Really listening to people

Have you ever spoken to someone and really really listened to them? Not just what they are saying but what they are not saying? The gestures, furtive
glances and nuances in tones and expressions might tell you a lot without the use of any words. The only downside of nonverbal communication is that it can be misinterpreted due to a lack of verification.
I feel nowadays our ability to read body language has been impaired by the simple fact that in many conversations, there is no body language to read. We hide behind computer screens, user names and passwords and it’s easy for true meaning to disappear behind the words.
A part of being a reader/writer is trying to understand the psyche of fellow human beings. Why they do what they do (or don’t), what goes on through that brain of theirs when they are taking an action (or don’t). People will not always explicitly state things like their motives and emotions. So we have to rely on the powers of observation to catch those, and thanks to our new-age world, those powers may be out of practice if not nonexistent.
Today’s take home message is to consider other people’s incessant prattle as just the tip of an iceberg of inner workings. There is a lot that is not being said, so maybe we need to take a moment and start really listening to conversations for a change; conversations that include not only words but also gestures, actions, and the most powerful nonword….
silence.

Those Clingy Memories

Some memories just cling onto you wherever you go. The farther you try to walk away from, the more often you tend to bump into them. Sometimes they spring out of the blue when you least expect them; upon a whiff of perfume or the sound of a pen clicking incessantly against the table or the rainbow arc of a sprinkler’s water falling upon green grass.
Maybe you need to learn to carry a pen or paint brush, to write about it or flesh it out in water colors. And at first you might feel like you’re bleeding on paper because whatever this memory is, it might be as part of you a tissue or organ.
But the more you let it out of your system, the lighter you feel, the easier you can breathe again. The monster hiding within you is transmitted onto a piece of paper that can be torn, burned, laminated or framed.
And then you realize that it does get better.
Some time, some day.
Eventually.

Maybe it was me who didn’t understand

You know how they say your past experiences shape your insights of the world, and how you decide to act in the present. Sometimes the way we react to a piece of news is inversely related to the number of times we’ve heard it before. And the numbers may as well have been taken from Fibonacci’s series; each number is a summation of the last two numbers. Take a simple example, tell someone in Minnesota that it’s snowing and they might not even react because they’ve seen snow so many times (many snow viewings = little/no reaction). But tell someone from the UAE that it’s snowing and keep a camera in hand to record the reaction and if you’re lucky it might go viral.

So while we may understand that we have a unique point of view, yet we still go through life judging people for being different. But sometimes in life, you just need to stop judging and start listening. We try to project our ideas onto others, we get angry at some of other people’s behaviors but maybe the things that bug us about them don’t bug them as much as they bug us, so we need to recalibrate our sensors instead of trying to change their behaviors. I guess with time you learn to be more accepting.

I wrote this because I came across this piece from my old journals…

Date: 25 June 2001

So the other time I was thinking that I’m tired of being stuck in this whirlwind of dreams of a brighter future for people who do not even care about having one themselves. Some of them are driving me nuts. I finally pull up the white flag. I surrender. There’s a voice that once told me to let it go. Maybe it was me who didn’t understand. 

Dare to Begin

Sometimes ‘staying away’ is easier than ‘walking away’.

The first step of anything is always the hardest to take as it deals with a shift in the current state of equilibrium.  It takes time for someone to adjust to the change that occurs. It takes time for life to move to a new state of equilibrium, aka the ‘staying away’ part.

If you think about it, change is mostly about overcoming inertia and maintaining momentum, with overcoming inertia the harder part of the two. I learnt that on the treadmill. My normal workout includes some time on the elliptical followed by a run on the treadmill. So once I was so tired after my elliptical session, I didn’t have the energy for the treadmill. Yet I told myself, “Just start and you’ll stop after five minutes”. Yet when I started, the adrenaline kept me going for so much longer than the five minutes I had planned.

