Tag: hope

  • A Brain Dump

    We buried my aunt last night. We weren’t very close, but she was a nice lady. She passed on in the afternoon, and we buried her by 22h00 the same evening in line with Muslim rites and customs. But like every funeral, I embraced the scent of camphor, probably more so than most would. We use camphor as an embalming agent to prepare the corpse for burial. So it’s always been a sobering reminder of the inevitable outcome of everything.

    Sobering! That was the lingering feeling that stayed with me throughout last night, and today. And it lingers still. At times in my life I often visited the cemetery alone on cold nights. Sometimes, if not always, I felt a sense of belonging, probably from the knowledge that that will be the final abode despite our best efforts to prolong our avoidance of it. Last night was different.

    Last night I made a feeble attempt to reflect on the sight of thousands of graves with their flaking lime-washed surrounds and the lives that were distilled into that piece of earth that didn’t care about their riches, their comforts, their legacies or their significance amongst men. It was cold to the touch, and lifeless. And the sense of belonging, or even yearning, escaped me. I felt dejected, not just in my own life any longer, but last night I felt dejected from the after life. Nothing offered me comfort or certainty, let alone peace. I had always felt some morbid sense of belonging to the dwellers of the graves.

    The above unfinished post has been laying in my drafts since August 2011. I never completed it, and I don’t think I can do so now either. But recent events in my life, mostly at the office, serves as a stark reminder of the purpose of my time on this earth. Betrayal is like pain, no matter how it is experienced, how long it persists, or how familiar it may become, it will never be a joy, nor a welcomed guest. I often have to remind myself of the advice I so readily dispense. Live with hope, not expectations.

    It’s been a while since I indulged myself in a brain dump. One is definitely called for, although the audience that I have solicited for my blog makes me hesitant to be as brutally honest about my thoughts as I used to be. The problem with trying to be yourself irrespective of those around you is that a large part of being yourself is in fact shaped by those around you. Thoughts spilt recklessly under the pretence of spilled ink, or freedom of expression, only adds to the already burdensome load of callousness in this world.

    Despite the incessant betrayals that I experience in my life, which incidentally becomes much easier to rack up if you’re naive like I choose to be, I still find it impossible, or at the least distasteful to treat others with suspicion simply because I was betrayed under similar circumstances before. I believe betrayal is the root to all evil, not money. We first have to betray ourselves, our deepest held convictions, before we can muster up the cowardice to betray others. Money is simply a distraction, like almost everything else that we surround ourselves with in life. Reflection is called for if we hope to know what it is that we stand for. With all the distractions there is little time for reflection, so it stands to reason that we’re more inclined towards acting in a way that contradicts our dreams and aspirations without realising it, while speaking wistfully of missed opportunities and bad decisions, because each time those opportunities visited us, or those decisions were made, we could barely discern the bullshit from the burden of reality.

  • Is that good I see?

    Acknowledging or praising the virtues of others when they’re around seems to carry a self-imposed burden of expectation that most of us resist. It’s easier for me to talk about this as a generalisation than to refer directly to my personal shortcomings, because in this vagueness lies some comfort as well. I’ve lost many people in my life that were significant others with whom I enjoyed a close and intimate personal relationship, or they were extended family, or even friends. Each time, I found myself trying to find comfort in the fact that my sincere inner prayers for their peace and comfort after death including privately acknowledging the good that they had in them is sufficient for not having acknowledged them while they were alive.

    But it’s never that easy. Acknowledging people when they’re alive, or at least present, does carry a burden of accountability that is not always self-imposed. I’ve often found myself on the receiving end of criticism when I acknowledged someone’s good, and they automatically assumed that I lost my right to criticise something else about them. I tend to be guilty of the same response at times as well. I guess we’re all defensive in that way, and I’m not sure if we start that vicious cycle ourselves in each relationship, or is it a perpetual cycle that was started long before we were even conceived.

    We live in a world of extremes. Digital thinking of zeros and ones, leading us to believe that it’s always all or nothing, but rarely any healthy balance in between. Recognising good in something, or someone, is often met with fierce criticism if we suddenly acknowledge something not-so-good in  them, as if it’s not possible for both good and bad to co-exist in a single person. I’ve been accused of being hypocritical before because I may have enjoyed a good relationship with someone while also taking exception to something that they may have been doing. Perhaps it’s not a vicious cycle, but instead an impossible standard that we hold others to, always forgetting that we’re also that ‘other’ to someone else that applies that same standard to us.

