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  • Bitter sweet arrogance

    Bitter sweet arrogance

    Arrogance is a result of insecurity that is presented as unwarranted confidence.

    While it’s easier to focus on the harshness that results from such behaviour, it’s more important to remember that only an insecure person will have a need to demand significance through arrogant behaviour.

    Arrogance serves as a distraction from our harsh self-judgement.

    If someone behaves arrogantly towards us, it feels like a personal attack because it undermines our significance or the respect and consideration that we believe we deserve.

    Whether we deserve to be treated better than that or not is not the critical issue.

    The fact that we need someone to treat us better than that is what defines where we’re at about how we value ourselves.

    That’s where self-worth or self-loathing on our part either feeds that cycle of arrogance, or it breaks it.

    Think of it this way.

    If an arrogant person is behaving that way because they’re already feeling inadequate, and you demand that they treat you better than that, you’re simply reinforcing their reasons to believe that they’re inadequate.

    You don’t resolve that by pointing out what you deserve from them.

    You solve that by introspecting on why their struggle with themselves has such an impact on you.

    Owning your self-worth is the beginning of finding peace in life.

    But ensure that your self-worth is based on substance, and not just wishful thinking or baseless affirmations.

    If there isn’t substance to your belief in yourself, your self-worth will result in you being selfish and destroying what could be a good relationship.

    It always starts with you.

  • Patiently persevere

    Life has never been simple, and only threatens to become more complicated with each day that passes.

    Sometimes I flirt with the idea that perhaps I was destined to struggle with so much so that I can learn the lessons that need to be learnt to share them with others.

    But my gut says that is not true.

    “Whatever ill you experience is sent forth by your own hands.”

    A verse from the Qur’an that is always a stark reminder that life is always more difficult when you are unaware of the full breadth of the consequences of your choices and decisions.

    The less wisdom you have about life when you set out to create one from very little at your disposal, the more mistakes you must make to acquire the wisdom that others simply inherited from a wholesome upbringing.

    Comparing notes is forever an indulgence in self-pity. That’s why I never compare notes.

    Whenever I find myself on the wrong end of the life that I thought i was creating, I take a moment to pause.

    To reflect.

    To catch my breath.

    To understand.

    Then I shrug off the self-pity and forge ahead once more.

    If the best efforts of my life will result in nothing more than misery, then I want to be damn certain that it’s a misery that I choose and not one imposed by others.

    And in the process, I’ll laugh heartily and mock cynically at my repeated attempts to figure things out by myself.

    Because when you don’t have a gentle hand guiding you through life, you need to brace yourself for colourful experiences.

    The moment you stop to lament the absence of that gentle hand, you’ll lose yourself to its absence, and become one with the harshness of the world that has no place for innocent mistakes.

    You don’t need others to be kind to you before you learn how to be kind to yourself.

    Nor do you need others to be supportive before you believe, with conviction, in what is important to you.

    Any excuse about not pursuing the life that you want because of the absence of support from others is nothing but an excuse that denies you the value of who you are.

    The trials that we face are the unintended consequences of the decisions that others have made, while the ill that we experience is the unintended consequences of our own poorly informed decisions.

    Strive towards not being a trial for others by being more mindful and diligent about the decisions that you make for yourself.

    And when you get it wrong, allow yourself to be human, own your mistakes, and try again.

    Life was never designed to be mastered on the first attempt.

    Where would be the fun in that?

  • Own your failure, own your growth

    Own your failure, own your growth

    Why do we feel accomplished and proud of our efforts when things work out, but we blame fate or taqdeer when we encounter trials or failure?

    The reality is, given our ability to reason and to choose how we respond to what we are faced with, both good and bad, we’ll never have certainty as to what was destined versus what is up to us to determine.

    If everything was destined, despite our best efforts or no efforts, there would be no reason for accountability, either in this world to our fellow humans, or in the Hereafter when we are taken to account in front of the Almighty.

