Time is what is left to you

“You have your whole life to practice yoga. That’s the beauty of it” . I think what my Brooklyn yoga instructor was trying to say is that time is always in your hands when the goal is lifelong. Time is something I have a lot of as a 26 year old.
I’m sitting again in my Brooklyn coffeehouse where I have become a regular over the past few months, the weekend routine whenever not on call has become to keep busy all day long, to sublimate so as not to dwell on my perpetual existential crisis. Yet a leopard cannot change its spots.

In his short novel "what is left to you", the Arab existentialist Ghassan Kanafani raises the question: what is left once you lose everything you had and find yourself alone in a desert looking for home again. It is a call to transcend one's own existence into some form of essence or action. The notion of time highly dominates his novel and marks it.
Personally, the idea of wasting time irritates me. I always have to be on the move to reinvent myself. When a Lebanese acquaintance I had just met at a NYC event suggested I get a local girlfriend to pass the time, the thought simply could not penetrate my mind. How can you keep someone around only because you need the clock to run faster? You are better than that. At least I think I am. Let's not mind the fact that happiness should not be contingent on others, time wasting is really the lowest form of time investment. I haven't picked up on this concept much yet in American culture but it is true that in Lebanon, we are raised to think time is the enemy and we need to kill it. If your time is hard to kill then please by all means change your living situation, because nothing is more unfortunate than wasted human potential. Now in contrast to the Lebanese who have too much time to waste, the notion of time flight has been greatly emphasized across history, more so in the romanticism literary movement. Lamartine was one of the major proponents of this thinking and he wrote endless poems on the flight of time through the eyes of nature and his lover. Although I absolutely love his Le Lac poem and have spent so many hours looking at the Genevan Lac Leman while reciting it, I am first and foremost an existentialist, and to me, as appealing as romanticism can be, watching your time waste away deprives you of your humanity. You may argue that existentialism is not a humanism but that is a whole different conversation which we won't get to here. I believe our goal in this life should be to find the drives which help us invest our time rather than pass it. I have been trying too hard to sublimate in the past few weeks to the point that sleep has become a commodity. From yoga classes, to gym classes, to writing and to random encounters with intellectuals. Yet there isn't really a proper way to quantify how much of my time is investeable. What is the right way to use my time. To go back to my acquaintance's comment, I should be thinking who am I to say what it the proper way to invest time? As long as the investor is content, it should be acceptable. I think this is a dangerous fallacy. You see the easy way out may often be appropriately numbing and with 7 billion humans on the planet, there is no need for all of them to be striving to make their life goals purposeful. What's wrong with a little leisure? Nothing. Yet how much of yourself remains if you strive to waste away all the possible experiences only because the easier ones flow smoothly. I guess the question is, would you rather ride your boat in a lac or down a waterfall on the stream of life? Which kind of person will you be?

To go back to Kanafani's story, and in attempt to shed a different light on the issue, what is left to you when you are thrown in the desert looking for a home? Yourself and all the time in the world to figure out what to do next. 

The numb Brooklyn coffee

Coffee marks my life. I had my first flat white by the lake in Zurich with my good friend Chloé who introduced me to the refined caffeinated drink. Ever since, I have been ordering it across the globe in an attempt to come off as a fancy coffee connaisseur. I love the reaction on the local Brooklyn Barrista’s face when I ask if they have a flat white and he freezes before the manager tells him “it’s just a fancy way of saying latte, charge him for that”. I am currently sitting in another one of those hipster coffee shops trying to be productive on a post partying Saturday morning and I can’t seem to take my eyes off the foam on top of the mug. I am usually quite expressive yet today I cannot help but notice how toned down my thoughts are, how steady my heartbeat is. It seems my mood became immune to caffeine.

