Eventually They All Fall

I wrote this when I was 16 and I have changed remarkably since. My moral sense has shifted back and forth between idealism and realism. Yet for some reason, these thoughts seem to be true again today. I am not a poet, I haven't written a good poem in ages but I like to believe that for a brief period of time, I was able to write a rhyme or two.This poem was my answer to the question "what do you do in your free time" for almost 2 years. I share it here because I haven't done so in over 4 years and I would like for the people i have met since to see how i used to answer that question:

Eventually They All Fall;

Books are made to be burned and reedited

Greed infiltrates every virtue that is listed

Faith shakes when by gain confronted

Will, alone, should not be trusted

When the masks grant full immunity,

Personal morale is no longer a necessity.

And those cheerful faces take forever place

As the fainted reality is covered with grace

You either wear a lovely mask of war,

Or fight determinism till all gets sore,

Till resistance faints or you easily let go

Of the attempts to eliminate this distasteful show

Standing alone among consciences’ corpses,

Your heart spills all to the oblivious masses

Confronted by contempt, your strength shakes

Keep in mind: collective thoughts could be mistakes

And when the end is near, everyone falls.

Apocalypse knocks on heaven’s doors.

What have you to say if judgment day comes?

“I stood where they said everyone falls”

                            

ALIen (early 2007)

Where are all the mirrors?

Today's post was supposed to be in Arabic, my mother tongue. However that is no longer happening for several reasons mostly that I could not formulate the introduction without offending some old friends of mine. From that concept, this post was born. How often do we put ourselves second because we fear of hurting people who don't reciprocate the fear or worse they sometimes don't understand it exists? Actually, that is not the topic either; I was just reminding myself of the importance of clearly pointing out what bothers me and avoiding denial.

Today we go to the seventeenth century, when French author La Bruyere wrote his only book, a lifetime project entitled "Les Characteres" in which he polemically portrayed over 300 overt personalities of French society and the royal courtyard of Louis XIV. One dream of mine has always been to write such a book of the tragically hilarious acts I have seen my friends and acquaintances commit over the years. I find it deeply disturbing that people often lack internal reflection when it comes to matters of self assessment. Plato theorized about perfect citizens in the republic and elaborated on how tyrants with power might seem the happiest people, however they cannot truly be happy when they do not realize the wrongdoings they bring to the world around them.

Nevertheless, this is not ancient Athens, and it seems most of the people in modern day Beirut (probably the world as well if I am allowed to generalize) are preoccupied with their own vision of life and unwillingly judge the rest of their neighbors.  Some very enlightened people have enough insight to see fine lines between their vision of the world and what is really happening, meaning that they can actually look at what goes around them objectively and formulate an impartial opinion.  Alas for most of those people, the line ends when their family or friends are involved and suddenly they turn blind to the mistakes these people make. In my humble experience, I have found this kind of personalities to be the most destructive to have around you. Love is a powerful entity but love does not have to be blind. Nothing irritates me more than people who stick together despite being absolutely and categorically wrong simply for the sake of love. Injustice travels in packs. When you violate someone’s right you often look for support and find friends and family there to hoot for you no matter what. This is one of the major flaws of our culture. A famous Lebanese proverb goes something like this when translated word for word: “I stand with my brother against my cousin and with my cousin against the stranger”. Need I say more?

I have gotten into endless fights and been referred to as a narcissistic troublemaker over and over simply because I have always given people the benefit of the doubt. You see while I was growing up, I was taught that people are categorically good and society corrupts them. This is what Jean Jacques Rousseau referred to as the “good savage”. He argued that humans are good by nature and society corrupts them.  I played the devil’s advocate all my life, always defying my friends and family and asking them to question their facts again before passing judgments on others. However, with time I learned some disturbing news my dear Jean Jacques, psychiatry and genetics would challenge your theory when you meet a person with antisocial personality disorder. Let’s steer away from pathologies though, no matter how healthy it is to see what is wrong in your loved ones, it is not a sustainable approach because eventually, they will walk away towards someone who supports them regardless of whether they are right or wrong. Human nature demands approval, evolutionary drives require unconditional support and if you play the devil’s advocate for too long you will end up in life’s courtroom alone with no one to defend you when you fall. It seems the answer here is once again: balance.   

