Amr El Beleidy

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.

You change what you see and what you see changes you

My yoga instructor told me that wandering teachers normally set up shop in the most stressful cities. This way they know there are a lot of people who are in need of their skills. Yoga sure does calm you down and brings yourself back to you.

But they don’t last there for long. Soon, it becomes too much for them and they have to move on again.

You see, they came to change the city, and they probably have, but the city has also changed them, and they didn’t like these changes.

This makes me think about the idea of living in Cairo. Sure, all my family is there and most of my friends, but maybe it is not such a good idea to live somewhere where your sanity is constantly assaulted, where you struggle daily just to keep your cool, and not lose it all.

Does it make sense? What good does it do for anyone to stay trapped in this mind-numbing hole?

Sure it’s a challenge, and I want to be able to adapt, to be able to live peacefully in my own hometown, and not to dislike it. But we don’t chose where we are born, nor brought up, and maybe this challenge is really meaningless. Maybe I am better off living somewhere else, where my sanity is better preserved.

Imagine you are born to horrible abusive parents. Does it make sense to keep fighting to change their behaviour and be able to live with them, or does it make more sense to just leave the house and become independent? Or does it depend on how much damage you think you will sustain in trying to make a difficult situation better?

There is a law in physics that tells you that you cannot see anything without changing it. That is, you can never know had you not seen it if the same thing would happen or not. One of those, if a tree falls and no one was around to hear it, would it still make a sound type of thing.

But it now seems to me that the relationship is reciprocal, not only do you change what you see, but what you see also changes you. And seeing Cairo day in day out, breathing its air, being trapped in its traffic, dealing with its stressed out people, surely cannot be good for anyone.

Maybe I will leave again soon, or maybe I should stick it out this time and really do an effort to stop moving from place to place. Two very conflicting simultaneous feelings.

Time will tell.

Relationships and successful women

Many women think that by being high achievers they intimidate possible prospects. They tell themselves, that it is difficult to find a man who can handle her, and how successful she is. They tell themselves that a man will be jealous, that she is better off toning down her successes lest she repels possible suitors. The belief goes that men are threatened by smart, ambitious and successful women.

This reminds me of the same argument that goes along the lines of, if no man is approaching you, that’s because you are too beautiful it intimidates them. Most probably this is not true.

Sure some men, heck even if you want, most men are intimidated by beautiful successful smart and ambitious women, take that if you want, but not all men. So if you’ve never been approached by anyone, or if all your relationships have failed, don’t blame it solely on the men. Like I said in a previous post, most clashes are due to issues from both sides, and this includes you.

Here are some reasons why relationships with successful women (and maybe men) might not be working… or working.

1. You are a lower priority.

In general we have to balance a lot in life. You need time for yourself, your work, your hobbies, your friends, your family and your partner. Most successful people will be spending more time than average on their work (or hobby, depending on where their area of succes is), which means less time for you. If they are workaholics, you pretty much have very little space in their lives, and you might not like that. Add to that the possibility of ditching you if something comes up, because let’s face it you can wait but work won’t.

2. You cannot really complain.

If a woman complains her man is working too much, he’s seen as not giving her enough attention. But if the man complains then, he’s probably jealous. He’s needy, clingy and jealous. He’s the type of man who wants to lock you up at home, because he’s so afraid of how successful you are. You show him girl. Ugh!

This attitude makes working things out even more difficult, since both parties are already coming from a place of blaming each other.

3. They’re probably insecure.

Have you not heard the expression insecure overachiever? Yup it happens, not all the time but it happens. The majority of high achievers and 80% of criminals have a weak sense of self, whatever that means. I’m not sure actually what it means, it’s a good idea that you google it. In all cases it’s very possible that they are doing all this because they need to be “successful” in order to feed their self-worth.

This explains why work is uber-important, because it’s not about work, it’s about their self-worth and if you get near it, they’ll be very defensive.

4. They’re probably very competitive.

Again, it won’t always be the case, but it is highly possible. They are used to winning and they want to win. If you end up with a super-competitive person who is not able to differentiate between winning a race and winning in life and especially in a relationship, their ego will come in the way big time. They will want to come out of a relationship as winners. This means you are either a trophy or you will get dumped. If they feel like you’ll dump them, they’ll probably preempt and dump you first, because they don’t want to be the one who “lost”.

At the end of the day every person is different, but on other levels we’re all the same. We’re probably all the same differently.

A relationship is a combination, and some combinations as outrageous as they seem actually work.  A sadist and a masochist both have major issues, but put them together and they’re happy. So don’t take these aspects in a negative sense. Some people don’t want a relationship where they see each other so often, some will be so busy they won’t have time anyway, some need an insecure woman to feel more comfortable and others will relish the competition they provide.

