Stick in your Spokes

I pondered for a moment if I should have chosen “Like Riding a Bike” as a title instead, but decided that would have been too misleading.  “Like Riding a Bike” is a much more reassuring expression meant to instill confidence in what you are about to do, that the motions will synchronise perfectly and you will find that sought after balance.

That is hardly the sensation I am trying to describe.

It is one of those days in Lebanon, one of those days when you think your day is best served by time-efficiency and smart planning – plotting your errands or meetings as per relative geographic location and traffic trends, filtering and prioritizing those that are restricted by bank opening hours, meal times, or other similar considerations; similarly working out the day’s wardrobe to suit the spectrum of meetings and occasions, and so on.  As I started saying, it is one of those days where you think that is how your day can best be served… until you are startled by a stick in your spokes that brings your bike to a frightening halt and hurls you over the handlebars to a dusty, heavy thud on to the ground.  You are not hurt, you stand up and assess the damage to your clothes (dusty and you find a tear somewhere), to your body (that’s going to bruise, but span of motion is normal), and to your bike, that looks so graceless in its distorted form on the ground.  There is no major damage to speak of, but the incident has completely shaken you up, disoriented you.  You try to pull yourself back together, but you continue to feel unsettled, and that sticks with you for the rest of the day.  You ride your bike with an eerie focus on not falling off again, so much so that you can’t think of anything else, or allow yourself to slip into a playful ‘swoop’ as you slightly avert your eyes to look at shop windows.  You reach one destination and you second, third and fourth guess the next one, trying to convince yourself that it truly is necessary, and failing that in the face of the hundred opposing excuses you have come up with, you decide instead to return home to relative safety… and do nothing.

You have so much to do, so much that you could be doing, and yet you are too restless to be able to focus on any of it.  Your entire day has been derailed, like a stick in your spokes.

A friend or a loved one who hears the news is similarly rattled and as they cannot assess the extent of the damage or how you are continuing your day, are also stuck in that state of worry.

Ironically, both of you are now restless, and busying yourselves with mundane tasks and pedantic motions in your attempt to stop thinking of the event, the accident, and what this could mean for the next day and the day after that.

As you have gathered, the proverbial stick in our spokes can represent a number of things: a shooting, a bombing, an assassination, a protest that blocks streets and sets tires to fire… A sudden unexpected event that derails your day, rattles you, leaves you unsettled.  Sadly, we seem to be practiced in such experiences, so much so that we each fall into our usual motions for coping, self-preservation, moving on.  We dust ourselves off and try to get on with it, some form of muscle memory lifting us back into a precarious balance as we pedal forward.

Ironically, like riding a bike.

قلمي

آه ... ما ألذّ هذه اللحظة...

لحظة سـكينة... هروب مؤقت من زحمة حياتي

صفحة بيضاء تغريني بتألقها واحتمالاتها

وارتياحي لثقل القلم في يدي

 

قلم يمشي من اليمين الى اليسـار 

حركة حميمية: يدي اليمنى تأتي بالقلم أقرب وأقرب الى قلبي مع كل كلمة

أشـفق على من لا يعرف لغة تحمل إليه هذا الشـعور وهو يكتب

أشـفق على من لا يتمتع بحرف كالحرف العربي الذي يُرسـم ولا يُكتب

يلتفّ وينتصب ويتطلّب التنمّق بـ"شـدّة" هنا وتنوين هناك

 

حرف يبعث فيك الحيوية واللهو، فيحثك على الكتابة حتى تمتلئ الصفحة!

 

واليوم، هذا كل ما اريده

أن أضمّ هذا القلم... وألعب!

 

للرسـّام ريشـته وللموسـيقار آلته، وأنا اليوم لي قلمي يرقص ويراقصني "على موّاله"

أعتذر عن أنانية (ومتعة) هذه الحركة

فلا مكان لثالث في هذه الرقصة!

