I write when I have something to say, my thoughts are not necessarily connected
I had never understood why people celebrate their birthdays before. It just didn’t make sense to me.
A lot has happened lately, and a lot has changed both in me and around me. I now have my reasons to celebrate.
I’m officially announcing to the universe that I’m planning to celebrate my next birthday 
There once was a young girl. She was young, weak and frail, so thin and small one wondered how anyone could be so small. A King and Queen saw her, all alone, abandoned by her parents. They took her in and let her live with them.
As the girl grew up, the King and Queen brought her the best singing teachers. They would not let her out of the palace, except in very exceptional circumstances, and they needed to occupy her time. This way she can also sing and fill the palace with joy, or entertain the King’s guests, whenever the King desires.
As it turns out, the girl had the most beautiful voice in the world. Her teachers were very impressed by her and encouraged her to sing to many people. It was a shame, they told her, that such a beautiful voice should not be shared with the whole world.
The girl went to the King and told him what her teachers have said, that she should go out into the world, and share her voice with everyone. It would cure hearts, she told the King. He stopped for a minute to think.
The King had taken a particular liking to the girl, some of his own daughters thought he liked her more than he liked them. She listend to what he said, he was the most valuable person in the whole world for her. He was ambivalent. If he lets the girl out, there is a good chance she won’t be as obedient as she used to be.
She’ll open her eyes to the world and might want to wander off. And despite having protected her from such thoughts, she has been showing interest in going out.
The Queen was adept at removing any signs of resistance to orders. She’d skillfully remove any foreign thoughts the girl developed, either through her teachers or her father’s guests.
The Queen had been complaining lately that she thinks the girl is becoming rebellious. She could smell it, and she doesn’t like it.
The King then reached the conclusion that the girl should share her voice with the world. Maybe if they give her something she wants, a little bit of freedom, she’d stop her rebellious thoughts and realise that the King and Queen are who she should listen to.
Upon hearing the news of the King’s decision, the girl ran up to his quarters, and in an unusual act, opened the doors without knocking, ran to the king and gave him a strong hug accompanied by many kisses. The King smiled, he had made the right decision.
Soon enough the King realised he was wrong. The girl, instead of being obedient, started asking for more time away from the palace. And she became more assertive about it. She had started loving life outside the walls. She started seeing the King and Queen as her captors. She started despising being forced to sing for the King’s guests. She saw herself as much more than banquet entertainment. She would heal the world with her voice.
Then one day, when her demands were too much for the King to bear, in a burst of anger, he told her she can leave. She can leave, but never to return.
The girl, with a waterfall of tears flowing down her cheeks, did not know what to do. The King and Queen were everything she knew. She’d never lived outside the walls. They were her food, water and shelter. They were affection and security. They were everything.
She wanted to leave so much, but she couldn’t bare to see the King angry or the Queen upset. They were the ones who did everything for her, as they many times reminded her. They were the ones who gave her her voice. If it wasn’t for them, she’d be just another abandoned baby with an unknown future. And she loved them so much.
The King opened the palace door, pointed to the outside and shouted at her, “Don’t you want to leave? Leave!”
She looked at the world outside through the door frame. It seemed so far and scary. Her tears were now in full flow. She looked down and away from the door. Trapped in her fears, she walked back inside. She never dared ask for anything again.
I’ve just spent three days in an oasis. And instead of the usual desert trips we actually stayed in someone’s house, in the green area of the oasis. Time there flows slowly, and people seem to do nothing. Eat, eat and then more eating.
You would think that people there are completely unproductive. Their conversations revolve around mundane and simple things. The order in which they should drop something off and pick something up for example can be the subject of a 15 minute conversation, whereas given the size of the place and that there are only five cars going around, they could have dropped off anything and picked up anything in the time they had the conversation. But what else is there to be talked about? Not much happens in your average day on in the field.
Oh! Look! That palm tree is growing. Not exactly exciting.
Sure when it’s harvest time, the village is all over the place with loads of action, but that’s about a month every year.
Back to the city, I’m wondering where my time goes. I’m almost always in a rush, running out of time and loosing count of all the things I have to do. Many times I skip a meal or even forget to eat. Why? What am I doing really?
And given that I have all these technological advantages that don’t exist in the farm, shouldn’t I be a hundred times more productive? Although I can tell you now that about 2-3 hours of my day everyday are lost in traffic, so that’s one thing we can start with. And I spent another 20 minutes writing this blog post, no one on the farm is writing blog posts.
I would like to conduct an experiment where as many Cairo people as possible would track what they’re doing with their time every day for a week. This should help us figure out whether we really do anything of value or not. If you’re interested leave me a comment below
In a previous life I’ve thought of a relationship as an investment, not any more. A lot of people talk about the investment of emotions, effort, time and sometimes money they’ve put into a relationship. And when it ends, they feel the other person has wronged them, they have taken all their investment and threw it into the wind, leaving them with nothing. The natural reaction is then to try to pick a better person to invest in the next time, so as to minimise loss.