    We look at others and demand consistency and predictability, but we crumble under the pressure of the same consistency and predictability being demanded of us. It’s easy to expect, but not always easy to deliver. However, most often our attention is drawn to the rights that we have over others, rather than the rights that they have over us. No wonder then that we have such dysfunction in society. We tend to wait to have our rights and expectations fulfilled before we’re willing to return the favour. Everyone is waiting for that change that we all wish to see in the world, but no one is willing to offer it without an expectation of reciprocation.

    I doubt this will change my inclination to openly acknowledge all the good that people do for me when they’re doing it for me. But I also don’t think that this is entirely a bad thing, because the acknowledgement I offer may not always be verbal, but is almost always demonstrated in my sacrifices of personal comforts and time which is much more meaningful than a few spoken words, the sincerity of which can never be known. When someone does something good for us, we’re faced with a few possible reasons why they’re doing it. Either they want something in return, they have a vested interest, or perhaps they’re doing it to subtly acknowledge our worth in their life. I suspect that we rarely consider the third option, quite possibly because the superficial nature of this world has most of us inclined towards the first two as motivators for action.

  • Finding My Way

    I have a lot that I want to pursue, explore, or share in my efforts to unravel or unpack the unanswered questions around me. I think sometimes that I should in fact write that book that many friends, colleagues, and some professional acquaintances often nagged me about, but then I wonder if there is anything new that I can add to the already burgeoning stores of narratives that someone thought was special enough to share. One of the problems with this ease of accessibility to sharing your thoughts is that everything fast becomes clichéd because everyone has a pearl of wisdom to drop all over the place. I wonder then if the new challenge is not to string together meaningful fresh insights, but rather to collate the clichés in a way that brings sanity to the noise, or beauty to the jagged edges of everyone’s desire to be noticed?

    My life is less than ordinary. It always has been. I always imagined ordinary to be a normal home, with a normal family, normal parents, with general growing pains and the usual social circles to round it all up. Children that have a healthy dose of sibling rivalry, but a healthier dose of family unity. Parents that each play their own parts equitably so that a vague sense of order and balance resonates through the home. Overall, there’s a general sense of wholesomeness accompanied by an unashamed sense of mediocrity in celebrating the little life stages that each of the kids make it through, while the parents grow content with having put their kids through school, and then maybe college or university, followed by marrying them off into good families to start that entire cycle again.

    That’s not my life. Never has been. Improving on that would be extraordinary, but less than that must then be less than ordinary. That would be my life. Less ordinary, and somewhat weird. Part of the weirdness was instilled at an early age when I realised that I was not like my siblings, so seeking affirmation from them for what interested me was never an option. My parents had their own distractions, so seeking out fatherly guidance was not an option either. And so started the troubled journey of finding my own way in life.

    There’s a boon that accompanies such a journey, and that is the ability to forge new paths and take the less travelled roads (oh, those damned clichés ). The opportunity to make your own mistakes without having someone around to tell you ‘I told you so’, nor having someone around to constrain your thinking or creativity in line with their fears, or failures. But there’s a burden that accompanies every boon. That burden is the anguish you feel when you’re embarking on something really important, or at least want to, and there’s a room full of no one that you’re able to use as a sounding board. No one that you feel comfortable enough to share that passion with because you know that your reality is very different from theirs. Your frame of reference is different from theirs. Your self-imposed limitations, your fears, your desires, your perspective, is all different. So seeking sanity in their reflections is a futile exercise.

    At points like these I wonder if this is what it may feel like, in some small way, to be an orphan. To be without guides, or mentors, or pillars of strength. To instead find yourself to be that pillar of strength, that guide, and that mentor for others, with the means to guide you being not much more than a quirky ability to reflect while indulging, or to observe while acting, coupled with a resilience that can’t be explained. There’s a stubborn obstinacy within me that refuses to give way to convention. When I do fight that stubbornness in an attempt to ‘get along’, I find my health suffering because of the unnatural tension that it causes within me.

    The likely delusion in all this is that I seem to think that my circumstance is special. This world appears to be more dysfunctional than wholesome. Our drive for individual instant gratification has already eroded the sense of community that we all long for, but towards which most are not willing to contribute. This is sounding more like a brain dump than a post. Perhaps in that lies the secret of finding my way. Rather than internalising, perhaps there is much to be gained from verbalising my clutter, because once it’s out there in plain language, the sense or stupidity of it all becomes blatantly obvious, making it possible to sift through the muck so that I can find the gems that would lead me on to the next leg of my journey.