So enjoy!

Quitting twitter: Self-destruction or self-saving.

Last night I did not sleep well. My mind was very busy with many things. I was not feeling very good. I have to take a number of rather difficult decisions and so thinking about them was taking all my brain power.

I woke up in the middle of the night, with a very strong sense that I should quit twitter. I had been thinking about this for a while now, it was not a spur of the moment thing, but the decision was. I figured I’d give myself a couple of weeks to really decide and see.

Having a strong feeling to do something does not always mean it’s the best thing for you. I keep remembering the story of this man, I don’t remember his name, who every time he achieves something, he becomes very self-destructive and starts all over again. But also holding onto things that hurt us is not good either.

First I’d like to tell you how I got to my 6,350 followers. The number may sound very big outside of Egypt, but I would say it’s average for your heavy twitter users here. We have the 50K level, the 25K level, the 10K level then the 5K level. There is also the 1-2K level then your newbies. The number of people in each level obviously increases as you go down.

Nevertheless 6.5k is a substantial amount of people who want to know what I’m saying and possibly have a conversation, and I appreciate each and every one of them.

Pre-revolution.

Right before the revolution I was at about 900 followers, this was at the time, quite a high figure although again not top tier. Two years before I had started using twitter. I was not aware of the Egyptian twitter community and its figures yet. I started following a lot of people who have bios that share my interest. I was more or less following / followed by 900 people.

Soon enough I found following this number unmanageable, there was a lot of noise as well on my timeline. So I stopped using twitter for about a year. Later I decided to mass delete all those I follow. When I did that naturally my 900 followers soon dropped to 650.

A while later I discovered that my tweets were not being indexed in search and I later found out that my mass unfollowing was the reason. I sent to twitter telling them I just wanted to reset my twitter experience and that I promise not to do that again. They let it go and they indexed me.

So on went the tweeting until I went up again to 900 followers.

Post-revolution.

I woke up on Friday 28th, unaware that the internet had been cut off. I switch on my laptop and voila I’m online. I had been one of the few whose ISP was still working. I guess I was one of the earliest to wake up that day (7am on a Friday) and so got a lot of attention, a lot. By the end of the 18 days I was somewhere around 5, 5.5k followers.

Eventually I stopped tweeting about politics and demos and I started losing followers again, probably seen a 500 follower drop. I guessed many were following me to know what was happening in the country and once everyone else was online, and I had stopped providing info they were naturally not interested.

Nevertheless a lot of Egyptians were joining twitter post-revolution and I was tweeting heavily, with some politics and citizen reporting when I went down to any protest. So my numbers started climbing up again slowly until I reached the 6.4k today. To give this some scale I figure your average Egyptian regular tweeter has between 1-2k followers.

What now?

Now, I’ll just need to decide how to deal with twitter.

Why is quitting self-saving?

1. I’ve become too transparent. My inner thoughts and feelings are always there in public. We were not meant to function this way. We’re meant to hide some of  how we feel and what we think, especially about other people, to oil social interaction and make it smoother.

2. It’s an unhealthy way to send a message. I know you are following me, I know you will understand you’re the inspiration behind this tweet, so I’ll tweet it. I’ve had friends look at my tweets and say, did you mean me here? Yes, yes I did.

3. It’s an unhealthy way to vent anger at the world. A lot of us are doing it. I dropped my phone, I got into an argument at work. Traffic sucks big time. I burnt the food. Life is unfair. I hate SCAF, etc… Venting the negativity out, and out onto other people, instead of just sucking it up like we used to before the smart phone days and just not making it a big deal. When you tweet about it, you make it into a big deal and you are throwing your negativity at everyone else, in exchange for a short burst of relief.

4. It’s false security. Having a large follower count plays with your ego. We all check our stats regularly, our followers, our retweets. Some more than others but we all do it. We want to know what others think, and we take security into thinking thousands of people want to listen to me, I must have something good to say.

5. It gives a false sense of achievement. What did you do today? I might have lazed around all day but it’s ok because I tweeted some stuff and got some more followers, so I’m good. And while sometimes tweeted some stuff would be important if you are spreading critical information, but most times it’s as productive as small talk in a  party.

6. It’s addictive. I check, check then check again for anything new. If my phone is not with me, I want to check and I’m not fully concentrating. Sometimes I feel I have withdrawal symptoms similar to substance abuse (but much less in intensity).

7. I’m not fully with those around me. When going out with friends, or sitting with family, constantly checking your phone is not ideal. Your mind is somewhere else most of the time and you are not really there, giving them the attention they deserve and the attention you deserve. When I decided that I won’t be looking at my phone a couple of times I went out with friends who don’t have twitter accounts, it was much more full, and human.