    Regardless of your spiritual beliefs, the fact that we can choose, and that those choices have very real consequences that we cannot wish away, means that the sooner we take accountability for those consequences, the sooner we’ll be able to learn from it and do better.

    When we convince ourselves that it wasn’t in our destiny to have something, we’re simply protecting our ego from having to accept that we failed at something important to us.

    Failure is OK. It means that you had the courage to believe in something enough to try to achieve it.

    What you do with the information that you acquired through failing determines whether you’re a failure or whether you’re still learning.

    And we’re all still learning.

    Right until the day we die, we’re still learning.

    You wanna know why? Because every new moment in our life is a moment that we didn’t live before.

    We were never 20, or 30, or 50 years old before. We were never parenting a 5 or 10 or 20 year old before.

    And we were never parents, grandparents, or whatever role we play at THIS point in our lives before.

    So stop blaming destiny or taqdeer and own your life.

    If not, those who own theirs will own yours as well.

    It always starts with you.

  • Enabling abuse

    Enabling abuse

    We often believe in others the way we wish they would believe in us.

    Sometimes, when we give up hope in someone believing in us, we find it that much more difficult to believe in others.

    It’s these same emotional commitments that drive us toward making excuses for bad behaviour from someone close to us.

    As with everything in life, without moderation, making such excuses becomes harmful.

    Therefore, when we keep making excuses or creating space for someone who consistently behaves badly despite having been made aware of the harm of their ways, we enable an abusive relationship.

    Many feel guilty for withholding affection or support under such circumstances from fear of transacting or ‘being like them’.

    However, the moment we make it about how we feel or how we want to be seen, we lose sight of the harm that we’re enabling.

    Just because we disagree with someone’s behaviour doesn’t mean that we hate or condemn them.

    In fact, if we truly love or care about someone, we will not enable them to behave badly because we wouldn’t want someone we love to cause harm to others or to ourselves.

    The moment you condone bad behaviour beyond accepting the humanness of one who makes a mistake, you’re not doing it for them anymore, you’re doing it to protect your ego.

    Too many complain about being caught up in an abusive relationship but refuse to take accountability for their contribution towards enabling the abusive cycles in which they’re trapped.

    You have to own your life before you can improve it.

    It always starts with you.

  • The courage to own your life

    The courage to own your life

    The courage to own your life will pay dividends long after you’re gone. It’s an investment in the generations to come.

    In the same way that we look back on our predecessors or great grandparents and feel a sense of awe about their achievements, or their way of life, generations from now, someone may be doing the same about us.

    That’s why it’s important to get over our insecurities and act with purpose and conviction.

    No legacy worth leaving was ever created by focusing on what others might say.

    If nothing else, worrying about what people may say is the very root of the fear that prevents us from sharing with this world what it desperately needs.

    Authenticity.

    When we operate from a place of fear, we step into survival mode.

    We’re prone to protect what we have or what we’ve inherited, rather than growing because of it.

    That fear then makes us aggressive towards those who don’t deserve it, and it convinces us that what we have is all we’ll ever be capable of achieving.

    Courage results from believing in the value of what we are capable of creating, and pursuing it as if our life will remain incomplete without it.

    But that assumes that you haven’t already surrendered to your fears and embraced the probability of amounting to very little by the time of your death.

    Don’t wait until your final sleep arrives before realising that you prevented yourself from living.

    Your past only defines the experience and skill that you acquired to navigate your future. It doesn’t, and never will define your future.

    It always starts with you.

  • Is it worth the effort?

    Is it worth the effort?

    Much of life is wasted exhausting yourself in claiming your rights from others.

    Whether you have a right to be treated a certain way or not is not going to influence the one who chooses to ignore your rights.

    They believe they have good reason to deny you such rights, in the same way that you may have withheld your efforts in fulfilling your responsibilities towards others when life was beating you down.

    Either way, it’s not right or wrong to focus on what rights you have over others, it’s a matter of realising at what cost you go about trying to claim your rights.

