On life, love, connection, freedom, and power.
I have never been a fan of staying at home. I always feel the urge to go out. I spend an hour at a coffee shop and another at a park. I drive. I let the roads determine my destination. It seems that I believe that life lies in moving and never settling down. I believe that human history comes down to the traces we leave behind us as we go here and there. They merge and connect to form a map of our legacy. I have never also been a fan of silence. I despise it. I always surround myself with some sort of noise. I do not even sleep unless I am listening to something. I admit that I usually talk to myself. It seems that the link that I made between life and moving is tempered with noise. Moving makes noise and noise means life, and I fear silence because I fear death.
I have found myself doing what I hate. I am confined to four walls and I am drowning in silence. I spend hours sitting at the same spot. I still listen to and watch something. Yet it feels that I am listening to silence and watching the void. Things lose their meaning when they are imposed. I still have an opportunity to write. I have always been writing, but I have never thought that I would write to survive. I have always been tempted to think that words do not live. Like us, words are born to die. Words commit suicide as they jump off people’ mouths or slip through their hands. The rows of words on a paper look like those of headstones at a graveyard. They are dead and buried within the folds of books. However, I need to change my mind. Writing is my way to survive. Words move and they make noise.
I have decided to fill the void with words. I want to put what goes through my mind into writing. I thought of writing a novel, but I fear leaving the plot to uncertain consequences. We know how it should end when we write. Suspension is more of a technique than a reality. I thought of writing a story but there are a lot of events and characters. I fear crowding the plot. Today, ideas should be separated. They should be distant. Hence, I put them into notes as fragmented as they are in my mind. They are also separated as I am from everyone else.
Life
Do you ever sleep at one world and wake up at another? Life can change rapidly. It does not take twenty-four hours. It changes in splits of seconds. You have always believed this. Yet you are shocked and in awe not because of the new reality but because the change has disappointed you. You believe in drastic change hoping that it remains a belief but not a reality. It is the reality, the new reality. The world used to stop in your imagination. You used the metaphor to mark historical junctures, but not anymore. The world has literally stopped. A world on hold is the new norm. Moving is the exception and the metaphor that will define the rest of human history!
Today, planes are held on the runway, cars are covered in dust, and train rails have begun to rust. The synagogues, churches, and mosques have all shut down their doors and the holy books are no longer recited in groups or heard from above rostrums. They are whispered in solitude. The call for prayers and the ring of the bell are no longer an invitation but rather a request to shelter in place. Reality has become a composition of empty classrooms, ghosted town squares, abandoned theaters, and quiet playgrounds. Every form of movement and every source of noise have become subject to stillness and silence. Life is gradually sucked out of the planet.
Still exists some forms of movement and noise. Ambulances drive through the streets with sirens heard from a distance. Patients beds move through hospitals and ventilators are transferred from one patient to another. The signs on monitoring machines go up and down and the rattle of breath is easily detected. However, these forms of life are at risk of coming to an end. That is because they are driven by fear and haunted by death. When this happens, the struggle for life becomes determined not by the lust for it but by the power of death. It is the riskiest trade that results from diverting movement from its essential purpose of making life to awakening death. Hence, it risks stopping movement of life and moving stillness of death!
Love
Come close. I want to give you a hug. I want to shake your hands. You have never denied a handshake and you have always welcomed a hug. These things are neither related to your religion and culture nor to mine. They are things that root deep in your humanity. You were born to communicate and connect. You do not know the world only through what you hear and see but also thorough what you touch and feel. There is something special about touching things. Perhaps it was the first means to explore the world, but it is certainly the best way to express love. Feelings are emancipated through a handshake, a hug, and a kiss. Even when expressed by words, they end up touching ears and hearts. Touch expresses everything and is superior to all forms of communication and connection.
Today, feelings are locked in our hearts just as our bodies are locked at our homes. Words are no longer forms of expression but triggers of depression. Touch is no longer capable but in need of emancipation. Handshakes are justly denied, hugs are no longer welcomed, and kisses are forbidden. Parents are no longer able to kiss their kids, intentions are no longer cleared through handshakes, and lovers’ kisses are mixed with caution and stripped off intimacy. None of this happened out of inability of expression but because of its unguided consequences.
We refrain from touching the world and those around us because we had to hate to love. However, hatred of love seems more of a result of what humans accumulated over thousands of years of existence. It happened that touch has been diverted from expressing love to expressing hate. Humans thought that they had to emancipate hatred the way they emancipate love. Hence, they found themselves holding firearms and embracing death. Emancipation of hatred was the most dangerous thing that was done by a man. As it was behind love of hatred, it may as well be behind hatred of love!
Connection
Hold onto your phone! It brings you what you need. It places the whole world at your hands. It makes you laugh and cry. Your phone spares you the burden of visiting someone, attending a gathering, or even being at an event. It does everything on behalf of you. Your phone is your way to shop and travel. Visit the website and order what you need. The three-dimensional glasses will take you wherever you want to go. You will feel that you are there. I promise. You do not need to leave your place. You do not need to see anyone. It is all in your phone. You can even love and hate through your phone. Here is an icon for liking and here is one for disliking. Just click. Your phone has made every other thing dispensable, even human beings. Do not you see yourself holding onto it even when surrounded by others?
