Otherness

i used to think that loving someone meant knowing everything about them. every mole on their back, every childhood memory that left a mark, every corner of their mind, however dark. i longed for these precious pieces of knowledge, to be trusted with them, and to trust someone with the pieces of me in return. i longed for them for the same reason we often long for things: bcoz we lack them in another place.

at the time, my relationships were sustained by the opposite of knowledge, by concealment: stories not told, feelings unexpressed, opinions withheld. and so, in a quiet place in my mind where i knew i wanted intimacy and this wasn't it, i dreamt of knowing every beat of another person. of a place where nothing was held back, not a single thought left unshared.

now i know that intimacy doesn’t work like that. not really. it does require us to share stories, feelings and opinions. but it also asks that we find the courage to accept that there are some parts of another person, and of ourselves, that we will never know entirely. as much as it is about intimately knowing someone, love is about accepting the mystery in each other too. not being threatened by the pieces of a partner or friend that are beyond your reach, and instead seeing that these unknown parts are what allow for mystery and beauty and newness, even after decades of knowing a person. isn't that a gift? 

i wish we'd realised sooner that love is about closeness, but it's also about tolerating the gap between all people. it might have spared us some heartbreak to understand that we can still engage and connect and be close, but respecting otherness is really valuable. when we can accept that we don’t know everything about each other, or ourselves, then we can remain open to experience.

 

We are Finite

 it's easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, gone to Paris, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

it takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. it's not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you're all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. it's easy to regret, and keep regretting, forevermore, until our time runs out.

but it's not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. it's the regret itself. it's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

we can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. those lives are happening, it's true, but you're happening as well, and that's the happening we have to focus on.

of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. we don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. we don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. 

we just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. we're as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

we only need to be one person.

we only need to feel one existence.

we don't have to do everything in order to be everything, bcoz we're already infinite. while we're alive we always contain a future of various possibilities. 

so let's be kind to the people in our own existence. let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are bcoz, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

Letters to Young Muslim

 

a series of letters written by Omar Saif Ghobash to his son, & to all of us especially the young muslims of 21st century. Ghobash is an Arab-Russian diplomat from UAE. his multicultural & multilingual upbringing combined with his education in UK exposed him to a diverse range of philosophies & perspectives, which he learned to appreciate while staying true to Islam. 

it's an honest, thought-provoking book that speaks the uncomfortable truth & has given me a religious perspective in a refreshing way. he stresses the importance of thinking critically & allowing room for good questioning in the process. questions like how much responsibility we carry, when will political leaders stop dividing & plundering, why are some of clerics still living in time capsule of glory days of Islam in the past, & why women are given lesser place in some countries. 

he holds the mirror up & the reflection isn't pretty. Ghobash is not making excuses for what's wrong with Islam today. he's asking us to stop accepting the order of things, to reflect, to study, to pause, to think & to engage with others. bcoz at the end of the day we do have a shared humanity & we owe it to educate ourselves, work hard & find answers to life's difficult questions. 

we gotta look beyond the binary world of black & white while welcoming the diverse opinions which are made up of all shades of grey. for a long time we've been told to follow the clerics & just accept the orders that it is what it is, without allowing a single doubt, uncertainty or curiosity, while ignoring the gray area of things. not many of us realize that as much as we stick to Quran & hadis, Islam also encourages questions & different opinions. 

my favorite quotes from the book:

"you can choose to live as a Muslim who insists that only Muslims are able to have knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Or you can choose to find knowledge, wisdom, and understanding in all cultures, literatures, and philosophies. You can choose to be locked into a particular world, or you can set forth into a world of human experience"

The Midnight Library

 

Nora is having a truly horrible day. life's never been easy as her wedding's off, her cat died, she's fired (twice), soaked through, & ghosted by family. her life's going nowhere. overwhelmed by regret & loneliness, with nothing to give, no one to love, & nobody loves her in return, Nora decides life's no longer worth living & she's done. but instead of her life ending, she lands in the Midnight Library, a place between life & death where she's able to live all the lives that would have been if she had made different choices. as she's experiencing a variety of potential lives, she gets to see her 'root' life with a newfound perspective. she's then torn between staying the course and plotting a new path.

i googled Matt Haig and he's apparently extremely popular with this kind of story. he writes about the idiosyncrasies of being human & what makes us tick. what's normal, what are other people’s lives like, what are we here for, what’s the point. this novel isn't as light as it looks. there's a lot of philosophy here, well pitched for non-philosophers. and i love it. so creative, thought-provoking, lyrical, & emotionally cathartic.

it teaches perspective, regrets, & how we should approach life. it's impossible to read this book without thinking about my own regrets & what i'd do differently. eventually, Nora has some fairly profound epiphanies about life which i've tucked away for those moments in life when i feel weighed down by similar regrets. my favorite part is about our limitless potential, the importance of moving forward rather than wallowing in "should haves" & how each life is valuable, even if we might not see it. every life is a mix of happiness & sadness, success & failure. the presence of downfalls doesn't always make life worth living.

Uncertainty

recently i learned about John Keats' idea of negative capability.

in its simplest form, Keats' theory describes the ability to accept uncertainty - the capacity to have two opposing ideas in your mind without trying to choose one over the other. it's the ability to believe that two contrasting things are true, both of them, and that they can exist side by side.

or, in other words, being satisfied with things that are unresolved.

and, well, wow. It struck a chord with me, this theory. how often i find myself trying to sort between black and white, yes and no, this way or that, when really, at the end of the day, what i'd actually like to settle on is both. yes and yes. true and true.

because it's possible, it is, to both love and loathe. to both admire and pity. to both appreciate and, just as truly, just as ardently, regret. it's possible that what's right is not just a matter of either/or, that it's not somewhere in-between, that it's simply both.

for whatever reason, it's difficult to accept ambiguity; it can be a struggle to embrace that sort of doubt. and yet it happens. to all of us.  at some point or another, we know in our hearts that it's not A or B.

it's C: all of the above.