On unconditional love

“Our kids are pieces of our hearts, walking the earth”

An Arabic proverb I often heard while growing up, in school, on TV, read in books, yet I never truly realized the real meaning of the words until I was blessed with children of my own.  Nothing prepares us for the flood of feelings that comes with our own child joining the world of the living to eventually walk the earth.  In pregnancy, a woman is especially overcome with new indescribable feelings that spread over her in waves, with the first doubt of a pregnancy on a stick, the verification of the fact by a lab test, and the smile on the doctor’s face when he gives the woman the thrilling news of a wanted pregnancy. I stress “wanted”, as it is essential for what I am aiming to write about.

The first imagined flutter of what we think is the baby, to the actual kicking of our insides by a little Monster seemingly practicing for the fetus kick-boxing championships, to the moving mound of a poking hand or a foot from inside our bulging belly, much like an alien movie, all make us swoon with the love of someone we never met.  You see pictures in black and white of a blurry shape on the ultrasound, and that is enough to make you sure he/she looks like you, or like the father, if you like the father.  Then the big moment comes, when you go through that simple procedure called childbirth (ha) and you are given a tiny human covered in slime, wrapped up in a cloth, thrust on your bosom, eyes closed tight like a new kitten, the objective is supposedly to bond with the creature.  And oh my God, you do bond.  You look at the little squinty eyes, the puffy face that just had an ordeal of being born to join you in the land of the air-breathing living things, fists clenched, fragile as a delicate ornament, a helpless lump that is the most adorable human you will ever meet.

My very own child. Panic.  Will  I break her?  An Arian like me had to think that when I was handed my baby in a Houston hospital after three hours of labor . You see, Sasha’s  was one of the easiest births on record. She however made up for it in her teenage, that was the time when I thought hard about introducing chemicals to my system to dull the reality of being her mother. Fine, I ended up resorting to locking myself in my room and watching Everybody Loves Raymond instead, but I would have been justified had I turned into a junkie a couple of years ago. Totally justified, ask anyone who knew her then.

But, that teenage demon from hell was an angel when she was born. The ugliest newborn ever, and the most wonderful one to hold, kiss and love.  She became pretty a few days after she was born, when the swelling in her face subsided and the alien features took on a more human look.  When she opened her eyes, they shone with a beautiful blue green light, she lost the ape-like hair that was covering her face and ears, and she turned into baby Sasha, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.  I loved her since the second I laid eyes on her, and I will love her till the day I die, even long after I die, I think I will come back often to check on her, haunt her a bit to repay her for the teenage horrors she put me through.  You can’t help loving your kids,  from the moment you realize that they are conceived, you love them unconditionally, without bounds, without reason, no explanation, you just do. Every new one you have brings with him or her a new flood of love from inside you that is enough to smother a whole nation with care, attention and worry.

Just imagine what it must feel like to love another person unconditionally and with the same intensity as you love your kids.  What kind of love would that be?  How devoted can you get?  Does that kind of love really exist?  I think it does.
When you love another human without an agenda, without  insisting that they love you in return, just as it is with kids, you don’t expect much, you just love them for them, and you do that without so much as a second thought, you just do.

I sometimes wonder if unconditional love is a common occurrence these days.  With all our preoccupations with concerns of acceptance, rejection, belonging, suitability, do we still manage to love another with no bounds, with total abandon, the same way we love those walking, talking pieces of our hearts?  I think unconditional love exists, and is everywhere around us.  We just have to open ourselves up for the possibility and the wonder of it.  Loving without limits, just for the heck of it, and knowing full well not to expect anything at all in return.  It is called true love.

Have a wonderful Sunday and enjoy the poem on Children from Khalil Gibran – our national Lebanese treasure.

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, ‘Speak to us of Children.’

And he said:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts.

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;

For even as he loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable

Khalil Gibran

The 13th Century poet and Sufi Mystic, Rumi’s poetry read by Deepak Chopra and Madonna (My Burning Heart and Bittersweet)

Lesson learned

He broke my heart
And now it’s raining
Just to rub it in
I’m at your door
I feel so crazy about it
You’ll say I told you so
You saw it long ago
You knew he had to go
I finally came ’round
I’m back on solid ground
Can’t let it get me down

It’s alright
It’s alright
It’s alright

Yes I was burned but I called it a lesson learned
Mistake overturned
So I call it a lesson learned
My soul has returned
So I call it a lesson learned
Another lesson learned

Sometimes
Some lies
Can take a minute
To fully realize
His tears
Your eyes
Thirty seconds to apologize
You give it one more chance
Just like the time before
But he already know you’d give a hundred more
Until that night in bed
You wake up in a sweat
You’re racing to the door
Can’t take it anymore

I was burned but I called it a lesson learned
Mistake overturned
So I call it a lesson learned
My soul has returned
So I call it a lesson learned
Another lesson learned

Life perfect
Ain’t perfect
If you don’t know what the struggle’s for
Falling down ain’t falling down
If you don’t cry when you hit the floor
It’s called the past cause I’m getting past
And I ain’t nothing like I was before
You ought to see me now

Yes I was burned but I called it a lesson learned
Mistake overturned
So I call it a lesson learned
My soul has returned
So I call it a lesson learned
Another lesson learned

Yes I was burned but I called it a lesson learned
Mistake overturned
So I call it a lesson learned
My soul has returned
So I call it a lesson learned
Another lesson learned

Alicia Keys

And the video is of Sasha singing it. Recorded this week.