Today, the direct means of communication and contact fade away; leaving phones and virtual communication as the only means to access the outside world. It has become difficult to have a cup of coffee with a friend, to head with a family to a restaurant, or even to go for a walk at a nearby park. All have become risks to take. Halls and corridors’ talks have vanished, and the street chat has been confined to chatrooms. The empty churches, theaters, stadiums, bars, and public squares have become a sign of decay for social gatherings. In fact, they have become a symptom of a sickness that engulfs the human society. Fear and isolation have forced humans to embrace loneliness and dispense with the warmth of human connection.
But is not this what humans have been after when they decided to withdraw and voluntarily abandon social connection? Is not it what they have sought when they embraced their phones and dispensed with their friends? Their sensitivity to direct contact has inspired them to control communication and curtail it through technology. Their fear of spontaneity has been behind the restless efforts to polish their characters through the network. Yet, they seem unsettled as their pursuit has turned into an imposition. Their withdrawal has become involuntarily, and actual, rather than virtual, masks are gradually glued to their faces. As they exchange the looks from a distance, they battle the fact that they cannot get closer and they cannot trust each other. They realize the lost joy and warmth of human connection. They also realize that their phones may have brought them everything yet they have pushed them further; far away from others and even from themselves!
Freedom
Do you find birds flying and planes taking off exciting? Does opening doors, envelopes, and boxes trigger something inside you? Do not you enjoy overcoming others as they attempt to hold you still and impede your movement? Do not you fear suffocation? Some answer these questions with yes and others with no. Regardless of their answer, what they feel is nothing but a longing for or fear from freedom. You might be among those who are longing to be free. You find flying a relief from your eternal attachment to earth. You find opening doors, envelopes and boxes an act of freedom from barriers and longing for open space. You find overcoming others a competition to win the title of being the last survivor of slavery of rules. Your fear of suffocation is not that of death but of the air being trapped inside you. Your exhalation is an act of freedom. After all, you long to be free not because you believe you are but because you fear believing that you are not.
Today, these manifestations trigger nothing but fear. Humans fear opening doors, envelopes, and boxes, and they voluntarily surrender to begin held in position. They have refrained from flying and abstained from walking. They even fear breathing. They fear that exhalation takes away inhalation. Open spaces have become spots of danger while enclosed places have become a refuge from the outside world. This equation has always been there. Yet it has been based on choice rather than imposition. The walls that have always been an expression of human control over the world have become the only shield against that world. Going out has turned from an exploration to live to an attempt of being hunted by death.
Freedom has not been eradicated. Doors are still open, and squares are longing for the first human who would step a foot again. However, fear has made everything nearly impossible. Fear is the enemy of freedom and the agent of death. Today, humans realize that. They realize that when they exaggerated restrictions and tightened shackles, they confused protection of life with protection from life. They realize that when they built cells and prisons, they were not encircling danger but rather accumulating it to be reproduced and redistributed. They also realize that when they put birds in cages, they were in fact subjugating themselves to fear from freedom. Excess of protection has morphed into production of fear. Hence, humans are tired of safety and in discontent with protection. They long for the freedom that they have assaulted in the old world!
Power
Look at the tanks that block the streets. Look at the trucks that deploy the soldiers. Look at the barriers that divide the land. Look at the ranks, the weapons, the bullets, the shields, and the helmets. It is all about power and control. You claim tight control over the planet. You have drawn the maps, erected the borders, and sat up the crossing points. You have trained and armed soldiers and devised means of detection and security. You have built watchtowers and planted cameras at every corner. You claim control over who comes in and who goes out. You have the records. The pride of your control digs deep into earth and aspires for occupying space!
Today, manifestations of power stand powerless and reflect on nothing but weakness and lack of control. Armies are mobilized, borders are shutdown, and cameras are activated. However, they fall short in detecting the threat. The tanks block the streets with no signs of penetration and soldiers hold to their arms with no calls to fire. Yet, there is a war. It is a war where victims fall without being shot. It is a war over which humans have no control. They do not even know whether it has started or not. They can neither claim victory nor acknowledge defeat. They can only stand in front of a hospital gate where they receive the victims of an unknown enemy and take them toward an undetermined fate.
Humans have mistakenly thought that bullets resolve all battles and conflicts. They have believed that enemies are always within the range of detection and that everything can be put under their control. Human biases have made them believe that they are the masters of all creation. They no longer see a power above or below them. Today, the battle proves them wrong. It proves that the smallest and the weakest creation can put their world on hold and may bring their civilization to the ground. It proves that there are wars that cannot be resolved through maximization of power but through realization of limits. It proves that complex systems are not necessarily an evidence for control but rather a failure to understand a simple reality. Above all, this war proves that power lies in recognizing and accepting weakness!
*****
Now that these words have been born and these notes have been written, here are the same questions: Are words born to live or to die? Does writing move and make noise or recede into silence and death? Answers lie in moving for life and stillness for death, liberation of love in the face of hatred, and recovery of social connection. They lie in upholding freedom and recognizing human limits. They lie in humbleness and content with the universe. If none of these things happen, then words are born to die. They move in order to stop and are heard only to be silenced and forgotten.
I feel the same urge to go out. I want to spend an hour at a coffee shop and another at a park. I want to drive. I want to let the roads determine my destination. I want to continue drawing the map and listening to noise. And when all of this is over, I will not abandon writing but I will let go of silence, stillness, and void!
This article is available in Arabic HERE
