Tag: zaidismail

  • 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.


  • Knowing your place

    Understanding where you fit into the strategy of the lives of your significant others will save you a lot of disappointment and even pain. More than this, understanding where you reside in the totem pole of their priorities is essential if you hope to maintain your sanity. If you are not aware of these two simple points, you’ll assume that the value system by which you embrace them is the value system by which they’ll embrace you. That couldn’t be further from the truth.

    When every ideal of yours is shattered by those in whom you tirelessly invest the moments of your life, you’re left contemplating who you are and what you stand for in the face of an abhorrent rejection. To claim grace and dignity in that moment when the audacity of ingratitude bears down on you without shame, becomes the battle that will determine whether you lose yourself to rage or do you hold on to the remnants of the self-respect that allowed you to invest tirelessly to begin with.

    Creating spaces for a life filled with love always seems like an amazing way to spend your life, until those spaces are neglected by the loves with whom you hoped to share it. The hand that gives is greater than the hand that receives because the hand that receives rarely understands what it takes to be able to give of that which you sacrifice much to earn a little. Receiving bears the threat of entitlement, while giving, the threat of arrogance. Lose sight of yourself in either, and you’ll become one with the ingrates who trade with entitlement and arrogance.

    Of course, this means that you must have first claimed yourself to begin with. Most have not. Most are defined by what they want to be seen as. They want to be seen as glorious, but offer only vainglorious ethics. They want to be seen as generous, but they trade with ingratitude. They want to change the world, but truly, they only mean to claim more from it for themselves. And if you grow up believing that you must take what you need in life, you’ll have no reason to consider the hands that toiled to create what you have available to take. Hence the ingratitude with which you are bound to operate.

    But giving while trusting that you will have what you need when you need it requires a trust that is scarce. When we realise that the values by which we live is not the values by which we are received, that trust in humanity, or even in our circle of endearment becomes a hot coal that we juggle in our hands, burning ourselves out while not having the heart to discard it because we know what it’s like to be discarded by those who don’t have it. For anyone looking on without appreciation for why that hot coal must not be abandoned, we appear as nothing more than a dancing madman persisting in self-harm while everyone else is self-preserving.

    Perhaps that is the place of the insane, whom, by the standards of the society around them, remain the only hope to retain some humanness where there now appears only a desert of isolation. In that desert we reach out to each other with tentacles of materialism while yearning for a warmly touch from living flesh, but incapable of receiving it with gentleness when it is offered, because we feel entitled to its offering because of our assumed place on the totem pole.

    When you step away from the system that depletes your dignity, you need a resolve that holds you steady as you navigate the darkness that remains in the spaces outside of that system. A cryptic life leads to a cryptic mind of cryptic thoughts that deepens the isolation of spirit, and increases the takers who reach out with those tentacles demanding a piece of your soul while reciprocating with a shallow smile and a goodly sentiment. But no warm embrace.

    Know your place.

  • Getting it wrong

    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?

  • You are responsible for your abusive ways

    You are responsible for your abusive ways

    This is true about abusive men and women. Not just men.

    “Stop complaining and just take it like a man!”

    “Why can’t you just be a man?”

    “He’s so useless. I wish my husband was like yours!”

    “it’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be”

    “You deserved it.”

    “If it was another man, you’d be dead by now!”

    “Why do you always make me angry?”

    And so the horrid rhetoric goes as it is spewed from those raging at the weak because they don’t have the courage to face the ones who treated them badly.

    Those who abuse others will draw attention to their victim’s supposed weakness to pacify their own conscience about their despicable behaviour.

    When we can’t face the reasons for our self-loathing, we find a soft target on which to project our rage.

    Believing you’re inadequate feels like weakness, but feeling vulnerable because of that weakness is what stirs the rage within.

    And all that happens because you’re judging yourself based on how someone important may have mistreated you.

    Most often, it’s a parent that didn’t give you a chance to be heard, or seen. And that parent is usually the father, or the absence of one.

    Your parents gave you what they had, not what you deserved.

    Nonetheless, how we judge ourselves becomes our responsibility once we’ve reached the age of self-awareness.

    Any blame from that point on only harms us and those who deserve more from us. It does nothing to change the reality of the past that left us questioning our worth.

    When we give up accountability for how we feel about ourselves, we make others responsible for how they supposedly make us feel, and then use that to justify our bad behaviour towards them.

    That’s why some men can’t deal with successful women, and why some women can’t respect gentle men.

    Your feelings of inadequacy are never enough reason to abuse those who had nothing to do with how your self-worth was formed.

    The only person responsible for how you feel about yourself is YOU.

    Own that, and you’ll own your life!

  • Faithfully hopeful

    Faithfully hopeful

    Abandoning hope in something good means that we are investing hope in the relief of not trying any longer.

    It means that we hope for ease after having struggled through the anguish and pain of trying to achieve something important, but failed.

    Sometimes we hope that abandoning hope might give others reason to care or to notice, or perhaps even to appreciate what we abandoned when we felt like our efforts towards them was being taken for granted.

    Perhaps it will give them reason to appreciate or care about what we’ve tried in vain to convince them is important.

    That’s why, when we lose hope in achieving something, we experience a double blow when we realise that no one cared anyway. Or that they didn’t even notice.

    Faith and hope are inseparable.

    Where we focus our hope, we focus our faith.

    Faith is what inspires us to want to change the world, while hope is grounded in our belief in our ability to change it.

    Our faith is shaken and our hopes are dashed when our expectation of what we wish to influence exceeds our ability to influence it.

    Being torn between having faith that things can be amazing, while feeling powerless to make it happen, is at the heart of all anguish in life.

    Perhaps it’s best demonstrated by the act of planting a tree in your old age, having full faith in the comfort and benefit it will offer those who are alive to experience its growth, despite knowing that you won’t live long enough to share it with them.

    Your conviction in what is good will ensure that you never lose hope in creating good for others.

    And your faith in the good that results from your efforts in life will offer you peace despite not always being able to witness the value of your contribution.

    Be mindful of where you’re investing your faith, and hope will follow faithfully.


  • Let’s exchange needs

    Let’s exchange needs

    Men complain about lack of intimacy and women complain about emotional unavailability.

    Sometimes, the roles are reversed, but generally, these are the two most common issues that couples face in a relationship.

    Problem is, neither is the problem that needs to be solved.

    We’re naturally more emotionally available in spaces where we feel seen or appreciated.

    Having no reason to doubt our significance to our significant other is all the reason we need to drop our guard.

    As for intimacy? We’ve largely forgotten what that even looks like.

    Similar to love, we’ve forgotten how to be intimate.

    Intimacy is not sexual acts or raunchy nights.

    Intimacy is about sharing something much deeper than that.

    But we’ve turned these elements of a relationship into commodities and rights.

    It’s therefore unsurprising to find that most couples, even the ones without major relationship problems, are essentially complacent or unfulfilled about their relationship, rather than inspired to live life passionately because of it.

    If you find yourself discussing your rights and your needs with your partner, understand that you’re distracted from why such a discussion is needed at all.

    This may sound naively idealistic, but perhaps our lack of idealism is what has killed the romance in our lives.

    Perhaps it’s our focus on occasions, and functions, and events, and allocated dates to acknowledge or celebrate each other that denies us the spontaneity needed to feel alive.

    Perhaps that’s why we’ve become so transactional in how we live, how we love, and how we seek fulfilment.

    It’s time to question whether you’ve been trying to solve the right problems in your life or have you simply been changing the dressing on a festering wound.