To your brushes, go!

A few meaningful quotes about happiness to start our day with:

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” Albert Camus

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” Albert Schweitzer

“My life has no purpose, no direction, no aim, no meaning, and yet I’m happy. I can’t figure it out. What am I doing right?” Charles Schulz

“Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.” Denis Waitley

“You can never get enough of what you don’t need to make you happy.” Eric Hoffer

“There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.” George Sand

“Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.” George Burns

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.” Helen Keller

“Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn’t know you left open.” John Barrymore

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” Gandhi

“Love is a condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.” Robert Heinlein

I have about a few dozen things to do today.  So much on my to do list, it is starting to look like a blur of things I want to color over with permanent markers.  Something is nagging me to write my blog post despite the bullet points I am covering with my coffee cup that are screaming for attention. So here I am, drinking my second coffee of the day, looking at the snowy mountains in the distance, and ignoring my growing snake of a list for the sake of finishing this piece.

Here’s why.  When you think of something for a long time, turn it around, upside down, look at it from all angles, stand on a chair and observe it from the top, lie down on the floor and look at its underbelly, it means that that thing that you are thinking about is a) important to you, and b) bothering you.  So the natural thing to do is write about it-if you are an aspiring writer.  At least that’s what I usually do, and that’s what I’m doing now.

I read a blog http://toughguide.blogspot.com/2010/01/5-mistakes-smart-people-make.html yesterday and it got me thinking again about priorities, aspirations, the enigmatic notion of happiness, love’s contribution to our lives, success, legacies we leave, and how it all fits on that great big canvas called life.

We are given a mostly blank expanse when we start off, dotted with a few givens (as my math teacher used to say-he loved the word ‘givens’), and givens cannot usually change. Well, gender is a given but a sex change operation can potentially fix that if you are so inclined.  Most givens cannot change. The year you were born, for example.  That is an unalterable fact.  Yet many of us have problems with that. We have a fixation about age, chronological and mental. My advice is that you should never ever let that given deter you from doing what you have to do, what you think you are entitled to and don’t ever apologize for being too young or too old.  Age is irrelevant in the pursuit of what matters in life. Yet our social norms put so much weight on what is allowed at a certain age, and what isn’t. My answer is: “Bollocks”.  I don’t think people should feel bad about a given.  Color, race, religion (especially if you are born into a religious environment), gender, sexual orientation, nationality, family we are born into, education we are given, social class we happen to belong to, are all givens-at least until we can start assuming who we are as adults and often striving to evolve and change what is changeable about what we have to start with.

What we do with what we are given is our choice-within limits we either accept or that we put for ourselves.  This is where the fun of life begins-defying these limits.  This is where things go from static and pre-ordained into “the sky is the limit” for people who seek the seemingly impossible and who don’t accept constraints and ceilings imposed by society. I would like you to consider the example of President Obama for instance, or India’s Sikh Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, or Kocheril Raman Narayanan, India’s first Dalit, or “untouchable,” president, Rosa Parks, Neslon Mandela, Helen Keller, among many other examples of people transcending their givens and their seemingly unalterable societal norms to shape a life for themselves that defies expectations and what’s possible-inspiring millions.

One important thing is often overlooked when we look at these examples, but which usually makes a big difference in one’s life trajectory.  That little thing is luck.

Luck is a chance encounter, a stranger you meet that changes your life forever, for the better and sometimes for the worse, that interview you go to, that plane you miss, that trip you take, that phone call you don’t answer, that look you exchange, that email you write, that rainstorm that gets you and a fellow human sheltering in the same place and discovering what magic means, that lottery ticket of life that you win without knowing you were in the running for it in the first place. Luck. Some people call it chance, some call it serendipity, but sometimes, out of nowhere, things happen to alter the course of one’s life without warning.  Sometimes this leads to a perpetual state of well-being we often call happiness.

How does that fit with the free-will and the decisions we make to shape our lives? I think it has a lot to do with it.  Opportunity rarely knocks twice.  Our good fortune will be the one that will compel us to notice it and act when it knocks that one time.  We open the door to our souls to receive whatever it is we were meant to experience.  Some of us are oblivious to the little signs and twists in our fate that we unfortunately miss, neglect, and move on.  We are none the wiser as we never know what we have missed sometimes.  We are in a state of ignorant bliss or blissful ignorance.  We exist, go through the moves, yet miss out on experiencing and soaking up the essence of our lives.

Success vs happiness. What is it that is most important to us.  Can success mean happiness, or when we are happy, it is inevitable that we become successful, at least succeeding in living our lives to the utmost?  The old man in the photo is one that came up behind me and startled me when I was taking photos in a Beirut street one night a month ago.  He  was laughing, so glad to have made me jump, and when I gave him a look of “have you lost it, grandpa?” he flashed a colorful sweet smile at me, asking me to not forget to think of something happy everyday and to smile whenever I can.  His words were:”Don’t ever forget to smile, it will make you happy, every day. Promise.” I did, still numb from being startled out of my wits by his impossibly loud “boo” in my ear.