This is in no way an attempt to reproduce "les characteres", I have simply mentioned one small trait that bothers me. To reiterate, I think most people with a decent IQ have gotten enough life experience to look into their proper reflections in the mirror and go over what they have done wrong in most situations. However most seem to be unable to do so when it comes for their loved ones. If you really love someone, try looking at their reflection in society’s mirror; If you really hate someone, look at them through that same mirror as well because unlike your eyes, it actually accentuates both the deeds and the flaws. In the end though, one has to learn in which scenarios to just let justice slide for the sake of love and in which to never compromise.

What's your end game?

What’s your end game? A friend of mine asked me this lately while we were in Tunis. I’ve been giving it some thought ever since and I realized I no longer know what that is. I used to be a very determined person. I knew what I want and I planned my whole future accordingly and yes, I always got what I wanted in the end.  That person is so far gone I can’t even remember how it felt to be in control of every aspect of my life and to actually secure a complete success. This is not a sad lamenting post, this is just recognition that as we grow older and move into bigger settings we realize how life actually becomes more complicated and nearly impossible to control as a million new variables come into play.

Some believe that not having an absolute objective in life is a sign of weakness and an omen of eminent failure. I was one of those people at some point in my life. You see we are often afraid of freedom, we tend to persecute it when it manifests in others. People do not want you throwing your nonchalance into their faces. A free thought is the deadliest of all weapons and some communities will fear it to the point of slitting your throat for advocating yours. This is a post mostly about how I learned to improvise and to let the wind take me with it towards whichever shore it desires.  The overly scheming child that was in me learned with time to drop the big issues when it was not my war, to let go of the fights that hurt and focus only on the ones with potential for success. All of that was pointless though; the anxiety will not vanish just because you told it to do so.  It had to be coupled with a few failures for that arrogant child to learn how to let go of the big plans and learn how to live life one day at a time. I did not want this to take such a personal dimension but I guess catharsis tends to do that. I am sure this is not just a personal struggle and that many others have gone through similar fights where we learn to let go of the world and let it lead us for a change.
  

I am not advocating a life of irresponsibility and absolute lack of planning, I am just affirming that my end game is still being cooked up somewhere in the back of my mind for now and that is absolutely fine by me. While growing up I learned how love affairs end, friends turn into lovers, other friends into enemies. Your confidant today might turn into an acquaintance tomorrow. Your enemy (assuming you’re opinionated enough to garner one) is also capable of changing and becoming your ally. Your dream job can turn into a prison for your body and soul, your hobby might turn into your job and worst of all your safety job could vanish and you find yourself on the streets of Beirut. Nothing is static and nothing is guaranteed. I could drop dead any day now from a rare cardiac cause. I could win the lottery tomorrow and find myself capable of finally touring the world with someone I love (I think this item should be on everyone’s list of things to do before they die).  Where am I going with my life? Honestly, I have no clue. It has never been gloomier. I believe this question cannot be answered at any age whatsoever because having one end point will prove you see an actual ending stage for your life. If the finality is to get married and have children then why bother with a career? What about the 40 extra years which come after marriage? Are they all just one point in time?  If life is about getting rich then when will you have time to spend that money? Can you really share with that money the memory of how you got it? 

In the end, uncertainty is a hidden treasure. Not knowing only means you have eyes wide enough to see the whole horizon and pick whichever element you want out of it. Although it is an ingredient for success but determination butchers the imagination. We all have to figure out an end point at some stage in life but we have to get along with it an escape plan, a comeback mechanism, something to help us keep our sanity if the endpoint is never reached or even more often, something to remind us there are still other places to get to once the first endpoint is reached. As a final thought to those still thinking of end games,  keep in mind that life is a lengthy process about creating yourself and having the end result before hand certainly kills the fun.  

In the eyes of Others

“Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. ”Aristotle

Man is a social being, and his social potential is too immense to be contained yet for some reason or the other most of us seem to end up confined into the compartment that our social group has allocated to us. That compartment by itself is dynamic and rarely fixed. In fact it varies depending on the people whom we hang around.  In our own inner circles we all play a very distinct role which may not be always a true reflection of our whole entity. These roles often are but a fraction of our true self that our friends appreciate us for having and we find ourselves constantly obliged to bring that part out to the public for further acknowledgment. This is how I have moved from being the overachiever, to the atheist, to the altruist, to the student activist, to the slacker, to the drama queen, and finally to the most recent role of the scheming snake. Effectively, I have found myself and lost it so many times across the years but rarely had it coincided with any of those images that the rest of the world enforced on me. Anyway, enough of using myself as the illustrative example and on to the matter at hand today.  