This is ridiculous. An investment is giving up something now to get more later. So if you give up some money to your bank, you should be getting more in the future. Or if you start a business, you’d be giving up money, time and effort to make a ton of money later on. So how does a relationship fit this model?
What are you giving up? What do you expect in return later on, and when is this later on? How do you calculate the internal rate of return on a relationship?
Love is its own reward. A relationship is continuously rewarding, every time you feel something, every time you see the other person, every time you smile, every time you miss them and every time you think about them. It’s constant reward.
Sure, sometimes it goes sour, but if you have an understanding partner who is willing to fix things, the fixing process itself is a bonding exercise. Might give you some pain, but pain is part of being human. Some people would kill to feel anything, even if it’s pain, just to remember they are alive.
And it might have ended, no marriage, no kids, none of what you expected. But if marriage and kids are your sole targets there are easier ways to get there.
A relationship ending is not always easy, sometimes it’s really difficult. Yes you are going through hard times, but it doesn’t mean that you’ve lost an investment. Just because you’ve lost a future you imagined in your head, doesn’t mean you’ve lost. You can’t lose something you don’t already have. Cherish the past, and move on to the future.
If you are doing things out of love, your actions are your reward. Enjoy it!
Today it hit me right in the face that I overthink. People have been telling me since forever that I overthink. I let them get away with it because everyone tells me that, so ok, fine, I overthink, whatever that really means. But I could not do anything else except think. What I call thinking they call overthinking, so be it, that’s how I’ve managed my life so far.
Then today it hit me. I was thinking about noise. That’s what it means to overthink.
When sending a signal to mean something, sometimes we involuntarily send something along with it that means nothing. Our message is in there, but there is added noise. A speck of dust in someone’s eye would make it look like they’re winking at you, but they aren’t. So you’re trying to figure out what that wink was all about, and how it fits in what they’re communicating but really it was not meant to be sent and it really means nothing.
You know who overthinks, everyday? Stock market commentators. I had this job once. I had to write about why the market went up or down one or two percent. Needless to say there were days where nothing really happened, so I had to make stuff up. I had to figure out what signal the market was trying to send by going down 1%.
But really, there could be no fundamental reason, it could all be just coincidences coming together. Those doing the buying and the selling are human beings. They have circumstances and moods, and they make illogical decisions sometimes. What if someone needed the money to finance their gambling addiction, so they sold off a good amount of stock driving the prices down? What if someone wanted to sell but couldn’t come round to it yesterday so they did it today? What if someone had a bad experience with the customer service of a company and they happened to own stock there, so they sold it off in revenge?
Sometimes there is no trend in the market and all this jitter reflects the sum of a lot of coincidences. There is really nothing to read into. And sitting there trying to come up with a reason will send you off balance. Sometimes things mean nothing.
There is an art to figure out when there is a trend or not. Deciding which piece of information is signal and which is noise, what to process and what to throw away. It will take me time to reduce my thinking of noise. But one thing is for sure, if you think about everything you will think about noise.
The question that comes to mind now is, am I overthinking about overthinking?
It takes two bad drivers for an accident to happen. OK, maybe not all the time, but in most times. And in conflict in take two parties messing up for a conflict to turn to war. Needless to say, that’s assuming the two parties are genuinely attempting to avoid conflict.
So the conflict happened, turned to war, and now you’re not talking anymore. What next?
Learn. The biggest mistake you can do is to completely blame the other party/parties for the war. Because then you will go on, doing the same things that might have helped start or escalate the conflict, and you might get yourself in trouble again, when you’re not asking for any.
If you’re lucky the other party wouldn’t just disappear, they’d give you an earful before they left. And it would be full of anger, reprimand or any other negative emotion. Look beyond the emotions and try to figure out what is really behind them telling you all these things. What did you do that pushed them to this?
You will always find you’ve contributed something to the conflict. Or at least you could have handled it better. The only person who loses from you being obstinate and thinking you’ve done nothing wrong is you. Think about your mistakes, learn, and move on.
There are many different approaches to a relationship, but there is one in particular that I don’t like. The one where it is split in different phases, each with its own name, and each with a set of what is allowed and what is not allowed. Different people have different sets of rules, but the concept of rules and phases seems to widely exist.
First there is the ‘we’re just friends’ phase, then “there is something going on but we’re not sure”, then “there is something going on” , then “we’re telling people” which effectively makes you boyfriend/girlfriend, then there is meeting the parents, then parents meeting parents, then engagement, then marriage, then marriage with kids. Phew!
Now while this might be one set of phases that a relationship goes through, it’s the rules that come with them that are a problem. Random rules include, can’t call you at night, can’t go out alone, can’t go out late, can’t go out late alone, can’t travel together, can’t live together, can’t etc…
These rules are on/off rules depending on the “phase” of the relationship. These rules tend to be set before actually meeting the person, either by the other party of the relationship or their parents or everyone’s parents. Too many people involved, and too complicated for my taste.