Happy man in Beirut

What is it that makes people confuse success and happiness?  If I am happy, why should I worry whether I am successful or not, if success is seen as a means for happiness and not an end in itself?  I see couples and families who have very little, yet who have such complicity, serenity, love, happiness, laughter – enough to package and flood the market.  Are they the exception? I don’t think so.  I think as long as we are making the most of what we’ve got, aiming for a life of seizing opportunities, to better ourselves and our loved ones -never at their expense – then we are using the beautiful colors and the brushstrokes that will make our life canvas the best that it can be for as long a time as we are given.  What we have is the hand we were dealt, and it is ultimately our decision to either fold, bet, or bluff.  As for me, I’m in. I see you, and I raise you.

Have a good midweek-Mittwoch as we say in some parts of Europe.

One love, one life

I posted this video on my facebook page yesterday and would like you to listen to it on the blog today.  I love this song, the two performers are impressive, each in their own right.  U2’s Bono is not only a great artist, but his activism is an example to celebrities.  He once said, when addressing the British House of Commons about aid and debt of Least Developed Countries: “we know where you park your cars”.  He is anti-establishment, a brilliant man who has taken the causes of poverty and aid and is consecrating time and energy to lobby for them through his organization DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade and Africa).

Mary J Blige, a very talented singer whose vocal range spans four octaves, is the next door neighbor of friends of ours in New Jersey.  She is also involved in Philanthropy concentrating on AIDS, cancer research and women’s advancement.  We stayed with our friends in November, and Sasha, my daughter who is an aspiring singer – going to Brighton next year to pursue her singing education – was very excited at the chance of meeting the star.  It turned out she wasn’t there, and Sasha and the family’s five year old, Lexie, spent a few hours at the kitchen table planning how they are going to go across the garden with a toy laser gun and a rope to scale the garden gate and check out Mary J’s house.  They of course slept instead and dreamt of their adventure.  The lyrics of the song ‘One’ will follow, as well as a youtube video of Sasha singing Kings of Leon’s acoustic version (Pixie Lott style) of ‘Use Somebody’.

Hope you like both songs.

I will have fewer posts in the coming two weeks as I have work to give in and an apartment to furnish in Madrid. Have a good week.

Mary J Blige with U2 – One (lyrics)

Is it getting better
Or do you feel the same
Will it make it easier on you now
You got someone to blame
You say…

One love
One life
When it’s one need
In the night
One love
We get to share it
Leaves you baby if you
Don’t care for it

Did I disappoint you
Or leave a bad taste in your mouth
You act like you never had love
And you want me to go without
Well it’s…

Too late
Tonight
To drag the past out into the light
We’re one, but we’re not the same
We get to
Carry each other
Carry each other
One…

Have you come here for forgiveness
Have you come to raise the dead
Have you come here to play Jesus
To the lepers in your head

Did I ask too much
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it’s all I got
We’re one
But we’re not the same
Well we
Hurt each other
Then we do it again
You say
Love is a temple
Love a higher law
Love is a temple
Love the higher law
You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can’t be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt

One love
One blood
One life
You got to do what you should
One life
With each other
Sisters
Brothers
One life
But we’re not the same
We get to
Carry each other
Carry each other

One…life

One

My favorite lines:

Did I ask too much
More than a lot
You gave me nothing
Now it’s all I got

….

Love is a temple
Love the higher law
You ask me to enter
But then you make me crawl
And I can’t be holding on
To what you got
When all you got is hurt

Le chocolat (not boring)

I visited a ‘chocolatier artisanal’ in Bougy-Villars near Geneva yesterday and today I am posting the photos from the expedition into the tasty treat land.  About a hundred flavors of hand made chocolates in a tastefully decorated shop that makes you want to move in and never leave.  I think it is these age-old traditions and preserved artisanal practices that make Switzerland what it is.  A lot of traditions thrive in Helvetica. A lot of people complain, however, that life in Switzerland is slow, too quiet.  Yeah, and?

Who says the ambulance sounds, traffic noises non-stop into the wee hours of the morning, polluted air, people rushing and having no time for themselves and their loved ones and working non-stop is the ideal way to live? I like the slow, quiet, nature-centered life in Switzerland.  You can have culture by the bucket-load if you want it, museum per capita is on the dangerously high side, concerts, exhibitions, art, conferences on topics from human rights to disarmament, performance of dance and song.  I so like the skiing, the hiking,  the outings in nice clean crisp air, doing the things you like to do in the outdoors.  I was made for the outdoors, I love the Alps, the Bernese Oberland, I love the Jura mountains, the lakes, the rivers, and what exactly is wrong with that?  I am sick of people coming to Switzerland and complaining that it’s boring, I think people who say that are themselves unimaginative and boring as they need the excitement of night clubs and non-stop traffic jams to feel entertained.  If we really need the super-excitement, Paris, Milan, London and Barcelona are an hour or so away, we can go there and be entertained when necessary.