I know I haven’t posted anything for a while and it’s not like I’m not writing, but rather I’m just not posting what I write. Most of the posts I have are half-baked, and I realize I never have the energy to carry an idea to completion. After 100 words, I tend to just lose my focus and talk about something else (exactly like what I’m doing here). But I’m going to be honest with you. Every time I sit in front of wordpress’s empty page nowadays I ask myself, “What’s the point? What’s the point of writing all this? Who reads this stuff anyway?”

I feel it’s normal to have all these self-doubts because writing is a very lonely process. They claim writing is supposed to be a two-way communication between reader and writer, when I sometimes think it’s just a person speaking at the beginning of a dark tunnel and listening to his own echoes wondering if there’s anybody listening on the other side. But the most important thing about writing happens to be my message for the day; “Dare to begin as it’s usually the hardest step.”

Brownie-like Recipe for Dealing with Bad Experiences

A lot of times we go through experiences that tend to upset us or haunt us. While they may not be entirely traumatizing, they can be really clingy. Take for example embarrassing moments that we can’t seem to forget about or people who’ve deliberately walked out of our lives we don’t seem to let go of. So today I made up a recipe for writers on how to make the best of those situations.

Ingredients

1 stick of facts (or butter)

1 cup of imagination (or sugar)

1 teaspoon of more imagination (or vanilla extract)

2 speculations (or eggs)

½ cup of characters (or all-purpose flour)

1/3 cup of setting (or Cocoa)

¼ teaspoon of conflict (or baking powder)

¼ teaspoon of theme (or salt)

Directions

1)     Start with the facts. That’s as essential as the butter-sugar-vanilla mixture when one is making brownies. You can just list the chronological order of the incident as bullet points but at the beginning just stick to the facts.

2)     Speculate. Add your speculations and judgements. Realize that while the details of the incident may be laid out as facts, a lot of how feel about it comes from our pre-conceived notions, background and experiences. During your speculation stage, try to look at the incident from other point of views, and challenge any assumptions you might have made about it. In other words, beat them together the way you would beat the eggs.

These first two points deal with the plot of whatever story you’re going to write out of the life incident. Next we move to the rest of the story.

3)     Draw up characters and give them names. The thing with us writers is that sometimes we don’t really understand a situation until we put it down on paper. It’s true we tend to think of paper.

4)     In the case where we’re turning this incident into a work of fiction, this is the point where we add elements that would fluff it up a bit the way the baking powder would. But since stories have to have setting and themes, you have to add cocoa and salt to the baking powder and stir together.

5)     Get into the zone the way a baking pan would get into an oven heated to 350 oF. Call it the creative zone, call it whatever…Let the story grow its own legs and take you in different directions if it must. You might start at a true-life incident and end with something that you would never do in real life, but would fill you with satisfaction.

And by that, you might have a story that was inspired by a clingy incident, and you would realize why the incident was so clingy in the first place (maybe its purpose was to act as inspiration for a piece of art and it wouldn’t let you go until you wrote it). Also whenever the incident comes up, you’ll end up thinking about your piece of art, and you might be so consumed by the piece of art to be bothered by the real incident.

Alternatively, just use the recipe between the lines, bake some brownies and enjoy eating them.

(c) alisdair

Love of my life, really?

When I hear someone saying “She’s the love of my life,” the first thing I imagine is an eighty-year old couple sitting at the back deck on rocking chairs, watching the sun set and drinking hot tea, not a newly formed couple. How do you know things might not change? Nowadays love is a word that is being overused a lot. Besides that, things and circumstances change so that the intensity of love could change, and it’s only if that love endures so many experiences could someone crown another with the “love of my life” title. So in my opinion, love is not defined as love unless it’s gone through many tests and remained unscathed. Love is not a word, it’s represented by a series of mawaqif (or situations not the parking space) in which someone wouldn’t translate it as being anything else other than love.

For instance, in a famous experiment, a group of professional posted “What does love mean?” to a group of children, and these are some of their answers.

1) ”When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore.  So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis too.  That’s love.” Rebecca – age 8

2)  Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK.” Danny – age 7

Or it’s someone going to visit his wife at an elderly center and talking to her everyday even when she doesn’t remember who he is because of Alzheimer’s.