Why is quitting self-destructive?

1. Twitter, like money, is an awesome tool. If you’re using it incorrectly then don’t just throw it away. Learn how to use it and use it correctly. In my case however, I still need to figure out what the correct use for me is, and how to be disciplined enough not to fall back into misuse. It’ll be a good lesson on learning how to manage things, instead of avoiding them because they can have a negative effect.

2. People. I’ve met some awesome people off twitter. I’ve even made a friend or two. Where else can you find such a group of interesting and exciting people?! And even those who I didn’t get to meet, I’ve had informative and interesting conversations with.

3. News. I get to find out what’s happening before the rest of the country in many cases. It feels like the back-office of Egypt, with inside info on what is really going on. This is particularly useful since media is super censored.

4. Information. When you have more than 6 thousand people you can ask about anything, someone is bound to know. Someone with real experience and solid knowledge.

At the end

There are definitely more positives and negatives and if you have more please do leave a comment telling us what you think. But that’s what I could come with on the spot, and probably these are the ones that hit home the most.

At the end after seeing what I came up with, I feel that my online life is taking up more of my time than it should and definitely more space in my head that it deserves. I probably won’t quit twitter completely, but maybe I need a break until I change my approach to it, until I have more ability to handle it, without letting it get to me, without it taking over, seeing it for what it is.

For many twitter is just an extension of their professional lives, or passions, online. For me, it seems to be an extension of my personal life. And personal should stay personal, or maybe blogged about, where we don’t expect immediate response, and where we don’t know who’s read what. Writing has a soothing effect, of getting things out of your system, like this blog post.

Maybe after taking it from twitter to my blog, I’ll start writing posts and then not publishing them. I know, it’s called a diary. Maybe this is what I really need. Time will tell.

Don’t let the bad guys get to you!

Both the British and the Americans had notable terror events on their land, the 7/7 bombings and the 9/11 events. Responses in both countries by the public have been very interesting. While I did not do an actual study, it seems like there have been two main themes along which the responses took place.

The Americans, who had been hit first, were quick to go into their shell. Everyone waited to see what this means, the response was a knee-jerk reaction, and a lot of new rules were up, blocking many people from doing many things.

The British on the other hand, despite having their busses and tube blown up, put a yellow police line around the blown up bus (which I have personally seen) and got the rest of the busses to go around it. Everyone was back on the street the next day, fully knowing that they could be next.

The British did not let others scare them into changing their life. They were willing to take the risks, they refused to be frightened into submission. They wanted to take the bus, and if someone blew up a bus then they won’t stop their life for it. The important thing here is not letting the “bad” people win, and not letting them change the way “good” people live their lives.

Another British example is the bendy bus. While the usual busses have one door to go up and another to go down, the bendy bus has three doors and you can go up or down from any of them. On usual busses you present your ticket to the driver as you get on, but with the bendy bus you don’t need to.

They put these busses on the crowded routes, and since the point is to get crowded routes moving faster, they realised it’s easier not to make everyone wait until the driver sees every ticket. So keeping this in mind, and focusing on making the life of paying passengers easier, they figured out a way to make not paying not worthwhile. The priority here was to make the life of the “good” passenger better, and not catching the “bad” passenger.

Their way to deal with it was having random checks by inspectors while the bus was moving. If you get caught you pay a fine of equivalent to 50 bus rides. So really if you get caught once, it’s not worth it, just pay. And even if the system allows some free-riding, it’s still the best system that makes the life of the paying passenger easiest.

Some of us, including myself at a certain amount of time,  have focused on the wrong thing in our personal lives. When we go through a bad experience, we try to protect ourselves by going into our shell. We let others in or we’re nice to them and they take advantage, and we’re hurt or feel bad afterwards. Little by little, we end up locking ourselves completely in and we only hurt ourselves. Don’t let the bad people win!

My nose did that very same thing. In response to an allergy, it decided that the air coming in carries the allergen and so the best way to protect itself is to block that air. It got inflamed (from the inside) and grew in size, in attempt to block the allergen carrier. Needless to say it did not make my life easy not being able to breathe.

So if your love has been used against you, next time love even more. If your generosity has been abused, be more generous. With time you’ll start getting better at spotting who’s abusing your good side, and you’ll cut them off. But don’t stop. Don’t make it a rule. Don’t lock yourself in to protect yourself, it only makes your life miserable.

Don’t let those who hurt you win. Focus on giving more to those who deserve it, and not cutting out those who don’t. Focus on the positive, not the negative. I don’t remember who said it but it makes sense, “Living well is the best revenge.”