  • Letting Go

    Most people automatically associate the phrase ‘letting go’ with love and romance. The angsty teenager with the broken heart, or the distraught divorcee, or the one who lost a loved one. It’s so easy to allow the requisite time for mourning to pass before feeling comfortable enough to boldly tell someone to let go and move on. But let go of what? Move on to where?

    Sometimes I find it akin to hanging off the edge of a cliff holding on to a rope in the hope that something will change at some point which will make my hanging from that cliff meaningful or significant. I hold on to that rope for dear life’s sake, more in fear of what will happen if I let go, rather than because I want to hold on. Perhaps my holding on is inspired by the hope that someone may find me worthy enough to want to save me from the fall? I find the same to be true in life outside of romance or human relationships. So many erroneously assume that the act of letting go is what is important, when in fact the need to not want to hold on is really what matters.

    When we focus on letting go, we end up seeking out replacements or alternatives to make up for what we’re supposedly giving up, when in fact we’re not giving up anything, but instead only filling the same gaping hole with a different object. With this realisation I find myself back on that cliff holding on to that rope for dear life, not for a second realising that life hanging off the edge of a cliff is really not much of a life at all.

    Perhaps the cliff analogy is somewhat extreme, but the principles of dealing with reality in the face of inevitability remain the same. We’d much rather hold on to what is familiar than let go in the belief that something better may be acquired. Sometimes we dismiss this insecurity and neediness as pragmatism, or reality, when in fact it’s simply fear. Crippling fear that if we got it wrong once, or if we lost once, we cannot afford to allow ourselves into a situation that would hold the potential of such fear or loss again. And there begins the cycle of self defeat where we assure ourselves of our limitations and pretend to accept it graciously when in fact we’re really just protecting ourselves from the unknown.

    Sometimes we deny this fear and camouflage it with misplaced courage sub-consciously trying to prove that we’re not damaged or dependent on those that betrayed us, and so we pretend to boldly pursue new challenges or opportunities, when in fact all we’re doing is trying to pacify ourselves, and dissuade others from seeing the weakness and the wounds that fester beneath the surface. One scarce talent, it seems, is our ability to accept our true worth before we embrace our limitations. We’re prone to believing that we’re flawed before we believe in our ability to succeed.

    It seems we live in a time when society thrives on the insecurities of others. Our self worth is determined by how much we’re able to fill in those gaps for others, so much so that we are in tune with what others need more than we have any inkling about what we need for ourselves. The trick, I believe, is not to know how to please someone else, but rather how to find someone that is pleased by similar values and virtues as yourself. There is much truth in the saying that love is not two people looking at each other, but rather two people looking in the same direction. It’s just a pity that most people are aimless in their wanderings to find a life worth living.

    Too much emphasis is placed on the contribution of others towards determining the happiness we experience. We’re prone to waiting for life to happen while finding distractions to fill in the gaps of loneliness and purpose, instead of embracing life while being entertained by the distractions. And the same is true for bad habits, social failures, or career bumps. We look at the failure or the setback as a defining experience of who we are, rather than a defining experience of the bad choices we made. Rather than kicking ourselves when we get something wrong, we should remind ourselves that there is much dignity and reward in reflection on the reasons for the bad choices we made, acceptance of the fact that each experience affords us an opportunity to make more informed choices in the future, and the ultimate goal of evolving beyond being a creature of habit, and instead becoming a creature of choice.

    The only thing worth letting go of (it seems) is letting go. Instead, we should embrace, reflect, inform, and persevere. Otherwise we may as well just hold on to that rope for dear life’s sake, hoping that someone will come along at some point and feel sorry enough to want to help us out of our stupor, so that we can start yet another cycle of neediness that ends in pain when the one we need cannot bear the burden of being needed so desperately.

  • The Oppression of Victim-hood

    Being oppressed does not necessarily result in victims, but sitting and waiting for someone else to lift you out of your oppressive state does. Immediately images of Palestine, Burma, Iraq, Syria and other downtrodden communities come to mind, for most anyway. However, this state of victim-hood happens on a daily basis in the most arrogant and privileged among us.