One word that is not allowed in our family  is  ’bored’.  I don’t allow kids to say it, and the sentence ‘I’m bored’ can land a child a time-out or a curfew.  I am not kidding about this.  I think people who can even utter the word ‘bored’ to refer to what they are feeling are so unfit to be part of humanity.  There is so much to do, all the time, that the sentiment of boredom is such a superfluous and spoilt state of being that should be punished severely.  If kids are used to the idea that bored is a bad thing, they will never allow themselves to be bored or to be useless to a point where they are compelled to even express the sentiment.  ”Write a poem”, “rake the garden”, “dust the living room”, “rearrange your drawers”, “read one of my books”, “walk the dog- yes, again”, “go help an old person with their shopping” are some of the suggestions I give the kids if they come close to even feeling that they have nothing to do. I am not very tolerant when it comes to that, I don’t think people should be so useless as to allow themselves to feel boredom.  Life is too short and there is so much to do.  Maybe I am hyper, but I would rather raise my loved ones to be useful people who always have something to do, to enjoy a good book, take a good walk in nature, help others, rather than be so unmotivated as to complain about being bored. The kids have invented a code word for ‘bored’, just in case they need to use it in a sentence.  Necessity is the mother of invention I guess. They now refer to it as ‘unsatisfied’ but I caught on and banned the use of that word if it means bored and will give them a chore to do straight away.  Hard on them? yeah, but they will not grow up to be useless spoilt people with no imagination. We shape these little people, our responsibility is to make sure they are good, functioning, caring adults that will be a giving part of humanity, not useless burdens who are selfish  and -God forbid- bored. Shudder. Have a good,  relaxed Sunday, whatever it is you decide to do today. I wrote this with a migraine taking hold of me, so I hope I didn’t offend you if you ever felt the ‘b’ word.  Try not to do it again.

Le chocolat

This morning I am going with two friends to a chocolate place in Bougy Villars, a little town in the Canton de Vaud in French-speaking Switzerland near Geneva.  This place is supposed to be “the” place to go to for artisanal chocolates.  In Switzerland, chocolate making has been elevated to an art form since last century.  The Swiss revere their chocolates and have particular tastes and preferences.  Truffles are very big here, and white chocolate is looked down on as “pour les malades” (for sick people). There is of course the commercial side of mass production by © Nestlé and other factories in Switzerland which is in turn exported all over the world, and carried by tourists as they leave Swiss airports taking pieces of Switzerland back home.  But then again, there are those little places, where those out of the way chocolate artisans lovingly prepare their own masterpiece creations with anything from chili, absinthe to mushroom chocolate on offer.  I have discovered a few of those places across Europe.  In France, in a little village called Arbois in the French Jura, where Louis Pasteur was born there is a little chocolatier to die for.  Annecy, the impossibly beautiful French city less than an hour from Geneva, is where I usually go for the antique market on the last weekend of every month that I could, or just invent reasons to go there to have their crepes and go pay a visit to my favorite chocolatier opposite the cathedral.  You go in and you are assaulted by a chocolate aroma so sweet you never want to leave.  I have explored a few chocolatiers in Brussels, Liechtenstein, Paris, Nice, and lately in Luxembourg, where a brilliant little place exists opposite the archducal palace which makes the most wonderful chocolates-my favorite: chocolate fig balls, my friend had to drag me out of the shop I had so many of those tiny little pieces of heaven.  There is also the liquid variety of chocolate, also in Luxembourg, where you have a selection of hundreds of flavors of chocolate cubes on a stick to dunk into your frothed milk (soya in my case as lactose intolerant), some with their own grappa that you add to your delicious concoction, to make a hot chocolate so delicious, as if made in chocolate utopia.  In the cafés of Bourg de Four in the old town of Geneva, you can usually have excellent chocolat chaud, as well as the chocolate house in the open market place in Divonne-les-bains in France.

Is all this talk of chocolate making you crave the stuff?  Yeah, me too, but soon I will be going to a place famed to be the Mecca of chocolate in Suisse Romande.  And to think I have been living here for years and never went on the sacred pilgrimage to the magic Chocolate place in Bougis Villars.  I will take photos and post them tomorrow, just to whet your appetite and entice you to go visit the little out of the way chocolate places in Europe that capture the charm of the old world and raise your blood sugar level.

I am now listening to an old song by Joe Dassin called ’siffler sur la colline’ which always makes me happy.  I am not in the best of moods this morning.  I am resigned that there are things that I cannot change no matter what, and thankfully the trip to the chocolate place will take my mind off things, at least for a few hours.

What is it with women and chocolates?  The guilty feelings we have when we enjoy a wonderful silky melting chocolate piece can only be rivaled by the pleasure we get from being so naughty.  It is a guilty forbidden pleasure that we all experienced and reveled in again and again.

The song I am listening to now is ‘avec le temps’ by Isabelle Boulay about the power of time to make us forget, a beautiful song, now on repeat.

