At the end of a long exhausting day...

If we could breath under the waters, we wouldn't bother to learn to swim.

All humans are animals but some humans are more animals than others

In the animal kingdom, there is nothing called 'stranger'. I have never thought of it before, but I doubt that if a frog comes across another frog, it hasn't met before, it will 'think' of it as a 'stranger'. They might even start jumping together (what frogs do, I think, not sure if they enjoy any other activities at first encounter) without introductions. What I am trying to say here is that, the concept of what we call a "stranger" exists only in the human kingdom. Now, the frog might not stop to introduce itself to the other frog (before they go jumping together), but we animals of the human kingdom, would have to (if we are to jump together that is). Frogs know frogs right away, the way we do too. But when we come across a stranger, we wonder, in fact, if he isn't actually an animal, an asshole, a dickhead, or a human. Many times we just assume, or have to assume, the stranger is actually the former rather than the latter, as a survival technique. Wait. Let me explain, if you have been working on growing your muscles, and you have trained your brain to become fearless of fellow men, strangers, good for you, you are not concerned with what comes next, this is for those who still haven't.

I have always admired Athens but was always jealous of Sparta.

It is said that humans are the only animals who have morality or can make a moral judgment. That is only partially true because only some humans can. It is more correct to say that humans are the only animals who can fear, and sometimes live in fear of, their own genre, or other humans. I haven't seen a cow look suspiciously at another cow, or a donkey, or a bee, or even a cockroach. Those are some of the animals I have seen with my bare eyes. Lest I sound like my father, let me explain to you that my knowledge about animals is, at best, poor, but my father made sure, against our obvious boredom, to lecture us about all sorts of facts and oddities from the animal kingdom, on one hand to show off his knowledge and on the other to explain to us that it is humans who are the animals not the other way around. This enlightened wisdom does not only come from having to grow up in a village but more from his passion for animal channels. He would watch any channel showing animals from animaux (his favorite) to the national geographic or chasse et peche, or any Arab TV channel in the wake of the death of an Arab leader. Of the 700 channels he could watch, from news to movies or music, he would stare for hours at a tiger lurking for a deer. One day, I watched with him. Usually, everyone would leave the room. But I stayed. So the tiger was waiting for the right moment to jump on the deer, or was it a zebra? This took more than I had planned. As usual, in the meantime, my dad would be the narrator -and from time to time even a translator probably assuming I am deaf- commenting on what is (not) happening on the screen. "Wild life teaches you a lot, he would say, see the patience?". A lot of time passes before anything happens, giving my father plenty of time to tell me about other episodes he had watched. Back to the tiger, who made a slight move, he would start telling me what will happen next, and next is not run, hit, catch, eat. You wish. He watches with such an anticipation for what he knows will come and surprisingly he is equally moved by the ending. Then I learn, this he had watched ten times already. My father went on telling stories from the book of animals of Al Jahiz; I was thinking: the deer ran as fast as it could but when it was caught fiercely by the tiger, it knew this was the end. It didn't fight back.

Athenians worried about the nature of things; Spartans knew better.

I heard this joke a while ago: what is the difference between a church and a casino? In the casino, you pray from the bottom of your heart. I remembered it recently, when I was in a taxi in Amman. The good thing about the Amman taxi system is that you have a counter, but the bad news is you cannot hop into one of those taxis that already have other female passengers, under an undeclared universal female taxi pact. If you want to bring someone, a woman, back to religion, send them to Amman without a car, and let them take a taxi. In a taxi too, you pray from the bottom of your heart.

Athenians pursued knowledge, Spartans were busy.

Some seek to understand, others take action. Both are guided by fear, baseless or not, it leads to the same conclusion. I was reading Amin Maalouf's "In the name of identity" recently, where he says "fear might make anyone take to crime". The book is very insightful and an easy read but if things go wrong in taxi -or anywhere else, I doubt I will recite excerpts from Maalouf's book. While Maalouf seeks to understand why the world is so violent, I have decided to take self defense classes. I am not a tiger, that's why, but I refuse to be a deer.

Don't fight it...

One without enemies is one without character.

Mondays

No, it's not one of those days! It's just another Monday.

Listen to silence

You don't know what noise is until you have heard silence.