    We often look for signs of being victims in people that appear helpless and incapable of fending for or defending themselves. Perhaps this is part of the psyche that drives us to denounce our own state of victim-hood. I’ve often suggested that anger is driven by fear, and fear is in turn driven by insecurity. Given that victims are generally insecure, either physically or emotionally, it stands to reason then that those that are angry more often than not are most probably the biggest victims among us. However, given that anger is often used to subdue others, it’s easy to see the target of such aggression as being the weak, and the aggressors as being the strong. This is very far from the truth of it all.

    I’m not suggesting that the aggressors should earn our sympathy, because that would be further adding to the imbalance in society that aggressors create. Rather, what I am suggesting is that if we recognise the victim-hood in the aggressors, we’ll recognise their weakness. If we recognise their weakness, we stand a chance of rising above their oppression and finding ways to undo that which gives them power over others. Stop thinking about this in the context of war and crime. It’s easy to be distracted by those because of the unfortunate prevalence of it all. Instead, think about in the context of an ordinary life.

    There is always someone looking to assert their superiority over others. But there’s rarely enough to recognise that such an effort results from an insecurity that drives us to seek such significance because we don’t believe we’re significant by default. It’s easy to succumb to oppression because we have a world celebrating the victim-hood of all with the aggressor being life. Just yesterday I heard that a child that throws tantrums at least three times a month for the period of a year is deemed to have a psychological disorder. Where I come from, it’s a parenting disorder, not a psychological one. The fact that the parents are inept primarily because of their own insecurities further cements the views I’ve shared about the oppression that results from victim-hood. But we’re unfortunately conditioned to believe that victims should be meek creatures waiting for a hand up, while forgetting that in waiting for a hand up we give up our right to take a stand for ourselves.

    Standing up should not be the act of a hero, or a brave soul. Like Stefan Molyneux said, “Anytime you create a hero, you diminish your own capacity for greatness.” Similarly, each time you wait for a hand up, you reduce your own capacity to be you. To be independent. To be a master of your life, rather than a victim.

  • The Pretentiousness of Self-Doubt

    Self-doubt, it seems, is insecurity cloaked in anxiety. It occurred to me one morning on my way to work this week that each time I witnessed someone in the throes of an anxiety attack, there was an underlying sense of grave insecurity that left them helpless to deal with even fleeting thoughts of burdens they couldn’t stand the thought of bearing.

    This same pretentiousness drives me to write, or to ramble. This pretence that if I spew these words, it will relieve me of the burden of realisation that accompany them. It doesn’t. I read, quite uninterestedly, the numerous reminders about death. Reminders intended to spur us into action before that moment arrives when we stare inevitability in the face pleading for one more chance to do everything we always promised ourselves we’d do before we got old. But those reminders don’t remind me, they only taunt me.

    They taunt me because they remind me not of death, but rather of my eager anticipation of it since my youngest years. And as I grew older, I grew more tired of the wait and the anguish of not knowing when. When I was 22, I revelled in the deep-seated certainty that I would not live beyond 23, and so I immersed myself in this promise of tomorrow not always holding true. Until I lived beyond that age and felt cheated out of the promise of peace.

    But this is not about death. Nor is it about life. It’s about the lies we tell ourselves for so long that eventually we even convince others that it’s true about us. It starts out with a simple insecurity, or a simple doubt about something inconsequential, but usually larger than life because of the audience rather than the deed. It starts out when we’re unconsciously focused on how we’re to be seen by another, instead of how capable we are. That’s when the paralysing fear of incompetence sets in and convinces us that it’s safer to hold back, than it is to push forward because ridicule is far more painful than an insignificant success.

    And so the circle of doubt is formed. There are many that nurture it to the point of debilitation, while others stop short at instant gratification. Instantly gratifying themselves with puny accomplishments and denying themselves the opportunity to excel beyond mediocrity. More than the debilitated ones, I pity the mediocre amongst us. They hinder us in our quest for excellence or fulfilment, because they’re always pandering to the accolades of the feeble minded. Meanwhile, their appearance of confidence in their mediocre endeavours feed that self-doubt until they reach a point in life when the lies are just not convincing any longer. That’s when the fear of being discovered lurks just beneath the skin of the faces of those pretending to be the shadow of their true selves.

    Most of us will die never realising our true potential. Worse still, most of us will die not having anyone believe in our true potential. That we will die is inevitable. That we will live is highly doubtful.

    My sincerest condolences to the sorry soul that can relate to the incoherent rant that I just attempted to disguise as a meaningful post.

  • Dress your soul in modesty and wear your spirit with confidence

    Cynically Jaded (via cynicallyjaded)

  • Dua When One Loses Hope

    Dua when one loses hope