We have to thank the Mexicans for chocolates.  It was the Aztecs in Mexico who were the first to go into chocolate beverages three thousand years ago and the word derives from the Aztec word “xocolatl” which means bitter water.  Thanks to sugar and milk, it is not bitter any more, now it is the definition of what is delicious and good about the world.  I’m getting too carried away, but I do love the stuff so much.  Chocolate has been claimed to raise serotonin levels in the brain, this is hormone responsible for our moods, and recent research has found that dark chocolates are actually good for you, as they have antioxidants that decrease harmful free radicals in your body.  All this information about the benefits of chocolates works on reducing the guilt factor when eating the heavenly things.  We have been eating chocolates for ever, and associating them with our festivities and holidays, and I cannot imagine the world without chocolates.  I don’t care much for mass-produced chocolates, I prefer chocolate fondue, and little artisanal places that offer handmade chocolate drops of paradise rainbows that target the soul and makes one forget their worries, heartaches, down feelings.  That and watching Johnny Depp in ‘Chocolat’ his most amazing film, how is that for serotonin.  This is a movie every woman should own two copies of, just in case one is scratched or destroyed by boyfriend or husband, a backup copy is always required.

Aaaah, can’t believe I’m going to the chocolate perfection center soon.  I am dizzy with anticipation. Yay.  I know you are all jealous. Well, live with it. Or go watch Johnny Depp or something.

The Purple Rose of Cairo

One of my all time favorite filmmakers is Woody Allen.  I get how he thinks, I like the way he writes his movies, how he treats human behavior and human nature, and how his imagination takes us places where no one thought to go before him.  In his movie, the Purple Rose of Cairo, which I have watched a few times for its originality, a character (Jeff Daniels) leaves the movie from inside the screen and goes to meet one of the spectators (Mia Farrow), who has been watching the movie and dreaming about him over and over.  She is in an unhappy marriage and he is her dream love.  I won’t tell you how it ends (I wouldn’t have ended it that way, it left me wanting a different ending), or what happens, I think you should watch it, it has hilarious moments as you would expect from a Woody Allen movie.  What I am interested in is the stepping out of a written script, a planned life, what we think we know, what we hold to be true, just because of our preconceived ideas about what we think we should.  A  love affair, marriage, relationship, a job, is most times like a scripted, shot, edited and projected movie.  You go through the moves, you know your part, you don’t dare change as you feel you’re not supposed to.  But how many times have you watched a movie more than once wishing it would have a different ending, that they would end up together (Casablanca), that he wouldn’t leave (Gone with the Wind), that the stupid girl won’t go down to the dark basement (most horror movies), that the moronic family would start understanding the smart dog already (Lassie).

We often get stuck in scripts, in our role, and it takes guts, or an almighty power that has a Woody Allen way of doing things to break us out of the ordinary, the ordained, the happy endings that we build in our heads based on our imagined feelings, or the ordinary endings we have internalized as true, or as inevitable.  When is it that we start thinking that there are higher purposes to our lives, that maybe settling for what is there, the not so great, the mediocre is not for everyone, it’s not for us, and maybe we are not meant to just accept things as they are, maybe we should be striving for the extraordinary, in feeling, in love, in self-realization, creativity, brilliant art, in writing words that really move people, inspire them, make them change their beliefs, step out of the script and be the best they can be, and do the best they can do, achieve something meaningful, live their dreams.

I am not sure everyone is meant to create great art, work on brilliant inventions, write inspiring words, dance like a dream, sing like a nightingale, make films that move us, yet there is one truth, one thing that all of us can do, and that is to be the best that we can be, as people, as friends, as lovers, as members of humanity striving to be good to each other and to our future.  Everyone can love someone or something to the full extent of oneself, to a point where it hurts to breathe, to the absolute maximum, to love and adore with abandon, to just feel that tide, of emotions, of happy pain, that comes from dedicating ourselves to love, for what we do, for our family, for our loved one, for our art, for our deity if we have one, for whatever it is that makes us dream, come alive, be the us that we are meant to be when we were created.

Why do we allow ourselves to be stuck in our familiar, our comfort zone, not daring to step out.  Why don’t you do a breakdance move, a hop and skip in the middle of your square dance of life.  Dare to get out of your ordinary, and think hard about your preconceived ideas about who you should be and what you should be doing with your life.  I have worked with people who loathe what they do, yet they do it day in and day out, convincing themselves it is for the comfort of their families that they stay in a dead end job, for the financial security, I know friends locked in loveless marriages, in dead end relationships that they don’t like to be in anymore, but that they are scared to leave without the guarantee of the viable alternative.  When were there any guarantees in life?  Any of us can be hit by a bus tomorrow, have that dreaded disease, our lives are the most fragile things we have, yet we plan as if we would be living to the age of Methuselah. Is it worth it? Would living the  mediocre and ordinary replace the beauty and passion of the extraordinary? For what purpose are we willing to give up on what we can be and we could achieve?  Why do we settle?

In the movie, Mia Farrow’s character struggles with a love triangle between herself, the character of the actor (Jeff Daniels) and the actor in movie real life (Jeff Daniels).  It is a debate of choosing between the dream life, going to the world of the actor’s archeologist character in Cairo by entering the movie in black and white, and staying with the actor in real-life and living the real life in color.  I won’t tell you what she chose or what happens, but the dilemma is real, at least for us, do we settle for what we know or do we strive to discover what we can be and how we can live life to the fullest?