In love with nature…

I was recently on a short business trip, and I was sort of dreading the whole trip, including the country of destination. I was aware of this, of course, but was still ashamed of myself when – upon hearing any piece of news related to either the project or the country – I would jump to the irrational conclusion that that might be enough to cancel the trip. Like I said, I was ashamed, but there it was. In the end, there weren’t sufficient reasons to derail the trip and I found myself, plainly and simply, traveling.

Among the coping skills I’ve learned as an adult, I put on a brave face and tried to seem un-phased by this non-turn of events. I believe I was doing this so well that I almost seemed callously indifferent. That is until we were in the car, driving on a sleek highway next to a sweet hillside that was spotted with airbrushes of orange and yellow. Oh my goodness – autumn!! One of my favorite seasons that is beyond brief in my beloved Lebanon, where the leaves don’t linger and fade, they opt instead to just drop at the first sign of wintery weather. I looked again to make sure it wasn’t just a type of boring tree, perhaps a breed that was too lazy to carry full-colour leaves to begin with (you may be puzzled by this notion since, as far as I know, no such tree exists, but that might just describe to you how un-excited I was about visiting this country). By that second look, my cynical callous indifference had all but withered and I found myself goofily smiling at this beautiful hillside holding autumn for me, for me to enjoy.

How ironic, I thought, that it would be this beautiful nature that would make me like this country again. This is when I realized that it wasn’t the first time. I could remember being on a bus from London to Oxford, upset and depressed by the usual gloomy, wet weather, when I looked out at a field with edges that disappeared over the horizon, and seemed to reflect a tinge of lush, rich, deep green onto the otherwise non-descript sky. All I could think of was ‘emerald’, and how, for the length of that field, I felt as if I was inside one.

I thought back to one of my many walks in Sri Lanka, when I would reach the point of saturation with all the dust, sun, heat and shriveled, dried up bark (which would give you the feeling that the sun practically peeled it off the trees and sucked the moist life out of it). Just around then, I would feel a slight, delicate cool, and would look up to find I was walking next to a majestically upright coconut tree, bending just so at the top out of its easy-going and kind shade-y character.

I would think of a perfectly smooth, wavy sand dune in Sharjah’s otherwise lifeless desert where I grew up, of a lake appearing like an oasis beneath the narrow, winding roads somewhere between Sanaa and Taez in Yemen, and so on and so on.

So there it was, a self-realization revealing itself to me for the first time, that it isn’t always my lofty notions of anthropological curiosity, courteous interaction with people, or self-disciplined motivation that keep me connected to places, and thus people. It was something much simpler all along and for which I can claim no credit whatsoever – but I'm happy to take a back seat to nature any day!

Write, dammit!!

The home page for one of my browsers, the one I use most often, is this blog. I did not do this out of egoism, but rather as a reminder for me to write, write, write. Whereas this reminder was pleasant in the past, it has now become a plainly annoying nag. Why do I do this to myself?

But the truth is that I do miss writing, so I came here today equipped only with my virtual pen and this blank page, with no particular idea, inclination or direction… let’s see where we end up.

I’m in a coffee shop with free wifi, decent music, and a strict non-smoking policy, there are a handful of these around town that have become my makeshift workspaces when I get too restless (and undisciplined) to work from home. I actually do have a cool set-up at home – I custom-designed my desk, have a couple of my favourite Klimts hanging right above to keep me calm and inspired, have broken in my office chair just so, and am at the perfect angle and distance from the air conditioner to remain perfectly cool/warm, depending on the weather. My coffee-shop workspaces have none of these traits, but they all share one feature that is sometimes central to getting any work done: they force me to stay seated. At these coffee shops, there are no TVs and shows that come up and “who knows when they’ll be screened again” (who am I kidding, I know they’ll be back on in 4 hours). There also aren’t any dishes in the sink, or laundry in the hamper that I can suddenly decide to feign a heightened hygiene conscience and feel propelled to clean right this instant. There aren’t any rooms to tidy up, even though they have been comfortably neglected for weeks, or any phone calls to make, or plants to water, and so on, and so on.