So yeah, it’s a series of mawaqif and not a word to be thrown just because it’s what the girl wants to hear. So going back to the “love of my life” description. A more accurate phrase could be “she’s the love of my life at the moment (or until now)”. Can you imagine a guy telling a girl that? That would totally drive her crazy and have her follow him with a frying pan to his head. “What do you mean until now?”

*Sorry honey, I’m just trying to be accurate because I don’t know what tomorrow might bring*

So yeah, of course, everybody plays it safe by omitting those extra words, “at the moment – or until now”. But then let’s say it doesn’t work out as we discussed earlier in Marriages that don’t last. The girl will be hung up on, “But he said that I was the love of his life!”

*if he had said, you’re the love of my life until now, you would have followed him with a frying pan, what to do?*

Just my opinion on the matter not that I’m an expert in the topic being a cynic and all…

(c)Lel4nd

I guess that’s just something that’s been on my mind today.

Self centered introverts

So the other day my friend and I were having this discussion about whether introverts are more self centered than others. The initial conclusion is yes we tend to be self centered because we spend so much time alone that we can’t help but love our own company which basically translates into a high degree of self-centeredness. We care more about what we do, who we spend time with, what we like and dislike because we spend most of the time with ourselves.
But if you really look around, most people are self-centered. They always try to tune to , WII-FM (what’s in it for me). The only difference is in the degree of self-centeredness. Some people are more concerned with themselves than others. Then you have other people who exhibit their self-centeredness in different ways. Take extroverts for example. A lot of extroverts love the attention on themselves. They go out with many friends, are surrounded by a crowd, etc etc etc. In order to have their brains overstimulated enough, they seek out experiences that shines the spotlight on -who else- them?
While introverts would exhibit their self-centeredness by not giving other people the pleasure of their company and enjoying their own solitude, extroverts exhibit their self-centeredness by hanging out with more people, which is why the general perception is that extroverts are not so self-centered.
Am I even making sense? What do you think of the topic? I would really like your opinion on the topic.

Under The Date Palms

Under the date palms they dreamt
On the swings
Their eyes closed against the wind
Nobody had yet told them that they cannot fly
That there are no dragons
And so they flew
But after so many hours fighting dragons
They had to crash land to planet earth,
Thirsty,
Panting,
They had to run to drink water,
You have to be realistic after all

Nobody told them that their choices
Will not be their choices
That their lives will be sketched
By the broken dreams of their family
That the sky is not the limit
As the ceiling gets in the way
You have to be realistic after all

With the pressure of life over their heads
Their imagination loses color
Then bit by bit it loses sound
Until one day it turns dark and silent
And they wonder
Under the date palms
When they had lost the will to dream

(c) A. Albadawi

Unleash Your Dickinson

Negative Space

Love is neither appreciated in its complete presence

Nor complete absence

But rather in its lack of presence

The empty slot in the shelf full of books

The clean square in a thick layer of dust

Where a photograph once was

The empty vase where once stood a rose

That drooped and wilted with time

It’s ironic that the ones who appreciate love the most

Are those who have just lost it

Image credit: TF

P.S. According to Wikipedia Negative Space in art, is the space around and between the subject(s) of an image.

If Every Action has an Opposite Reaction

In physics, one common question is, If every action has an equal and opposite reaction why don’t they cancel out? The main reason is because they are acting on two different objects.
In social dynamics, every action does not necessary have an equal and opposite reaction in the first place and even if it did exist they are both related to different people so the action (or reaction) force gets amplified or diminished based on individual factors like the person’s background, personality, etc…
For instance, you do something nice for somebody (action). You expect them to thank you at the same magnitude of the thing you did for them (reaction). But they don’t because of some reason, maybe they are not used to show gratitude or maybe they think whatever you did was their right. Whatever the reason does that mean that due to the lack of reaction you should stop doing the action?
Not necessary since your action should really be independent of their reaction (the two forces act on different objects or in this case- differpeople). Basically you’ll be held accountable by Allah (SWT) for your own actions, and not other people’s.

Photo credit; Newton’s Cradle by hellolapomme on Flickr