What will it take for us to step out of that script and morph across the screen we erected around our lives, when will we dare do the unscripted, the unusual, because we deserve it, and because it is worth it?  Will we ever break out of our preconceived ideas of what love should be, ideas we got from movies and love songs, that boxed us in with expectations that limit our view of what’s real,  and maybe, just maybe there is something else out there that we never experienced and that we should know what it’s about. We might be surprised at what we find on the other side. “Because, hey, you never know”. (borrowed from the NY lottery ads)

Digital vs Print (the age of the iPad)

I have been, like the rest of the connected world, bombarded with news of the iPad, the new product released by © Apple computers yesterday, that is a cross between an ipod and a macbook. The hype was so great that twitter (if you don’t know what twitter is, I don’t know how to help you right now) had to shut some functions down to avoid the overburdening of the network (the famous failwhale) with all the traffic about the iPad. Now, you could ask, what is the world coming to, if a product, a digital tablet and e-book reader, is causing all this hoopla, while Obama’s State of the Union address did not generate a fraction of that following or interest. The singer, John Mayer (@johncmayer), tweeted on his site, that maybe Obama’s address should have included the unveiling of a gadget at the end of it, to generate more interest. Funny. But sad at the same time.

Yet it is the sign of our times, our obsession with technical advancement, with new gadgets and gizmos, with everything that is cutting edge and sleek and can do so many more things than we ever dreamt of being possible as long ago as last year. The world has never witnessed such a meteoric growth in technological advances as it did in the past few decades. It is like we are living in the science fiction movies that were dreamt up in the last century (one astronaut that I am following on twitter is actually tweeting in real-time from the International Space Station-he ate fajitas yesterday! Probably in pill form).

Who would have thought that so many millions will be reading a collection of the morning papers from around the world on their laptop while sipping their coffee at their kitchen table and slowly eating their papaya? That’s what I did this morning. I read the Lebanese, Swiss, French and British paper headlines digitally. This practice has eliminated the ink on my fingers while reading the traditional paper and struggling to fold it right to get to page 5 without creasing the whole thing and uttering angry exclamations that I wouldn’t want the kids to hear. I like digital newspapers, they give you a broad view of the news, from different perspectives, different takes on the same event, and good analysis from different sources from across the political divide.

Now on to books. The new iPad, like the kindle from amazon, is revolutionizing the way we read books. E-books have been on the market for a while now, and google is aiming to digitize almost all books in existence, so that the selection will be boundless. New books that are being written now, will most likely be available first and foremost in digital format with a print on demand function. I think it is a good thing that thousands and thousands of books are not printed uselessly every time a book is out, to be in turn mulched at the expanse of countless trees we cannot afford to be losing from an ailing earth with an environmental problem that could potentially render life very difficult on the planet. From the climate change angle, digital books are great.

There is, however, the aspect of the emotional connection we have with books, holding a book, feeling the pages, dog-earing them, flipping them, using a bookmark we love, finding a book worm (ha) that will be hard to replace with a digital reader. Yet the fact remains that it is very practical to take all your book collection with you on vacation or a business trip if you wish without the extra weight and the space in your luggage. I once went to Koh Samui in Thailand for a spa-meditation break (of course with my luck I arrived one day before the Asian Tsunami hit), and I had taken a dozen books with me to read. I read them all, and to avoid the extra weight in the luggage (owing to excessive shopping in Thai markets-mostly T-shirts of “same-same, but different”), I had to throw the books or give them away before I left. These were books I wanted to keep, but now with the digital gadgets, I can keep every book I read, for future reference, for highlighting passages I like, or for the hell of it.

People usually resist change. I think when the shift was made from stone tablets to scrolls, a lot of disgruntled people talked about the feel of the stone, running your fingers on the etched word, smelling the stone. But everybody eventually switched, for the practicality reason alone. Those tablets must have been heavy, no? Almost like books in luggage. And when scrolls were abandoned for books, I am certain a lot of people complained about the feel of the rolled-up scroll, the smell, blah blah, and yet the world shifted to print. Now that the digital age is here, a lot of what we read is already in digital format-provided you live in a part of the world where a) you have computers AND electricity, and b) the connection is decent so as not to give you an embolism while you wait for a page to download. So, after newspapers, memos, reports, files, presentations, basically everything we deal with and research has become digitized, google-ized, wikipedia-ized, the natural next step is books. If it makes a small dent in our environmental management of the earth’s precious resources and if it makes the industrialized world cut less trees for its books, then that’s an added plus, don’t you think?

There will always be libraries, and books, and charming book stores – in Chelsea, Quartier Latin, New York, Geneva, and wherever beautiful old book stores exist. There will always be the aficionados of old books, much like old vinyl records enthusiasts, but the sign of the times is the binary 1 and 0, get with it.

