Tag: rights

  • The One You’re Alone With

    Loneliness is often assumed to be distinctly different from being alone. Too often I hear people professing to be alone, but not lonely. However, as I’ve often heard, you’re never lonely if you like the one you’re alone with. It’s the kind of wisdom that everyone nods enthusiastically in agreement to, but most don’t fully experience it either. It’s part of how we wish to present ourselves to the world. Composed, grounded, passionate, significant, and most often, independent. The sad truth is that most often that appearance is nothing more than that. Just an appearance.

    I think loneliness sets in when we grow to realise that there is no one that truly knows us. The desire to be understood, appreciated, and anticipated feeds needs that can’t be fully articulated, nor ever completely fulfilled. Those desires are needed to fill the cracks that life creates while we pursue charms and goals believing that those same cracks will be filled by such a pursuit. We’re too distracted to realize that we create those cracks in moments of distraction.

    Like my mathematics teacher once told me, “You’re the image of perfection, but just the image.” With role models like that it’s a true wonder that I didn’t fall to the wayside seeking affirmation from people in authority, given what he should have represented in my life. My inner voice, albeit muffled at the time, was still stronger than his sarcasm. It was stronger than the attention seekers around me. The more I grew familiar with that inner voice, the more resolute I became about not needing to fit in. I looked in the eyes of those that should have provided the moral and emotional support needed to be considered an asset to society, and all I saw staring back at me were the needs of those that wanted to be accepted.

    It didn’t appeal to me. The neediness, the wanting, the desperation for inclusion or acceptance. It all seemed too desperate to be appealing, and so I grew naturally averse to it. I didn’t need to believe in myself, or in my ability to rise above it. In fact, I didn’t even consider either of those aspects about my life. All I knew was that I didn’t want to be part of it. And that was enough to guide me through the ruts and the roads that I needed to take. A firm belief in what I didn’t want for myself always stood me in good stead. I looked at others and saw how empty their lives were in the absence of that affirmation and validation that they courted so religiously, and I realized what a fake life they had.

    Substance, at least the substance of your life, is always most prominent when tragedy or loss finds its way to you. It’s not necessarily the loss of a loved one, or similar tragedy that visits, but it could be as simple as a huge expectation being trampled into the dirt. When failure questions everything that you thought you had a grip on, or when betrayal shakes loose the handhold you thought would always be there for you, that is when the true substance of you comes to the fore. The more substance there is, the greater your resilience, the less substance there is, the more violently your world is shaken.

    The one we’re alone with most is also the one we tend to know the least. When we don’t see ourselves as beings independent of others, we grow incapable of being without them. Worse still, we grow intolerant of ourselves because having to embrace the stranger whose flaws are grossly unattractive causes us to wretch almost instinctively. We know our flaws better than anyone else. Couple that with not knowing or accepting ourselves fully and you’re left with a scenario of having a stranger inside us whose ugliness is more pronounced than their beauty. Little wonder it is then that we are so fixated on complying with expectations or committed to soliciting affirmation and validation, because the acceptance of others is the only thing that numbs the disgust we hold within.

    Sure, you’re never alone if you like the one you’re alone with. Problem is, you need to accept the one you like before it’s possible to like them for who they are. The less you accept, the more likely you’ll be to blame the state of your being on circumstances apparently out of your control. Too often we confuse fulfilling rights with meeting expectations. It’s a shame that most never live to figure out the difference between the two. An even bigger shame is the one who is a slave to the latter while believing that they have it nailed.

  • The Heroes We Want To Be

    What if I told you I had cancer? Would I suddenly appear bolder and braver than those without it? Or perhaps I lost a loved one, or suffered a traumatic event? Would that suddenly make me easier to understand or relate to? Why is it that we find ourselves compassionate only to those whose troubles we know, but assume that all others are privileged and therefore not in need of our consideration unless earned? It’s exactly this morbidity that drives the mentality of hero worship. We only perceive others as heroes if they have triumphed over a struggle that weighs us down, or achieved a goal against odds similar to our own.

    I can’t recall who said it, but they said it well when they suggested that:

    Each time we create a hero we diminish our own capacity for greatness.

    When we create heroes we create limits. The naïve optimist may see it as setting an aspirational goal, but the realist knows that it sets a limit to what we wish to achieve. It therefore defies logic and reason that one would go through life with the goal of being someone’s hero. There are two critical shortcomings in such an objective. With the first having been explained above, the second is more troubling though because it suggests that the one seeking such a status is shaping their life around the expectations of another.