The Fall

I have an emotional weakness (sometimes physical) for the fall season. For some reason, it awakens in me nostalgic feelings and sets my mood to a sort of a reception mode. It is the fall rather than summer that is supposed to be the leisure time. These are the laziest months of the year, the days to curl up under a woolen blanket and dream, maybe remember. This is the season that brings back childhood memories and feelings. The sight of small kids wearing school costumes and colorful water bottles makes my stomach tickle as it did on my first day at school. The rain, the slippery streets, the crowds under umbrellas are to my eyes what music is to my ears. There is a feeling of cosiness in the sudden darkness that welcomes us earlier than we had expected. The fall is not a somber season as many people think and that feeling that you might confuse with sadness is rather charged with high voltages of innocence and peace.

Beyond good and evil

I have experienced both: starving to the point of stealing food and eating to the point of throwing up. I assure you that the effects of the second are much worse. The first actually feels good!

Learning

Unlike a Marathon, learning in itself is not worthwhile if you do not enjoy it along the way, because there certainly is no finish line.

Cooking thought

Writing is an attempt at conquering time and that is exactly what you lose in the process.

At the coffee house: Motion

I am at the coffee house. I need to feel normal again. I need to see real people doing most ordinary stuff. That will help. I find a small table for two in the corner. It seemed perfect for someone like me whose only purpose there is sit and watch people. Watching others has always been a real satisfaction to me. Strangers help me regain normality. Without them I lose sense of reality. Three guys on the table across are chatting loudly. One of them is talking less than the others, but looks interested. On my right is a couple holding hands. A girl in her early twenties enters. She is wearing a short blue dress, and is looking happy. She stops for a few seconds and scans the room quickly, barely moving her eyes. She looks beautiful I realized. As she was about to turn and leave, one of the three guys calls her name. She puts a fake smile and walks towards him. She passes by my table and I saw closely that she is not as beautiful as I thought at first. Some people look better motionless. She is one of those. She will look stunning when she dies, I thought. Suddenly, the thought that all those people are not real, occurred to me. They could all be figments of my imagination. I think that if I move and reach out to that girl with my hand, she will fade away. Nothing in this coffee house seems real anymore. I need a sign, anything that defies science to know for sure, maybe a man who walks through the wall, or a lamp standing upside down from the floor up, or a rabbit in a costume ordering coffee. Nothing of that happens. Everything looks ordinary, just not real. Not to me. I pause. A sort of nothingness invades my mind. I pause. “je pense donc je suis”, is the best thing that has ever been thought, I decide. I pay my bill, is this a real bill? Is this real money? It doesn’t matter. I sip the last residues in my coffee and leave.

At home: Motionless

I am at home, the whiteness of the walls start to weigh heavy on my chest. I decide to leave but my feet refuse to obey my mind’s orders. My body is numb. Nothing moves inside me. Maybe that’s what happens when we die. Our consciousness is still alive, some people call it soul, but our body no longer responds. Am I dead? I want to move my hand to remove the doubt, but my body remains stiff, unresponsive. Am I rehearsing the moment of my death and relishing it? Even my eyes stopped moving. You know someone is dead when you look in their eyes. You cannot mistake that emptiness that looks back at you. The whiteness of the wall filled my eyes with void. They just stare without seeing. Whiteness, rather than blackness, is void. I used to wonder what blind people see. I imagine that inside them, behind those outer eyes, there are other eyes, thousands of other seeing eyes, eyes of a whole audience, staring at a theater’s curtain that never opens. I always had this image until one day a blind guy was asked this question on TV. What do you see? he was strangely faced with answering. He said: I don’t know what ‘seeing’ means. But I thought: what does ‘not seeing’ mean? Now, I am the blind. I freak out. I want to see. I shake off the numbness in my eyes and I look. Everything around me starts to feel alive. The old radio by my side is about to jump up and start walking around the room. I can almost see it floating at the level of my eyes and say: enough of that crap. The green plant at the far end of the room is moving its leaves. Is it dancing? The small useless decorations are loosely roaming in the air. The room is no longer empty. I am no longer alone. The ground is slowly moving. It is circling around me clockwise. The painting on the wall behind me is suddenly in front of me. The people in it start jumping out and filling the room. Suddenly, I hear music, and couples start embracing and dancing. One couple has stumbled on my plant. Where am I? The whiteness is fading. The room is gradually being filled with colors, as if someone is painting the scene at that right moment. I am part of the scene. I am part of the crowd. No, I am the tip of a painter’s stroke, a marginal persona in the background. I jump and without thinking, I open the door and slam it behind me.