Next step for helping climate change, travel by plane less, and eliminate low cost airlines that encourage excessive plane commutes. But that’s the subject of another blog, when I get the nerve to write about my fear of flying.  I know I fly everywhere, but I hate it. Okay, you can stop rolling your eyes now.

iPad vs iPod

Prayers

Praying was a topic of discussion in my family recently. It came about in an unrelated conversation as we are not religious at all, nor do we know how religious families are supposed to behave. Our only religious ritual on Sunday has been to go get grilled chicken from the outdoor market in Divonne-les-bains in neighboring France, and it has become our Sunday thing following our pancake breakfast. We do not go to church. I think the last time I was in a place of worship was in Lebanon on New Year’s day. I had gone to church to light candles for someone I cared for, and for my family, and for my Mom’s best friend who was ill and who passed away that same day. Before that, I think it was in Germany last summer when I went to see a beautiful Gothic church in Überlingen near Lake Constance. We are a pretty easy going group, our family and friends, we happen to represent, combined, almost every major religion in the world, yet we take things lightly, we laugh a lot and no one in our immediate entrourage is a religious fanatic or has hang-ups about religious issues. I happen to be Greek Orthodox because I was born into a Greek orthodox family in North Lebanon. I quite like that my co-religionists were not really a part of the religious conflict in Lebanon as we were the ones who advocated tolerance, inter-faith dialogue and education for our community. I quite like my faith group for that reason.
When we baptized our little daughter in the beautiful Russian Orthodox church in Geneva a couple of years ago, we were so chatty and lighthearted about the whole church part, which led the Russian priest to let out a terrifyingly loud scream that shook the walls and that none of our guests will soon forget “SILENCE!!!! Vous êtes dans une église” (Silence! You are in church).
I am not really disciplined or motivated to follow any part of organized religion. I think of religion as a spiritual matter consisting of a private set of beliefs held by a person-that even applies to atheists and agnostics. Atheists choose to disbelieve in the existence of God or a deity (from Greek atheos ~ godless, from a- + theos God), Agnostics, on the other hand (Greek agnōstos unknown, unknowable, from a- + gnōstos known) are those people who are not committed to believing in either the existence or the nonexistence of God or a god. I think religion should ultimately be a matter of choice, and only at adulthood should a person choose what religion to follow or believe in. Just imagine what the world would look like if we abandon the practice of indoctrination of the masses since birth, mixing the traditional and communal practices with religion and brushing whole communities and generations with the same brush just because they happen to be born in the same country or to parents who believe in a religion they did not choose. If religion is a free choice in adulthood, I imagine us like Woody Allen’s character ‘Mickey’ in Hannah and her sisters when he goes around experimenting with different religions to choose the one that fits best. Hannah and Her Sisters happens to be one of my favorite movies besides Casablanca and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. One part of the script, after he discovers he has a brain tumor and buys a gun trying to kill himself, is probably the best ever written for cinema, and sort of puts things in perspective about life and religion:

Mickey: One day about a month ago, I really hit bottom. Ya know I just felt that in a Godless universe I didn’t wanna go on living. Now I happen to own this rifle, which I loaded believe it or not, and pressed it to my forehead. And I remember thinking, I’m gonna kill myself. Then I thought, what if I’m wrong, what if there is a God. I mean, after all nobody really knows that. Then I thought no, ya know maybe is not good enough, I want certainty or nothing. And I remember very clearly, the clock was ticking, and I was sitting there frozen with the gun to my head, debating whether to shoot.
[gun fires]
Mickey: All of a sudden the gun went off. I had been so tense my finger squeezed the trigger inadvertantly. But I was perspiring so much the gun had slid off my forehead and missed me. Suddenly neighbors were pounding on the door, and I dunno the whole scene was just pandemonium. I ran to the door, I didn’t know what to say. I was embarrassed and confused and my mind was racing a mile a minute. And I just knew one thing I had to get out of that house, I had to just get out in the fresh air and clear my head. I remember very clearly I walked the streets, I walked and I walked I didn’t know what was going through my mind, it all seemed so violent and unreal to me. I wandered for a long time on the upper west side, it must have been hours. My feet hurt, my head was pounding, and I had to sit down I went into a movie house. I didn’t know what was playing or anything I just needed a moment to gather my thoughts and be logical and put the world back into rational perspective. And I went upstairs to the balcony, and I sat down, and the movie was a film that I’d seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and I always loved it. I’m watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film. I started to feel, how can you even think of killing yourself, I mean isn’t it so stupid. Look at all the people up there on the screen, they’re real funny, and what if the worst is true. What if there is no God and you only go around once and that’s it. Well, ya know, don’t you wanna be part of the experience? You know, what the hell it’s not all a drag. And I’m thinking to myself, Jeez, I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I’m never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts. And after who knows, I mean maybe there is something, nobody really knows. I know maybe is a very slim reed to hang your whole life on, but that’s the best we have. And then I started to sit back, and I actually began to enjoy myself.

You should be given the choice of deciding what works best for you, which belief fits best with what you want out of life. I think of religion and religious faith more as self-help and affordable therapy than a matter of identity and belonging to a group. In his book ‘Les Identités Meurtrières’ (In the name of identity), Amin Maalouf goes into analyzing religion and identity in depth as the causes of much of the troubles of the world. It is an excellent book by the way, I think everyone should read it to reflect on who we are as a collection of communities that are in constant conflict precisely because of identity, religious and otherwise.

But the fact remains, whether you are religious or not, practicing or not, that the power of prayer is undeniable. You can call it yoga, zen humming, meditation, lighting a candle and closing your eyes in silence, whatever way you do it, it is that willful slowing of things around you when you pray, when you forget the world for a little while, and just look inwards, and ask yourself to just shut up and think and free your mind of the mundane and wish, or dream, or thank, or ask for help, for strength, for one extra dose of will to go on. Prayer gives us a sense of hope, that someone somewhere who is an almighty, be it nature, the universal good, God, or even our own inner power, our own Jiminy Cricket, whoever that unseen or unknown power, is always there to help us out and pull us through.

