The Perfect Fairytale

A lot of us girls think of ourselves as princesses in a fairytale. We await our prince in shining armor to save us from the fire-breathing dragon so we can live happily ever after. But the thing is, real life is not a fairytale. Real life is a long tortuous road with continuous obstacles in the way, and when the road becomes smooth for some time, we are taken by surprise when rocks start hurling down the mountain and onto our path. In real life, there’s pain, there are tears, there are bad decisions and worse actions. There are mistimed steps, unspoken words, closed doors, high fences and extreme uncontrollable emotions. Real life is charred by all that so that our moments of joy become just that; moments.

But then they say that things are known by their opposites. Without the pain, how will we know what pleasure feels like? Without the tears, would we be able to appreciate the tear? Without the scorching heat and dryness of the weather, would we appreciate the cool breeze and the rain? Then we go back to the idea the highlights of our lives happen in moments; short bursts of laughter in the middle of long hours of tears. In others words; moments, just moments…

But then a shawl is woven out of three main fibers, a shawl that enwraps you and helps you survive the cold bitter winters, and look forward for that next moment. A shawl that makes the tortuous roads in between those moments smoother than they are. Those fibers are called; dreams, hopes and aspirations.

So you’ve read 266 words right now, but right down the three words that you will carry with you through the day….Then tomorrow try to remember what three words you remember from this post…

We grow great by dreams. All big men are dreamers. They see things in the soft haze of a spring day or in the red fire of a long winter’s evening. Some of us let these great dreams die, but others nourish and protect them; nurse them through bad days till they bring them to the sunshine and light which comes to those who sincerely hope that their dreams will come true.

- Woodrow Wilson

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PS image courtesy of google images

Of Power and Power Outages

If you’ve ever lived in Africa then you probably experienced power outages at a regular basis. Some countries have the rationing system, where each region is given electricity for a certain time. My aunties used to call KPLC (Kenya -lack 0f – Power and Lighting Company), pinch their kids and say, “see, the kids are crying, can you please hurry up.”

Seeing that customer (dis)service that they have, a common response used to be, “We already announced the power outage in the newspaper. Don’t you read the papers?”

Then the debate would shift to why these women don’t read the papers. Totally not the point.

A funny Mombasa thing always happens when the power is back on. Members of the whole neighborhood collectively scream, “Hizo!!” (there it is) It has become the cue for knowing when the power comes back on. If you’re asleep you’d probably wake up from the noise.

Personally I’ve always seen some advantage to power outages (the main word here being ‘some’), but have you ever stared at the sky when the whole city is engulfed in darkness? The star-studded sky is so beautiful it can bring tears to your eyes. Now if you live in the more developed part of the world, then you probably don’t get the privilege of such a sight.

So maybe it’s a phrase that every cloud has a silver lining and there’s always light at the end of the tunnel, but my fellow Swahili friends can actually use “Stars shine brighter when there’s no power” and “After every power outage comes a loud ‘hizo’!”

  Guess that’s it for now. Leave your comments below, feel free to share and subscribe.

Image courtesy of google images

The Blessing of A New Day

Recently I was listening to the tafsir of surat Al-Asr in English (you can find it in this link) and they were saying that sadly enough, even though the surah itself was talking about the significance of human being’s limited time on Earth and how he should utilize it, people tend to read it quickly during salaat when they’re in a rush to go somewhere else. Unfortunately this is the common attitude; there’s a class lecture in five minutes? Read surat al-asr during salat because it’s short. There’s a football match soon? Read surat al-asr during salat because it’s short.

About a month ago, my facebook timeline was inundated by the image of this facebook status.

What you see was the last status that Alaa Abdel Hady posted before getting killed in the Cabinet sit-in in Egypt last month, Allah yir7amo.

Later on that month, a friend of mine got into a car incident similar to the one we got in last september. All praise is due to Allah, the girl came out of it shaken but with minimal injuries. “But you know,” she told me, “it was the best thing that happened to my life.” She continued describing about how it made her realize that life can end within seconds, so she’s just learning to make the best of everyday without complaining anymore.

