Amr El Beleidy

Which generation is taking care of the other?

Interacting with older people, there seems to be this underlying assumption in both generations. The younger ones assume it is them who need to take care of the older ones, and the older ones assume it is them who need to take care of the younger ones.

It’s kind of funny sometimes, because each treats the other like the little kid. A lot of misunderstandings of course arise and a lot of conflicts.

The older ones think the young don’t know much about life and how it works, they’re hot headed and reactionary. They still have a lot to learn and they refuse to listen to the experience being handed down to them.

The younger ones see a huge difference in speed, the elders are slow, have no idea how the world works these days, talk a lot about theory but in practice these things never really work. They don’t listen, don’t change and refuse to adapt.

The young ones have muscle and energy, the older ones have experience, money and power. Let’s see how that pans out.

Decisions, epiphanies and aaah moments

They tend to come in the oddest moments. You’re there sitting, talking, doing something, concentrating heavily, or just floating in your imagination from thought to thought and image to image, than BAM!

It’s as if your mind has been working on it in the background and when it’s done, it pings your consciousness and delivers the result. Suddenly it all makes sense, suddenly the decision to take is very obvious, suddenly you know exactly what you need to know.

Life is a series of discovering the obvious. Once things are seen, they cannot be unseen, they’re integrated in your thought process and make up, even if they sink again into the subconscious, but they’re still there.

So if you need to figure something out, work on it for a bit, but also leave your mind to work on it on its own. Sometimes doing something else will trigger the answer, even if they seem unrelated.

Quotes from Thrust – the book.

So you’d be on this escalator all these years, and eighteen months after getting off it you’d be dead. And I couldn’t be part of that. I really couldn’t be. You’re only here once. I was also very aware that I hadn’t really seen the world.

I’d suddenly realised there was a lot more to life than working in a big multinational, a hell of a sight more!

You can’t really give up when things turn sour. Half of the battle is in forcing yourself to keep going when others might be tempted to stop.

Success can be very sad, actually, once you’ve gotten over the initial elation. You realize that the whole excitement of such projects is everybody working, communicating, and travelling together, and fighting against the odds. Then suddenly it’s all over, and it can never be savoured again.

How not to get mugged

Walking along the city streets at night, and in some cities in the morning, sometimes we become aware of the possibility that we might get mugged. Looking like a tourist, not knowing your way around and having no language skills, we think we’re easy prey. This can keep us captive to lit and crowded streets as we seek the security of the masses. This means we miss out on what are possibly the most interesting parts of any city.

But let’s do a little trick. Instead of being the victim, let’s become the muggers. Start thinking that you are out there to mug someone (but don’t actually do that). Convince yourself that you are a mugger, and start thinking like one.

I say there is a much lower probability of a mugger being mugged than your casual tourist. So once you switch sides and become a mugger, you’ve effectively reduced your chances by a huge margin. Feel free to explore without boundaries.

(Please also exercise common sense, sometimes muggers actually do get mugged)

Left in the desert

Being your own boss is not easy. There is no one to tell you what to do. And when I say being your own boss, I’m not talking about work, I mean everything.

When no one has designed your journey of life for you. When you don’t buy in in the usual, get a degree, get a job, get married, get kids model or any other model for that matter, when you realise that you are your only source of everything, and really there is no one you can go to to help, it feels like you’ve suddenly been dropped in the middle of the desert. And that’s it.

No mission, no function, no directions, no big brother, nothing. It’s freestyle from there on. No KPIs, no standards to hold yourself against, no right, no wrong, no should, no shouldn’t.

Do this. Imagine you are in a desert, you just appeared there, there is no past. Everything starts with you in a desert. There is sand as far as you can see in all directions. There is no one and nothing anywhere. Silence. Now start from there, and start doing stuff in your imagination. What would you do? How would you feel?

Your face

Face muscles are the ultimate mirror of brain activity. Once you get lost in thought they automatically start reacting to the stuff going on inside your brain.

A negative thought, so addictive, turns your face all frowny and rigid. Relax. Stop the negative thought, remember you are alive and smile

Relax your face. You don’t want to look old and creasy. Feeling old is such a terrible thing. The lucky ones are those who feel young, despite their bodies having been there for long. The more you smile, the more you throw your worries behind your back, the younger you are.

It’s not your age that matters, it’s how relaxed your face is.

Get lost

One of my favourite hobbies is to get lost in cities. This becomes even more interesting when you do not speak the language of the country. It’s amazing. You just get a random feel of the city and its people, you discover things you would have never thought of, and best of all everything is a surprise because you haven’t done one bit of research so you have no idea what you’re going to find.

There is also the long walk aspect, which is always relaxing. In this case a 7 hour walk, with rests and food of course.

I’ve come to realise that some of my best travel memories are those where I just floated. No research, no knowledge, just walked or just went along. You meet the most random people sometimes, you get to know the weirdest things about their personal lives.

I still remember the Norwegian I sat next to on the ferry from one Thai island to another. It was a two hour ride after which I got to know all about his ex-girlfriend who he had just broken up with on the island. Sometimes people just want to let things out and you happen to be there. It’s much easier to talk to a stranger than talking to a friend.