I believe in times like the ones we are witnessing these days, with disasters so much more devastating, terrorism ever more lethal, global epidemics a step away from engulfing the globe, 2012 and alarmism about the environment, possible asteroid hits on earth, we cannot be expected to deal with that using our own physically available means. We need and do resort to higher, more esoteric means of calming ourselves collectively and individually, and those means are not prescription drugs but prayers. Calm, spiritual connections we have with ourselves, that reassure us and rekindle our hope in our future, as people, as a human race, as earth dwellers.

Close your eyes if you have a minute, clear your mind, and allow yourself to just be, breathe in and out slowly, and just, you know, pray. For no particular reason, just do it.
Have a lovely day.

Roots in the sky

This is a homage to the victims of the Ethiopian airliner that crashed off the coast of Beirut on January 26, 2010

We Lebanese are everywhere. Go anywhere on the globe (I’m not sure about outer space) and you will find a group of Lebanese living there, usually owning a business and making quite a decent living.  Much like the Greeks, Italians and Spaniards, Lebanese are migrating people.  For three and a half million living in the tiny country, there are an estimated ten million living in the rest of the world.  We started with ships, we had to invent a vessel that would take us into the open sea, to seek adventure.  So in the ancient city of Byblos, the first sea-faring ships were built by our Phoenician ancestors, and since then, we voyaged-nonstop.  We were traders, we took our ships laden with wares to trade with neighboring islands in the mediterranean.  We left our languages and influence in some, like Malta.  We have never stopped traveling since those times, forever roaming the big heavenly rock we live on, by land, sea and air.  Lebanese to me are like a group of hyperactive ants.  God must have put them as a bunch on the side to keep them out of his way while creating their country, and they wandered off, as ants do.  Now they are all over the planet, making money, crying every time they hear Fairouz, our diva, sing  and keeping the cuisine alive.

I read a book by a Lebanese author entitled “Roots do not grow in the sky”.  The title was fascinating to me, as it described what Amin Maalouf – a Lebanese author living in France – recounted in a number of his books, the story of the Lebanese identity and migration.  Our ancestors used to voyage on ships where the destination was not really clear. One friend of mine whose dad became a huge entrepreneur in Manila, was originally going to Argentina with her grandfather, a carpet salesman.  The ship made it as far as the Philippines, and this is where they opened their business and amassed their wealth.  They are nothing if not entrepreneurial, the Lebanese.  They make money out of anything, and they can sell water to the water salesman, as we say.  Another proverb we use is that a Lebanese will take you to a river and bring you back thirsty.  I think their ability to outsmart others is what is stressed here.

Because the Lebanese are so dispersed in the world, the odds of them being caught in disasters and major accidents involving travel are great.  In the September 11 attacks, I knew one childhood friend who was on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, and another who was going to LA for his engagement party on the plane that plunged into the North tower after flying from Boston.  In Paris, when a part of the roof at Charles De Gaulle airport fell a few years ago, I was surprised to learn that one of the four people killed was a Lebanese girl.  In many disasters around the world, there are Lebanese victims and it is understandable as we are always flying somewhere.  Not only are we a migration country, but we also do a lot of business with other countries.  We are the major workforce in a lot of Gulf countries, in Western Africa, and our countrymen are often doing business in every country across the expanse of the globe.

What makes it sad is that with so much travel, we belong nowhere in particular.  When we go back home, we feel like tourists who speak the language and when we are in our adoptive home, we feel like going home, always treating our stay as a temporary one, for business reasons, or for the war reasons, or for better education for the kids.  We are all in denial about why we can’t live in Lebanon anymore, and why we can’t be happy elsewhere. So what do you do?

We keep traveling, and in the case of the many people who perished in the plane crash in Beirut, we sometimes die in the process.  Lebanon has a history with death and dying. We have a history of inter-confessional wars, vendettas among families, the war with Israel, our civil war (don’t like ‘civil’ and ‘war’ in the same sentence, but this is what it was sadly called), and now our proxy wars on behalf of Syria and Iran.  We seem to have a lot of black-clad women around the country.  We usually have a funeral or two to go to when we visit.  People die a lot in Lebanon.  Dying is easy when you had so much of it.  A very good friend died yesterday, along with many Ethiopians, Lebanese and others on that fateful flight.  He was going to Addis Ababa to open a new restaurant.  He was 38.  His parents lived for him, he was their only child.  He got married quite young, and had three daughters. And now he’s gone, because he was fulfilling a destiny of travel, very much a part of his Lebanese genes.  I am certain that he is in a good place, as he was such a decent, polite, beautiful young man.  Where else could he be?

For all the victims of this and other accidents, where many lives are taken so suddenly and without warning, I give you my heartfelt prayers and this song by Fairouz, our most famous singer, who is singing the words of the Lebanese poet, Joseph Harb, written for Beirut during the war years when Beirut was suffering, like it is doing today.

May all their souls rest in peace.

(thanks for reader Khalil Murad for providing the correct information about the song)