News like those just make us stop and wonder about life, and how we never know what would happen next. So when you wake up and get the blessing of a new day, be grateful to Allah for that blessing, because no matter how much you try not to think about it, this blessing will not last.

That’s it for today.

Waking up from a dream and stepping into a nightmare

“Dreams, they feel real while we‘re in them, right? It’s only when we wake up that we realize how things are actually strange.“

Have you ever woken up from a dream wishing you could go back to sleep and continue the dream because it was so beautiful? Have you ever woken up from a dream wondering to yourself what it really means? What about waking up from the dream and realizing that the life you life has nothing of the glamor and beauty you just witnessed in those hours of sleep? That maybe your real life is actually a nightmare in comparison with your dream?

Sometimes a dream may taunt you by showing you a world that you don’t have – and might never have. Or maybe your dream life has been occupying your  mind for so long that it naturally trickles into your subconscious and gives you a make-believe world to live in for a few minutes. So maybe it’s making you suffer through taunting, or maybe it makes you happy for  just a moment.

Lately I’ve been overloading my imagination to tell you the truth. During the daytime, not just at night. It’s an escapism mechanism that I’ve adopted for the longest time ever. When I was unhappy about something or something was worrying me  I tend to conjure up images that take me to a place that is so far away it’s amazing. Sometimes the exercise can last for a few minutes, and sometimes they can last for hours, and I lie in bed imagining things, imagining people, imagining dialogue, and I can get so consumed that it’s easy to shut the system down. It usually works because I tend to project myself to a place and/or time when this thing will stop worrying me. So if, let’s say, I’m worried about an incident that is about to happen on the 8th of March in Masdar (deadline of thesis submission en sha Allah), I project myself to a time beyond it, say, June, in Kenya, and I’ll be telling myself (or maybe an imaginary person would be telling me), “It’s behind you now, see? You were so worried over nothing!”

“But it ended terribly…”[Since I need to prepare myself for worst case scenarios right?]

“At least you learned your lessons, and it’s time to pick up the pieces and move on. Don’t think about it too much. Think about the now. You’re here, you’re happy with other parts of your life, so you messed up one part, so what?”

So by doing that what I’m trying to do is reverse the title of this post; stepping out of a nightmare and into a dream through my imagination.

And this text (taken from a story I wrote once) describes exactly where do I go when I feel like running away in my mind;

“By the time she reached her favourite spot in Mombasa, she did not know what she was feeling. The anger that she had felt at some point in the evening had died down, but sorrow still resided within her. It was nearing sunset. The sky was dimming gradually, and the squawking of the crows became more boisterous. Behind her, there were screams of bare-feet children playing football while beneath her, the ocean breathed as the waves crashed against the pointed rocks. She was seated on a low yellow fence at the edge of a cliff hanging over the ocean. The fence was part of Fort Jesus; a historical monument that was built by the Portuguese in 1592 to guard the harbor. The monument was turned into a museum that was open for tourists. She had indulged in the tourist experience only once, but since she was a local, once was more than enough. Even though it had been years since she last sat there, the contrast of the place still reminded her of her life; the contrast between the ugly fort with the peeling paint behind her that represented her life, and the endless beauty in front of her that represented the hope of a better tomorrow. In her line of sight, she could see a part of Mombasa jutting out into the sea from the left; a piece of lush land with pearly white mansions nestled among the trees. Even though the mansions looked tiny from where she was sitting, they had a dreamlike look – like castles out of a fairytale. 

Staring out at the sea had a soothing affect on her. She loved that place because of its beauty and timelessness. It was easy to block out the noises around, and sink within herself in deep thought. When things were going bad, she went there to clear her mind, sometimes carrying a book with her to read, and most often than not, ending up writing. But the real reason why she loved that place was what it meant to her. What it used to mean to her, at least. It was hard to imagine just five years ago, that she would be sitting here again with those particular thoughts racing within her mind. Questions that she felt ashamed even asking herself; three words that kept on repeating themselves over and over in her mind despite herself. She tried to close her eyes and bring about happy images, but the only scenes that passed through her mind were those connected to the incident at the office that morning.”