In psychiatry we talk about the range of one's mood and affect i.e. the extent through which someone can travel from the lowest to the highest point of the human emotional ladder during a psychiatric interview. The thing about those of us who travel all the way up and down that ladder, is that it is far easier to lose the handle and overshoot. You could argue that it would be easier to keep your emotions under control and to rationally release the appropriate doses to every situation. That approach may be the right decision. However as Milan Kundera puts it, the unbearable truth about human life is its lightness whereby no decision can really ever be known to be right or wrong. We only have one life and we can never know what would have happened had we chosen the other road. Things are as they are for no reason other than absurdity. This creates anxiety focused on figuring out where our life will take us or whether it could have been better. Faced by that fact, you either embrace the lightness and thus keep jumping from one adventure to the next or you stagnate in heaviness, fixating on a choice versus the other. I always identified as being heavy, as insisting on dogmatic approaches to what life should be like, to what love is and to what is expected of me in life. Moving to New York has pushed me to reconsider my heaviness, to let go of my need for answers and to embrace that life is uncontrollable, that pain takes too long sometimes to subside, that no calendar can decide when your heart heals or when you are ok to love again. No formula decides when the lonely New York street will feel like home. The only control you have in this life is over your actions, and that only comes with much, much work, will power and time. There are very few cities that offer you so many opportunities to focus on yourself like New York does. No other place pushes you to overcome your fears and insecurities to become part of its population and be dubbed a New Yorker. I have been single my whole life and it has never bothered me to be honest. I did however always belong rigorously to Large social circles which met my need for human connection. Yet I always enjoyed my absolute freedom and lack of entanglement that came from being in so many groups. However when I first moved here I found myself clinging to ghosts from my past, building safety nets very deep in the sand of the Atlantic shore and stretching them all the way back to the middle east in relations doomed to fail before they even start. The fear of "killing" old friends and lovers has rendered it impossible for me to cut those cords and suspended me for a few month on a transatlantic thread that was slowly burning over the fire of distance-induced apathy.

This will sound like an oxymoron yet one of the major lessons I am learning in NYC is to slow down. I am notorious for being neurotic and occasionally impulsive. I am emotional and rarely rational and often attempt to control the world.  Yet when the world moves from being a bunch of coffeeshops and bars aligning a vibrant street called Hamra (Red) to becoming 8 million people from all over the globe, it becomes much harder to control. This is where I learn to breathe, to let go of others because I am not here to save or attach to anyone, I am here to do Yoga, embrace clubbing and figure out who I want to be in my 30s.

I go back to my cup of flat white now, never mind that exaggerated reflective moment, the world is here, coffee is the moment and life is happening.

Beirut boy and the New York subway

Over 2 years ago, I started writing here occasionally about random thoughts going through my mind. I was mostly fueled by fear of terrorism dawning on Beirut and inspired by being in my first ever psychiatry rotation. Today I am fueled by heartbreak, homesickness and generalized cynicism. It's bitter sweet how life can take you around in circles through all the possible emotional states and leave you too drained to write. I am not going to focus here on my heartache or list "prêt à porter" life wisdom set for Facebook like the rest of this blog ended up becoming.

Today, I want to just reflect on the New York subway.

I remember the first time I ever rode a subway train was in Paris. I was overwhelmed and panicking about being mugged the whole time let alone being stressed out by constant bickering about finding the right destination with my sister who ironically ended up becoming a resident of the city of lights. I dealt with multiple subway systems from then and till the first time I visited NYC 2 years ago. I remember being amazed by the totally different experience when riding on the subway that literally included faces from every spot on the globe. However I did and still do think it is one of the most inefficient systems I have seen.

I moved to Brooklyn in June and have been a daily subway user since. First thing I noticed change in my Lebanese paranoid self is the decrease in hypervigilance as I became less and less careful and aware of where my wallet was or how many of the Train strangers are trying to snatch it. Gradually my pretentious Beirut shoes gave way to Brooklyn flip-flops that slammed the train's floor. As Autumn took hold, I realized there is something about walking down the chilly streets of Brooklyn and grabbing that coffee in formal wear on my way to the hospital that just makes you feel grand. You feel like you are swallowed by the machine, as if the big city turned you into another pawn in its massive urban plan: you dress like them, rush like them and drink Starbucks just like they do. Well I also occasionally grab a coffee from the French truck with a Barista originating from Marseille; more of that cross cultural aspect I guess. The morning routine continues as I rush down the stairs till I have to make the first decision of the day: Stand or Sit? What are you in the mood for today? The overstressed mothers, the religiously dressed folks, the random dancers, the hospital staff you kind of know because you see their faces everyday on the train. You can try to observe the world or simply go through the motions. You can sit and read through your book silently (preferably some French existentialism), however most days, I tend to pace around despite my short commute, just to make sure I'm really here and not in my Beirut bed dreaming. Your sad thoughts travel with you all over the metro stops. They fill the empty seats and free handles. The melancholy tracks the trails and comes back to hide in the equally depressed features of strangers. Yet the empty seats only weep or laugh depending on how you feel inside. In the instances I was genuinely fully happy on a gloomy morning, the whole tube seemed to echo my euphoria. This keeps me going since I realize that once the urban beast is tamed, pleasant rides await. One of those instances translated in being free out here, the population changes so often that you could be dancing ridiculously and feeling no shame. Yet, that never stopped me before. I always danced around on the streets of my Beirut even if I knew everyone there. And just like that, Brooklyn underground tunnels now hear the soaring throats of Latifa, Fairuz and Marcel Khalife. I take my mood, state of mind and translate them into soundtracks for my trip. A stranger smiles at me, I smile back. Couples fill the train and the single people sit around wondering whether to make a move or stick to their books. You see it would make a great story to say that you met on a train, but how often does that happen? How often did people meet in a service cab back in Beirut? Probably more often.