The idea of having named phases as such also detracts from the relationship itself. Later phases become a goal, that in order to reach one must pass through the earlier phases. So from day one, the couple is talking about where they see this going, how they will get there, and work on getting there. Effectively turning a relationship into a destination that must be reached. Sounds like they’d get bored quickly once they reach there, and they wouldn’t enjoy the way there either.
It’s how comfortable we are with each other that decides what phase-name we tell other people we’re in, not the other way around. If we didn’t have to communicate the state of our relationship to others, there would really be no use for these names.
So I find it easier to think that there is only one phase: being together.
I’ve been through this conversation a number of times recently with some female friends. The whole thing about people giving them a hard time for wearing what they want wherever they want. The Egyptian culture, within world spectrum, is generally a conservative one when it comes to women showing skin.
The men don’t like it (on one level, they like it on another), and a lot of women don’t like it either. Who didn’t like it first and why is not really the issue here, but the fact is that a lot of people don’t like it.
Is it healthy? Well, protecting your skin from the sun in a sunny country is. But it’s not about covering skin, it’s about suppressing and hiding femininity. Not only that but it’s also about the reasons and methods many women get told to hide their femininity. In some cases shame is the tool, and the women end up ashamed of actually being women. Not a healthy state.
If you are one of these women who have been told to suppress any sign of being female, and you need to fight your fight to regain control of it, then by all means please do whatever you find necessary. But once you reclaim it back, don’t hold yourself captive to the notion that your femininity is minimised if in some situations you are required to abide by a certain dress code.
But that’s a double standard, that’s dishonest, I would be lying about who I am. No, you won’t. Wearing a long dress is not a statement that you always wear long dresses, you are not lying to anyone. Wearing a short dress is not a statement either, it’s just a dress. So wear whatever is appropriate for wherever you are going.
Imagine if I show up to work in shorts, formal shorts, if such a thing exists. I doubt my manager will be very happy. Does it take away from my freedom that I can’t show up in shorts or jeans? Yes it does. Does it force me to do things I might not want to do? Yes it does. It’s part of having a job, you give up your freedom and they give you money in return. Different jobs, different freedoms and different pay. And if you work in the Swiss branches of UBS they even tell you what underwear to wear.
And in social situations? Well, no one will force you to do anything, but you might not get the reactions you want. So chose your social occasions. If you are going to someone’s wedding and you know they wouldn’t appreciate it, then don’t push it. Sometimes I don’t feel like shaving my beard or cutting my hair, but I do it anyway for the people I am going to. I don’t see it as a compromise, I’m doing it as something nice to the people who’ve invited me to their occasion, to make it look closer to the way I imagine they want.
In the end there is a balance, between what you do for people and what you do or yourself. If you do everything the way people want it, well you might as well be a slave. If you do everything the way you want, you will not always get positive reactions from people.
The main point is it’s just a dress. People who make a big deal out of wearing a long dress are similar to people who make a big deal out of wearing a short dress. You’re both making a big deal out of a dress. Your femininity is not your dress, although your dress might be a part of your femininity.
At the end, I’m not a woman, so I probably have no clue what I’m talking about, but at least you get one guy’s perspective.
I came across this article here, which is pretty useful, tells you how to stop being controlled by guilt, but that’s not my point. Somewhere in the middle the author writes some of the things people confuse love with.
Notice that these things should not be confused with love when feeling a lack of it as well. If the person is not fully approving of you, or not spending a lot of time with you, it doesn’t mean that they don’t love you. And if you want to give someone more love (if love is quantifiable) giving them more attention or security is not what matters the most.
Love is love, so stop confusing it with other stuff. I guess using words to describe what love is, is like writing a musical score to describe a painting. But at least now you know six things love is not.
That’s not completely true, even the dead are changing, rotting a little bit at a time.
The most important ability I find in a human being is the ability to change. Changing yourself means you can become anything, move forward, progress in life, and when the world changes you can adapt. Being fixed, you’ll end up doing the same thing over and over, blaming others and the world for why things don’t go your way. You feel it’s everyone else’s fault and job to accomodate you.
Even if you’re fixed on something that’s working for you now, it won’t work forever. One of the main and most dangerous reasons that keep you fixed, is believing that you are fixed. It also seems that the older people get the more they believe they are fixed.
Believing you are fixed is like someone who believes they are blind, so they never open their eyes, and continue to live as blind when in reality all they have to do is open their eyes and see.
The odd thing is I find my ability to change myself has been improving over time, as I shake off more and more things that I consider givens. Sure, I’m not old yet. People who say they are old are normally in their 60′s or above, but I just cannot see what would change. I don’t get it. Maybe as the older generation always says, when I’m their age I would understand.
Still, today I think everyone can change if they believe they can change and work on it. Reshaping yourself is a difficult task, requiring a lot of awareness and effort but mostly courage.