In any case, I only had one conversation in my last seven hours which I spent floating around the city. It wasn’t interesting at all, but the man was supervising his son playing in the swings, and obviously just wanted to pass away the time. I was resting from my long walk.

In any case, the best thing about this walk was that I had only one safety net. I went out, no map, no phone, no watch, no compass, and with a camera* that was low on battery. All these things help you find your way around and without them the feeling of getting lost is more realistic. My get out of jail card was one that had a local map of my hotel area and the phrase please drive me to blah blah hotel written on it in the local language. Should I get far too tired to continue walking, I should just jump in a cab and show the driver this card. I wanted to avoid this and find my own way home, but eventually I just did it.

So it all started with me looking for the closest metro station. I wanted to get to the one closest to the park. I knew it was going to be a difficult walk from there but I trusted I will find my way. So I kept walking and eventually I found a station, except it was a couple of stops after the one I was looking for, so turns out I walked too much.

I decide to ditch the park, and head straight to the river. The metro system was fairly straight forward. I got out and found my way to the water.

The oddly shaped Opera house

There was a very oddly shaped building. It was the opera house. My first thought was why are many opera houses situated next to the water? The Cairo opera house, is in Zamalek, an island in the middle of the Nile, and the most famous one of all, Sydney, is always next to water in the pictures. In astrology, water signs are those who are more in touch with their emotions, as far as I understand. Operas are a lot of drama, and art in general plays on emotions. I’m not sure where this is going but putting the opera next to a body of water somehow made sense.

I looked at the building and the most amazing thing was not the building itself, but what the building made you see. It’s odd convex shape and having a glass exterior meant you could see a reflection of the whole area. Very symbolic, because art is not about art itself, but about what it reflects in us and our surroundings. Art is a mirror of the artist’s soul, and the world around them. In this case I was the artist, I could see myself and the what’s around me.

Art shows you yourself and your surroundings in ways you've never seen before, can you find me in the pic?

Amazingly, this also meant i could see things reflected off the building that I couldn’t see just by looking around. It’s like when you go to a restaurant with a large mirror in the ceiling, and you can see all the other tables. If you had just looked striaght at them, you wouldn’t be able to see them through the barriers or through the other tables. Art gives us vision and insight into things we wouldn’t be able to see on our own.

There was a statue of a man, sitting on a block, leaning forward and holding his head up with his hand, in heavy thought. It must be a famous statue, I saw one in the grounds of the British Library. It makes sense in a library, but why would anyone have a heavy head when you can hear the brass section of the orchestra tuning up?! You’re going to listen to some good music, so in the words of a t-shirt I saw, easy your life.

That was enough time in the Opera grounds, so I gave it my back and moved along, time to really get lost.

A head heavy with thought weighs down this man to the ground.

*A camera can be a good navigation tool in urban areas when you have enough battery on it. Take a photo at every intersection you make. Ideally this would be a photo of the road name sign, this way you can trace all the roads back to whence you came. You can always show the photo to a local and ask them where it is, they should sort you out. Otherwise you can take a photo of an iconic landmark, and then go looking for it. It’s not your most foolproof method, but it works.

Overprotection Kills

Seriously, it does. Don’t do it.

Rehab is for quitters

I feel like I’m in rehab. I might not be trying to quit but I’m trying to consume responsibly. I have went to somewhere far away, and I have no access. I wonder if all dependancies have a similar pattern when it comes the to the withdrawal phase. What are the chances of relapse? Am I going to go into one of these vicious cycles or am I going to come out squeaky clean, and stay this way?

I’ve gone cold turkey before on something else, and it worked. I haven’t relapsed. But going cold turkey is easier than regulating and being responsible. This is the trick. I am going to have to use a word I generally dislike, but it seems like one must balance.

Don’t throw something away because a lot of it would be harmful, but don’t get dragged into overconsumption either. Difficult, but easy once you get the hang of it.

Rehab is for quitters, and I aint going to quit.

People love rules

Easy is better than difficult, or so we have been taught, actively and passively for a long time. There is a great direction towards making everything easier, make our lives more comfortable, faster etc… I even just got an email from twitter telling me that they just made it easier to share anything off iOS5. They actually want to announce that now instead of pressing two or three buttons you will only press one .

Don’t get me wrong, I love the easy stuff. I like my copy/paste option instead of having to retype every word, but some things are not meant to be easy and attempting to make them easier backfires.

Sometimes the easy way out is the most difficult.

And this is why we look for all those rules in life, a formula that makes life easy, gives us the results that we want by just following, not leading, by executing not thinking. Everyone thinks they got it, but none of it really work.

Even those who think they got it working, seem to be living a life full of contradictions.

Think about it, even physics hasn’t come up with rules that explain everything. They’re still looking for the theory of everything, that explains stuff at all times. Right now, the laws of physics break down at one point or another.

This could be a trick, people who limit themselves to the parts of life where rules work, thereby getting more and more convinced that their methodology is a good one, not realising that trapping yourself is a sign of a broken system.

Rules are an approximate way of explaining things, something that roughly works, that gives you your best bet, but if you can (new age word alert!) transcend  the layer of rules and just go one step deeper, whatever it is down there is what we try to understand, to live a fuller life without all those bloody rules.