    I vehemently oppose the belief that we should live our lives with the intention of fulfilling another’s expectations of us. The one that appears to be heroic in such an endeavour is in fact a martyr. Not all martyrs are worthy of celebration. Those that act impulsively out of conviction rather than a consideration for the consequential fame and admiration they may earn are of honourable, maybe even of noble intent. Those that act while consciously aware of the potential fame and good fortune that may follow are attention-seekers and should be spurned. They are the ones that will behave unethically and will lose their moral compass the moment their intended audience is not around to witness their foul ways.

    We are driven more by our ego than we are by sincerity of intent. Those that deny this fact are in fact in denial. So when we set out to be the hero of those around us, be they our significant others, or people whose respect and admiration we court, we must not fool ourselves into believing that such an endeavour is a noble one. Although the benefits may be so, the intent is very firmly grounded in our need for significance, or our need to allay the guilt of those actions that undermine the integrity of the relationship we proclaimed to have had with the one we now wish to serve. Simply stated, when we feel a need to compensate for past failures or betrayals, we willingly sacrifice our rights and liberties in order to repay our debts for previously abusing the rights of others. And to the casual observer, we may appear heroic in the process.

    I think every one of us harbours a desire to be celebrated. The greater the self-loathing, the greater the need for that affirmation and validation. Those that court such attention are often the most troubled. Those that don’t, seek fulfilment of a more substantial kind. But that is the musings of another post altogether. All this keeps nagging at me with one final realisation that many don’t grasp. The difference between rights and expectations. Some will read this and find reason to abdicate their responsibility towards others under the false notion that they refuse to live according to the expectations of others, when in fact the truth is closer to them searching for any reason to abdicate responsibility. Period.

  • Recalibration and Resuscitation

    There are moments when my resolve gives way to feelings of surrender. It usually accompanies moments in my life when I realise that my expectations are consistently exceeding my reality, often relative to those around me. Initially I find myself rejecting the simple truth that that holds, but eventually the unintended cycle of recalibrating my expectations begins. Recalibration for me is like rising to the surface for a breath of air before submerging again into the sea of expectations that pervade my life.

    In the absence of this cycle, I find myself growing persistent in my justified views of what should be expected from those around me. As much as I have my rights to those expectations, its unfulfilled reality strips me of the peace that would otherwise be enjoyed should those rights have been fulfilled. It was in contemplating this that I realised that life is all about victims and oppressors, with a smattering of humanity in between. When we recognise and fulfil our rights towards those around us, we become humane. The moment we fall short or overstep those bounds, we become either oppressors or victims respectively.

    The challenge with this realisation though is that most people are so immersed in their need to be fulfilled, that they have long since lost sight of the rights that others have over them. The overwhelming majority of those that still breathe today are victims of circumstance, and mostly of themselves. It is this reality that forces the need for recalibration because in the normal course of life, everything being equal, and all parties fulfilling their rights before demanding their expectations, such recalibration will not be needed because the natural order will be maintained. Withholding our contribution towards the fulfilment of the rights of those around us disrupts that order, and more often than not we are the ones withholding in response to us being the disgruntled recipients of the effects of that very same disorder.

    Simply stated, we easily forget to notice that we often impose oppression on those around us because of an oppression that we may have experienced at a different time in our lives. Unless we stop to reflect on the reality of when we slip into that victim state of mind, chances are great that we will find ourselves being party to the very same oppression that we decry. In my short life I have witnessed the worst oppression being meted out by those who viewed themselves as victims before anything else. Moments like those are often what prompted the need for recalibration. In the face of such victim-inspired oppression, it made no sense to persist in my expectation of having my rights fulfilled by one that was oblivious to it. Recalibration, at that point, allowed me a moment to resuscitate myself from the suffocation of the imbalance around me.

    I’ve also recently realised that my pursuit for balance, and therefore logical conclusions, is core to my frustrations with those around me. People behave emotively before they consider logic. I’m often reminded of the verse from the Qur’an that states that everything was fashioned in due proportion. Such proportion I believe is not limited to just our physical form, but instead, to every single law that governs our existence. When that balance is disrupted, ill health and mental strife follow, often manifesting itself as oppression, or victim-hood.

    Recalibration is therefore not simply an indulgence in seeking a meditated balance in my life. It is a tool for survival. Survival from the insanity that parades as humanity. Survival from the chaos that I am inclined by nature to unravel and restore into an ordered state. Resistance to that order is what oppresses me, which oddly enough is the resistance of a victim to contribute towards an order that they were denied, and therefore refuses to break the cycle, choosing to pay it forward instead.

    My efforts at recalibration used to be sub-conscious. In recent times it has become a conscious need, and with it, the mindfulness of what I need to surrender in the process drives my ego to resist my efforts at recalibration because of the need to sacrifice my own benefits in favour of sanity. The moment we place more emphasis on our rights than we do on our sanity, we become a threat to the morbid peace enjoyed by those around us.