The trip is grand but it is in no way near as intimate as the service I used to take from Salim Sleim down to Hamra every morning, but then again this is New York. It is never as intimate, never as one on one. It will always be the huge city trying to devour you with its massive loneliness, endless options and forever changing façades. It is never you, the cab driver and one more rider talking about the randomness of the world or him sharing his random theories on the use of apple fruit in treating cancer. There is no cigarette smoking, no suffocating traffic jams, no Fairuz mornings, no bargaining over where he will drop you off, no Sabah murals on the Hamra walls. Yet there is no need to despair, there are millions of faces, robots, walking to work yes, yet every now and then I get a moment of lucidity and oil up my cyborg mind, remember that I may not have the comforting Beirut accessories, yet I have something much more precious: I have the whole world at my fingertips. And so I keep riding till I find my ultimate destination, and if I don’t, I just ride the train uptown. 

It isn't just a matter of Garbage...

I have been in Geneva for little over a month now and I have tried to grasp as much out of this ridiculously expensive city as possible yet I cannot shake this weird sensation of happiness that has been haunting my thoughts here. You see I have learned a long time ago that the best gift traveling offers you often comes free in the form of new ideas. This may not be apparent at first but this is ultimately a post on Lebanon so stick along. As an allegory of the last idea which crossed my mind this morning, let me start with this example from medical school: Children diagnosed with vision disturbances often describe not suspecting their vision of the world was blurry before they put on glasses. They simply thought this is what the world looked like. We are driven by mostly empirical reasoning after all and much of our perception of the world is built through complex brain circuits which collect data from what our senses see, smell or hear and match it to our previous interactions with the world. Since I am an existentialist seeking happiness somewhere on this planet this got me thinking, could it be that we cannot know happiness before we have experienced it? Is this why some couples get divorced after 30 years of marriage? Is it that they never knew what real love is until they met that new stranger which ultimately liberated their own understanding of what love is or "should be".

I am quite a conversation enthusiast and perhaps like me you tend to discuss many aspects of your life with some of your more talkative or receptive friends. Possibly you also dissect your intentions and driving forces behind your actions every now and then. I have amassed quite the large number of friends as my life progressed and they come in a wide spectrum of personalities. Yet the voices that resonate the most in my mind and amplify my insecurities are the ones who often tell me what I am doing wrong or what I should be doing to be happy. Jean Paul Sartre argued that “Hell is other people” which could loosely be understood in a “pop culture psychiatry” definition whichever way we want. Along those same prêt-à-porter self-empowerment lines, let me give my own interpretation here. Our need for acceptance and fear of judgment by others often place restriction on our behaviors, our choices and can in many cases deprive us of being happy naturally out of fear of rejection or lack of conformity. However that is universal to Lebanon and the western world and no Jean-Paul, this time unhappiness is rooted somewhere else.   

I am not arguing for much here, my conclusion is fairly simple: You do make your own happiness however not all of us have the luxury of trying that. Moreover, life has taught me in the few years I have been acquainted with her that the simplest answer is often the right one. You see in medicine we have a principle whereby you do your best to find one cause for all the manifestations in the body because it is simply far more likely for one disease to express itself in different organs than for one person to have two diseases simultaneously. I think I would be arguing that the gateway to happiness is prematurely locked in Beirut and I only realized that after comparing it to the European alternative.

Happiness is playing Sabah songs in your earphones and letting her put a tune to the grey streets of Geneva before the sunrise. Happiness is the routine of going to work with predictable timetables, o flooded streets, having daily lunches at a fixed time, and of course no occasional bombs. Ergo happiness is the safety needed for mundane activities which we lack in Beirut. Happiness is getting carried away drinking wine till you miss the last bus all the while laughing your drunkenness away because there are no services/cheap taxis in town, leisure is simply not as accessible, A drunk fool freezes in the cold in Geneva. Happiness is speaking your mind fully because no, not everyone hangs around the same streets their whole life and you do not have to see those who get offended by your blunt honesty. Happiness is working because you want to work regardless of the credit simply because everything else is taken care of around you as long as you perform your side of the deal and do your damn job.

Yes, the Lebanese community is incredibly intrusive but the major obstacle to happiness is simply state infrastructure.