Below is a pic I got off the internet of the scene from FJ in Mombasa though I have to admit it doesn’t do the place any justice. I’ll see if I can find any pics of my own later. As for the fort itself, you can google it to see how it looks like.

So when life becomes tough for you, what’s your escapism techniques?

Emotional Extremes

“Goodbye.”

“Take care of yourself.”

He turned around and left. She looked at him as he walked away and wondered what she was feeling that day. She saw the same person in the same place, and they always exchanged the same words, but today her heart was filled with pity. Once upon a time, the feeling filling her heart was love. Then it was pure hatred. Today it was pity. At what he has become. Her emotions have covered the whole range from one extreme to the other. Sometimes she wondered if both love and hate were just on opposite sides of a single coin. Maybe what mattered was how it was flipped. Maybe what mattered was what caused it to flip at that second. Maybe the common denominator – the thing out of which the coin was made – was passion. Or maybe it was just raw emotion; unnamed; unfiltered; unaltered.

So this piece has been bothering me for a few days now, random words in a random context, but it made me think about human emotions and how they affect us in our daily lives. On one hand, emotions such as hatred, anxiety or anger can distort somebody’s judgment or change their actions. But then on the other hand, suppressing these emotions can lead to an emotional build-up that causes sudden rapture and that might end up badly. So it might make you wonder, do you suppress your emotions or do you find yourself a nice comfortable couch and pay an amount of money to a shrink to listen to you?

Some people have an amazing quality of using powerful emotions such as pain to fuel their journey towards success. They are the ones who might have had sadistic childhoods that might make other people criminals. Or maybe they lived in a world full of fear and scarcity, half the time wishing they wouldn’t wake up the next day. Or maybe they sleep under the stars  because there’s no roof above their heads.

Yet maybe they’re the ones who carried the pain of yesterday to develop compassion and start campaigns to help tomorrow’s children. Or maybe their world that is full of scarcity has tuned their senses to observing the unmaterialistic aspects of life. Or maybe, while they’re sleeping under the stars, they dream of a more beautiful place they might end up in tomorrow.

The point is, they make use of their situation, whatever it is, for the betterment of themselves, and more importantly, for the betterment of mankind.

dreaming about a more beautiful place they might end up in tomorrow. Yet they use all those negative emotions, and turn them around into something positive, adding to society through pieces of art that only a few experts would understand.

“We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.” Kenji Miyazawa

“A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks that others throw at him”

Comfort Zone?

A lot of us have been living in our comfort zone for so long that we stop thinking that there’s anything beyond its perimeter. We’ve spoken a lot about being stuck in the rut, and not following our passions because they threaten to take us far away from the life of comfort we are used to living. But the moment you start doing crazy things in your life, you’ll realize that there’s more crazy things to do and the adrenaline or whatever rush you feel starts getting addictive.

Let me give you an example. A lot of people ask me if I regret dropping my job 1.5 years back (1.5 years?). With the bad economy, and the gloomy job prospects beyond Masdar Institute- extrapolating from the previous batch – I get that question a lot. On the outside, it looks a bit crazy, leaving a comfortable life (moneywise) for something that pays one-third and comes with all the disadvantages of being an outsider heavily pronounced (in the previous job, they tried to treat most people equally regardless of their backgrounds, please emphasize on the word ‘tried’).

So do I regret making that decision? The answer is no, all praise is due to Allah. When I made the decision it was well thought out, and I knew exactly why I was doing what I was doing. I was also preparing myself for the ‘fall’. Studying stories of people, one could see that failing after success is really hard. Like when someone’s used to living the high life and suddenly loses his income, it becomes really harder than someone who grew up in a poor household and is accustomed to living at a minimum. So the thing is, if tomorrow my parents decide to pack their bags and travel back to Africa, I would at least be prepared on one front, taking a financial fall because I have done it in 2010 and survived it alhamdullilah. Now of course, the issues of culture shock, settling down in a different environment, and dealing with social obligations are all things that would need to be considered, but at least on one front I’d be a bit prepared.