Home

I always wondered, what's home? or more precisely where is home? At times, I thought that home was not a place but a time, sometimes a person, or a thought, at others home was always here and now. My home was that spot between his shoulder and his elbow, I wrote once. Home is where you want to escape to and sometimes escape from. An ocean could be home to your eyes, a book home to your mind, and that tree behind your grandpa's house could be home to your heart. Home is always where problems seem bigger than they are but smaller than everyone else thinks. Home is that key hanging on the wall but used to open a door that no longer is there. Home is that small beach house that only exists in your dream, that you might never build but keep furnishing in your thoughts and painting and repainting its walls. This small huge planet can be your home but also that small box where you hid your teenage poems, a few memories, and your first pregnancy test. Home is always where it could have been nicer only if a little bigger, smaller, a little brighter, older, a little newer. Home is where there is always something that needs to be fixed but you never do, it keeps staring at you until you stop noticing. It is that addiction to loneliness that you call peace. For once I thought that a mattress and a pillow and that dark hallway through which my feet know their way blindly to the bathroom were home. It doesn't matter what it is or where or when and maybe who, I thought, it is where you will always go when the lights go off.

A feel good post?

So what is so exciting about achieving a goal? is it the achievement itself? or the challenges you overcome along the way? The harder it is to reach it, the more you are likely to savor it (my father would rather say, the more you are likely to appreciate it, but that's beyond the point here) and the bumpier the road, the more you enjoy the arrival (after you throw up!). You don't enjoy the obstacles or the challenges while you are at them, you only do in retrospect. You know all of that and you cannot disagree. I do. I wouldn't mind an easy accomplishment and I would make sure to enjoy it equally and be thankful that it came the easy way. I wouldn't mind winning the lottery for example. BUT, the real achievement, or shall I say project, is defying your own self into going beyond your own potential, that sounds lame now that I hear myself saying it, but it is true. That is the only challenge that you would enjoy winning over only because no one but you know what it cost you. Such achievements are usually the ones you hardly notice and rarely congratulate yourself for.

What if?

The most complicated notions are best explained in the most simple words. Ask kids. Ask them about freedom, love, hope, pain, justice, you choose. They give you easy answers but ones you wait for inspiration to put into words. "All grown ups started off as children", the great man behind the "little Prince" said, they just forgot. They grew up; they had to behave like grown ups. That's what they have been told. That's what they believe. Then they just got used to it. They could no longer think simple. They now think that thinking simple is not thinking big. Kids know that it is the little things in life that matter. Today I woke up in a bad mood, for no reason at all. Maybe, I had a bad dream. But all day, because of that mood, I have been thinking about my life, and asking all those questions that start with the evil "what if"; What if I need to go away? what if I need to change career? What if I need to get better use of my time? what if I need to change goals if I had any? What if I did this and what if I didn't do that? I knew that I was asking the wrong questions and I knew that I wasn't really looking for answers. I was just thinking like grown ups. Later during the day, I craved for ice cream and it was in that cup of ice cream that I found the answer. All I wanted was ice cream. Freud might have had a different opinion but I know better. Kids know what they want right away. When they want ice cream, they just say so. When they are happy, they smile, and they might even laugh. You might think they confuse laughter for happiness. You are wrong. They know better.

Noise

I could hear my thoughts in my dream. They had a voice, my own, and it was too loud that I wanted to tell them to shut up. It was like I was lecturing, or preaching, only I wasn't. I didn't see myself in my dream, there were only floating thoughts with a voice, a loud one, and my own. One of the thoughts was: How can I hear my own thoughts? I don't need to if they are already there, and why do they have a voice? and why is it my own? and why don't you just shut the F*** up? and since my inner hearing sense was so alert, why couldn't I be listening to some classical music now instead or a stand-up comedy? I did actually throw a few jokes but I didn't laugh. Then I woke up and it was noisy outside too.

Expressions

A sad half-smile is more powerful than a tear and a tear is more meaningful than a sob but anger is the truest form of emotional expression.

Peace

Peace is rain on green meadows.

Miscalculations

Force yourself to laugh and you were never sadder.

Don't drink wine when you are sad. It creeps down your throat right to that burning lump.

When you are sad, look in the mirror and note down one more mistake.

The Fall

It's about to rain now. If my grandfather was here now he would probably tell me how the next olive season would be like. I say, when it rains, it feels right. Good things usually happen to me during the fall, not so much during the summer for instance. But that's not the reason why I like fall; on the contrary, it is because I like it that good things happen. Not so clear. I see. But I will find better ways to explain it to myself.

Touched

Wine of wisdom wrote on his blog:

"I'm afraid that at some point I'll hang on to words and mistake them for life itself. The less i live the more I write - a formulae of exhaustion. I mustn't live in words; words must dwell within me."

I can't say why but these words go straight to the heart. The full post might give an answer.