    If you’re not aware of that cost to your sanity and your peace, you’ll lose yourself to that struggle and become bitter, while not noticing that the struggle with one distracted you from fulfilling the rights that another has over you.

    That’s how we become part of the problem when we grow fixated on what we deserve rather than who we want to be, or what we stand for.

    If you’ve exhausted all options to communicate to another why their behaviour towards you is hurtful or unkind and they persist, adjust your expectations of them or else you’ll lose yourself to the struggle of trying to convince them of your significance.

    Feeling like you deserve something is entitlement, and entitlement is what feels like betrayal when it’s not fulfilled.

    The only way to break that cycle is to reclaim yourself by connecting with what you’re willing to accept and not what you demand, because demands and deserving things is dependent on others agreeing with you.

    When they don’t, it will break you without you knowing it, and you’ll convince yourself that you’re a martyr for a noble cause.

    Is it worth it?

  • Afraid to hope

    Afraid to hope

    If fear is what shapes your view of what lies ahead, you’re focused on everything that could go wrong because of what went wrong before.

    That may seem like a natural response to protect ourselves from being hurt or betrayed again, but it also means that we’re focusing on everything that appears as a risk.

    The problem with that is that we only find what we’re looking for.

    If we’re looking for risks, we’ll find it. But that means that we’ll miss all the opportunities to get things right, or to create a better outcome than before.

    While there may be practical reasons to protect ourselves from physical threats, it’s very different when we protect ourselves from perceived emotional threats.

    It’s like putting a bird in a cage to protect it from getting killed by a predator.

    You may protect it from that possible fate, but you also prevent it from learning how to fly away from such dangers.

    That bird then becomes dependent on you for its protection.

    The same is true about emotional threats.

    Only, with emotional threats, we become dependent on holding onto that past hurt or betrayal, or failure, to ensure that we remain alert to any circumstances in which the possibility exists of repeating such an experience.

    When you release yourself from that emotional cage that trapped you, remember to give yourself enough time to learn to fly before you go in search for new opportunities to create the life that you want.

    If you don’t, you’ll look to the future with fear, and convince yourself that hope failed you each time.

    It wasn’t hope that failed, it was a lack of awareness of what we were getting ourselves into.

    Solve the right problem. Don’t give up hope, invest in yourself so that you’re equipped to create the life that you want.

    It always starts with you.



  • The death of critical thinkers

    The death of critical thinkers

    Critical thinking is lost when we strive to belong at all costs.

    When our need for inclusion overwhelms our objectivity, we give up what we stand for in favour of what the group stands for.

    If that group is driven by a collective victim mindset, we’ll buy into it while finding strength in being around others who share our struggle for significance.

    The more their views resonate with our emotional needs, the more the pervasive ignorance that drives their behaviour will appear as collective wisdom to us.

    The only antidote to such sways of emotion is to have a healthy self esteem.

    A healthy self esteem is developed when we hold ourselves accountable for what we stand for, rather than reassuring ourselves that we’re correct because others agree with us.

    But that means that our need to stand up for what we believe in is grounded in a value system that we consciously subscribe to, and not one that we blindly inherited because we found our predecessors doing it that way.

    And that is where critical thinking is either adopted or abandoned.

    When we’re faced with honouring traditions that have long since outgrown our reality, or honouring customs that were developed out of ignorance and are now harmful to the progress of society, we become blind followers who create harm while having good intentions.

    Our value system must be grounded in something greater than our opinion of how life works, or what celebrated individuals may think.

    It must be grounded in a credible source that is above reproach not because we’re not allowed to question it, but because when scrutinised for credibility, it withstands the test of integrity.

    The greatest threat to mankind is the absence of critical thinking, because it places the accountability of the individual in the hands of leaders who may be driven by selfish goals.

    Thus, society is corrupted, and religion becomes a tool for control rather than harmonious social bonds.

    The greatest gift that you can give to this world is to raise a critical thinker, not a blind follower.