I have not posted anything for a long time, and here is a thought that has been in my mind; nothing special. ------
When you are young, the world is two dimensional to you. It is either big or small, strong or weak, tall or short. You go to school and learn in physics that the world is not only three-dimensional but that time weave through it to add a fourth mysterious dimension. You then grow older and the world goes back to the way it always was; two-dimensional. The only difference is that the reference points are not the same; it is now either rich or poor, friend or foe, higher or lower. And you wonder, how comes the physicists got it so wrong.
Late at night, sleeping on the sofa, I dreamt of you walking on the stars above my head and tearing away the peace inside my heart. The echo of your steps awakens the old pain in me, the pain that I paid so dearly to forget. Not that I ever forgot it, but I pretended to, and I am always good at pretending. I am so good that I sometimes go around feeling that I have already forgotten you, that you are part of my past, my history. That nothing connects my heart beats with your light steps on the stars above my bed. All goes well until one night I hear the soft echo again, I hear your whispering sound to the star relating a story that could have been if we had ever continued being the me and you that occupied that little space called happiness once upon the time. Here goes all the sleep from my eyes, all the dreams that I was planning to watch tonight, and the desires I would have like to concentrate on. Here goes the control that kept my pain in check, my heart beat steady and my smile semi-functioning in a world that never allowed my young innocent love to survive.
Obviously I am feeling sentimental today, maybe it is the jetlag.
If I say that my mother is an emotional person I would have made the understatement of my life. If I say that she is hysterically emotional I would have made a closer approximation to reality.
Being the older son in a family where the father was traveling abroad most of the year (from my tender age of ten), I had to endure the full brunt of my mother’s hysteria. As a child not knowing how to deal with this sort of emotions and unable to handle it, my strategy must have been to shut myself completely in front of such a force. As time went by, I was more entrenched in this attitude that I grew not knowing how to deal with emotions. Or to say it better, I know how to deal with emotions in only one way, being completely unavailable.
Only after getting married and being through my intense life situations that I recognized how stupid I am when it comes to emotional intelligence. I remember dreams seeing myself as a big hard shell with a soft inside, and I knew that my challenge is expose this soft inner core to the sunlight again. This is not an easy challenge for someone who lived 37 years an impeccable rational life. And although I am not where I would like to be, I am going there.
This might be just a personal account of how rationality was born within me, but I am wondering if the birth of rationality in our society had a similar root. The world faced with inexplicable irrational behavior of chaotic masses restored to the only option available, being extremely rational. If this is the case, then our society will be faced with a similar dilemma to mine, how to balance emotions with reason. To live completely out of a rational point of view is not only undesirable, but also strips life out of its joy. It is the reason why we all stressed, why we are sick and why we are at war. A step back for our society to not only understand emotions, but to feel them is a must if we to survive as a healthy evolving species.
In 1961, the Russians divided the conquered city of Berlin along ideological lines, separating friends, families and changing lives forever. America was on freedom side then. It took history forces 28 years to topple the wall down and reunite the nation again.
Today, America is dividing the conquered city of Baghdad along sectarian lines, separating friends, families and changing lives forever. The similarities cannot escape me, and I wonder, how long it would take history forces to topple this one down, and who will be propelling the change. I doubt that it will be America this time around, those who erect barriers are the least inclined to see them gone.
Is history repeating itself with a dull rerun of an old plot? Are the old actors playing the same old game with different roles enacting by each? We know who is the villain but who is going to be the hero this time around?
As far as I remember, I want to belong to something, some group, some fraternity, some club, some like minded people. But whatever I have joined, it didn’t take me long to discover that I don’t belong there. Even when it came to group of people who I thought share the same mindset with me. I always found that somehow, I didn’t belong there. This of course enforced my feeling of being a misfit. To put it in nicer term, I called myself a nomad, because I don’t belong.
When I joined my new work, I started t work in a group in ways that I was not used to before. I was more engaged with everything and everyone that I started to feel for the first time that I belong to something. The strange “coincidence” is that this team carries the logo “Non Solus” which means not alone in Latin. Isn’t that surprising?
I have talked about self-improvement as a way of life in my last post. I hope I didn’t sound as if bragging about my life and my superior stance (that I follow self-improvement), because I wasn’t. Self-improvement means different things to different people, and none of them is more superior or higher than the other. When you try to break your barriers, get out of your shell, do something that you are not used to do; that is self-improvement (at least in my opinion). So if I am a grumpy looking guy who is striving to add a smile to his face, the day this smile will shine naturally on my face will be a day of triumph for me. If I am a bashful or timid person and cannot assert myself in public, the day I can speak one sentence in front of an audience with full assertion would be a big day in my life.
Chani, that is the standard of self-improvement for me; it is not the hard-core, go ahead in life picture that you must have imagined. I do not belittle of anyone’s experience or choices in life, we are all free to live according to what pleases us. Also, I don’t believe that any values or issues that are important of us today are itched on stone. We are organic beings and we evolve as our life goes; what is important for us today might be without any value tomorrow. This is because we are moody, or don’t have set of rules to govern our lives, it is just because as we change we see the world from different angles and we choose differently. In this way, maybe we can understand more of the people we have been at odds with one day.