Second point is I need to make a huge confession. When I wanted to leave my job, there was a point when I wanted to just leave it to stay at home and work on my writings but I knew that there was no way my family would accept me sitting on my certificate, so going back to grad school was actually an indirect way of doing that. In my head I already had an idea that I might not get a job again after graduation, so I might end up staying at home, working on my writing – involuntarily. But that was back then, right now, I would like to do something useful with the knowledge that I’ve gained over the years – like teaching it and passing the torch on to the next generation, but making sure they don’t burn themselves with it.

Personally, I don’t want to have high expectations, because I’m tired of being disappointed in life, and you know how Zig Ziglar says, “Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.” 

Some might find the tone of this note a bit pessimist, but I’m being a realist. A lot of people who have graduated are still at home, so again, I’m preparing myself for that by writing half-manuscripts that I would busy myself with en sha Allah if I get the time. I also try to 2a5ukh bel-asbaab by applying here and there, and seriously I don’t know where we’ll be a few months from now – whether we’ll be alive at all. The thing is just every time you start worrying about the future, remind yourself with aya 51 from surat – altawba.

So we started the talk with living within your comfort zone, and then moved to job prospects. How does it all converge? Review your life every once in a while. The moment you see that you’re becoming too stuck in your comfort zone and can’t seem to get out, welcome change – for better or worse – and see what you can do about that. Many people reading this could be in Masdar, worrying about their next step after graduation. Maybe they fear unemployment or not having money or not having a place to go to every morning. But whatever it is, it would be a change, a way of nudging you from your comfort zone so you can go out and do something different now that you have the time and/or don’t have the money. Take is one step at a time and enjoy the simple pleasures in life.

Breaking The Eerie Silence

I know I’ve been quiet lately on this blog, but I don’t like it either. I’d rather be blogging than working on my thesis, but with the deadline looming, I’m really out of options. My wish for 2012 is for the thesis to write itself while I’m busy doing something else. Like Siri you know. “Siri, please write my thesis for me and then when you’re done ping me.”

Siri: “Never insult me like that again. Ping me is for that-phone-that-shall-not-be-named, you have to apologize if you want me to write your thesis for you.”

Me: “Okay.”

Of course, that’s just an imaginary conversation *sigh*, and if you’re totally clueless about Siri then google “Iphone 4s siri” to understand what I am talking about. Truth is, we are so dependent on technology nowadays. How do you feel if you leave the house without your phone? I remember once when I lost my mobile phone and I was totally disconnected. Even though I was in AUS, I felt like I was alone on an island; that’s how isolated I felt. The other day we were supposed to meet a friend before she travelled, and we agreed on a place (Y) but it was too crowded so we went to another cafe (Z) and started calling her. She didn’t pick up, so after waiting for some time we left. Later on we discovered she had left her phone at home, and that she was waiting for us in the cafe (Y). Both cafes were in the same mall,and all of us were there but we couldn’t see her. We all felt horrible after that for changing locations, but who would have guessed that she forgot the phone at home (we had just thought that her last-minute preparations were taking longer than she had expected)?

It’s 2012, and yesterday “Page 2 of 366″ was trending on twitter and I was wondering what was this book people were busy reading. It took me a while to figure out they were talking about the second day of 2012 in the book of their lives. I thought it was interesting. So can you summarize in 180 characters what lessons you learned, new experiences you had in Page 3 of 366?

While the fireworks were going on for ten minutes on Burj Khalifa, Al Jazeera’s broadcast at around the same time was showing the massacre happening in Syria; a massacre that has been going on for so long that I wonder if our brothers and sisters there have felt any taste of joy during their Ramadan, 2 Eids and the “holiday” seasons (how come the army didn’t go on holiday?). I felt a bit sad thinking about how one whole year had passed in the blink of an eye. Also looking at the political situation in the Arab World, how all those presidents had been ousted/jailed/killed made me wonder what the new year would bring.

Today’s quote is by Denis Waitley, “Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised.”