Jean Paul Sartre said that people who live in society learn to see themselves in the mirror as their friends see them. Needless to say, this is one of the many reason that man is my idol. Now forget about the fancy French philosophers, the elaborate metaphors and the hidden messages, this is plain and clear: we convince ourselves that we are who the people around us see us and it isn’t until we have learned to observe what is going on outside of us that we can realize what truly lies inside of us.
We are very different from one another. Some people embrace the differences while others search for a unifying model. Thus conformity is born and whoever dares to be different is penalized and marginalized. Sometimes the distinguished person is even idolized and copied till they all resemble him/her and he/she becomes no longer different. You see society is constantly trying to quench diversity.  The unsuspecting victims fall into the trap and find themselves adhering to a role, an image, a purpose in a group. Your little social family grows and integrates more people so that you get to enforce your own vision on the new comers. Eventually you lose contact with who you were before all of this started to the point that you simply become the person you were told you are. You see at this point, no matter how deeper you dig, you will never find the answer inside of you because you are a reflection of where society put you, a reflection of the place you took or were given.  Perhaps this is not absolutely wrong. Perhaps the outsiders are more capable of seeing who you truly are, perhaps your ego won’t let you see your misdoings. Let’s face it not everyone is going to be brilliant, caring and nice. Perhaps truth is not inside of you, it takes great soul searching to try and remember who you really are and what you want, it probably is safer to rely on how the insightful others perceive you.
If you did not sense the sarcasm in the last few sentences, then I must tell you your intelligence exceeds the normal limits, take a shot at mass and energy equations, dye your hair white and you might just become the next Albert Einstein. (Did you note the snake like behavior here?)

If not in others and nor inside of us, where do we find ourselves then? Here’s the thing, we don’t. At least I don’t think we do. A human being is too much of a complex entity to be classified into small roles; humanity is too broad to be summarized by how we interact in society. Introverts have icebergs that the external worlds cannot see and extroverts have the best bits hidden deep inside of them. I am not saying society has got it completely wrong and that singled out people are always victims. I am saying that it is not society’s role to confine us into the spot it wants. All the images people have of us probably have some degree of truth to them yet my main motive to write this post stems in the revelation that whatever image some limited individual has of us ends up being the image we believe to be true of who we are and the world becomes a little bit dumber as every bright person loses his true self and conforms.  If you find yourself confined into a person you are not then please by all means walk away, there are people out there who will see a different side of you and you can stay around them till the next need for entourage change arises in you. After all, “the only consistency in life is change”. This goes on and on till you reach that end point that is self acceptance and self realization after which you become indifferent to the changing variables around you. 

Make no mistake though, no matter how much you change, society rarely does and maturity is exclusive to selected few regardless of how old you get. To mention the Aristotle quote in the beginning of this post, if you succeed you will become a God and as most deities learn in time, it is a lonely job to have.

Ali.

Karma is a three headed hydra

Karma is a three headed hydra at its best. Unlike what the Hercules myth advocates, decapitating it is never the option. The past few months have been pivotal in shaping my view of the world. I see life with a clarity and transparency like never before. In fact, I think this is what is commonly referred to as maturity. From now on life will be a hectic ride of perspective changing and reconsideration perhaps until I reach my 30s and get to the so fervently advertised "stability" or what I'd rather call stagnancy. 

Back to that hydra of ours, if you cut one head three others will pop if I recall correctly. I do not believe in the supernatural, in fact, I am a firm believer in the empirical sciences. However I see Karma as a self assessment tool whereby we subconsciously punish or reward ourselves for the misdoings or good deeds of our daily life. The key to killing the hydra is not to do good. In keeping with my roots as an existentialist, I say the universe is indifferent about the value of your actions.  However, if you have been raised "right", you are not. Do not mislead yourself, you will always keep the lessons of right and wrong deep within your silent mind as you grow up and you will assess yourself based on them. Nietzsche went beyond good and evil but that road is a long pilgrim that not everyone is capable of undergoing. 

The road out of the karma loop lies in time and experience. It takes time for you to accept who you are: good, evil or more commonly neutral. What the pop culture failed to mention is that doing good is not the way to get good karma. At least that is how I see it. Good Karma comes from a mind at ease. Good karma comes when you know what you want, when you know who you are. Doing good for the sake of receiving good is a hypocritical version of denial. Doing good for the sake of doing good alone is a good trait that soothes the voices of your Super ego (excuse me for quoting Freud but I only believe in this part of his preposterous theory) yet by itself will bring you no guarantee that good shall be done to you

To end this on a cheesy note, I take the idiom "be yourself, everyone else is taken" and turn it into: discover yourself, it is never taken.