adopted wholesale.
Confucian filial reverence ↔ acknowledgment of parental contribution	Respect has substance; demands to continue a father's way differ substantially from the article's contemporary independence.
Gentle remonstrance in the Analects ↔ disagreement with continuing respect	Objection can exist within a relationship; the source retains hierarchical limits and does not establish conversational safety.
Kant's setting one's own end ↔ the limit of a parental life project	Another person cannot make an aim internally mine on my behalf; this is a philosophical distinction, not a psychological technology.
Gissing's Emily retaining attachment while refusing coercion ↔ gratitude without surrendering the future	A literary counterexample separates love from imposed consent; it does not establish the effectiveness of a family practice.
NHS support concerning control ↔ the limit of discussing matters together	Safety requires separate attention; British information does not verify a service's availability in the reader's location.

This map establishes no agreement among all traditions. Philosophical argument, historical instruction, fiction, and contemporary support information perform different tasks. The proposed practice is the article's application of distinctions, with neither proven effectiveness nor a guarantee of restored relationships.

Sources

George Gissing, A Life’s Morning, chapter XII. English original, novel published in 1888; Gutenberg 4312, digital version updated 27 December 2020. Chapter XII's context and an adjacent passage from XI were read; reading the whole novel is not claimed. Both short quotations are Emily Hood's speech, with original Russian translations in the paired edition.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.11–12, IX.1–2. Translated by D. P. Chase, Gutenberg 8438, updated 27 March 2021. Selected passages and their context were read. A historical philosophical model, not contemporary law.
The Analects of Confucius, IV.18–20. Version from the Chinese Classics, translated into English by James Legge; the selected book IV context was read. Comparison preserves differences concerning hierarchy; the complete corpus was not used.
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics, Introduction, I–V. Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, Gutenberg 5684, updated 27 January 2021. Selected sections concerning freely setting ends, duty, and other people's happiness were read. The digital heading's date of 1780 is not used as a verified date for the original Tugendlehre.
NHS, Domestic violence and abuse. Reviewed 23 June 2026; sections on family abuse, control, support, and safety concerning departure were read. British context; services local to the reader were not verified.

About the authors

Andrey Zarinsh is the author and founder of United Wisdom. He explores inner transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut is a co-author of United Wisdom. Alongside her research, she seeks to test these ideas in practice and observe how principles of unity and mutual understanding work in real relationships between people and cultures. Instagram: @ilkutki.