No, these coffee shops are the closest type of workspace to my offices. And the procrastination they offer is also quite similar – websurfing, emails, and – wait for it – blogging!

As a matter of fact, there are so many similarities to my previous routine of working in an office that I have begun to doubt my level of productivity during all those years of employment. I mean, was it truly an achievement to respond to around 50 emails a day, playing a virtual ping-pong game of ideas, that take much longer to see tangible fruition sans ping-pong? Did I really need to spend late afternoons writing comprehensive reports that would later be butchered into one-page briefs general enough to be relevant to just about any other project? I’m not sure… I often feel that, at the end of the day, I get things done within roughly the same period of time, but there is much more ‘camouflaged wasted time’ in an office than there is when I call it a day and decide to, say, cook or go for a walk.

What I don’t often get to do, sadly, is just write… The biggest downside of not being in an office and full-time employment is that you never have those lulls where your mind just gets to wander aimlessly and not immediately get roped back in by to-do lists and deadlines. When in an office, there are always some episodes that are just so mind-numbingly infuriating or boring (think back to just about any meeting that has gone too long) that they set my mind free to daydream, and that’s usually when the first lines of a blog entry come to mind. I’ll have to work on creating some daydream episodes, preferably without the infuriation!

You Never Forget the War…

For cultures like ours that are prone to drama, we hold onto and mark all sorts of dates that – mostly – refer to a dramatic event. When speaking of national memory, this is at a whole different level to the “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” question for a few simple reasons. Firstly, we don’t linger too long at the ‘it was just a regular day’ part of the story and choose to go into much more depth at how the world changed as a consequence. Second, although the Americans probably posed the question as an opener for a shared experience and shared grief, we tend to slip into a somewhat competitive discussion of which of us was affected more, closer to the event, or understood it at a whole other level and was thus more intimately touched by it.

All sarcasm aside, the main difference in our region is that we have far too many days to mark and remember, far too many events that provoke the question “where were you when…?” For stretches at a time, our lives were (are) defined by these rather than by our own regular life events. We don’t remember the year a cousin underwent surgery to remove his appendix because it was the same year that our 6-year-old lost her first teeth, but rather that that was the year of a particular conflict or bombing and the roads were closed, or the electricity was out. I suppose this is why you can never quite forget the war: it’s part of our calendar.

And, of course, the list goes on: I remember when one conflict broke out because it was exactly a week before the date of my PhD defense and almost threatened my chances for traveling. Similarly, I remember the years of a particular reunion, and a friend’s wedding, because I managed to slip out of the country and back right before the airport closed in both those years. This naturally brings back memories of the first time the airport closed because we were not so lucky that time around and fled the country by land. Yes, I remember that year as well for the same reason.

You never forget the war because fireworks continue to make your hair stand on end, and you recognize the sound of tanks rumbling through the streets at night. Because every summer reminds you of one you spent under siege, where you couldn’t go near the beach and, even though you’re not a regular beachgoer, you can’t forget how much your body missed the sun that year. You never forget the war because, every time you travel out of the country, you still can’t chase away that fleeting thought that something might happen while you’re away, and are you prepared in case it does.

I think, however, that what most compels us to remember the war is that we lived to reflect on it, we survived. After the war in 2006, one of my expatriate colleagues was part of the first convoy to go down to the ravaged South after the war had ended. For a week, most of what they saw in the villages was funeral processions for those who had been found amidst the destruction and rubble and this naturally overwhelmed him. During one phone call, he kept repeating that we (the national staff) really had to go down there, searching for the words he tried to explain “you have to come down and stand witness to this part of your compatriots’ history”.

So, yes, you never forget the war for all your personal reasons, but it is not (just) that we are unable to forget - we are actually duty-bound to remember.

Dunya's Bahrain

Since the unrest in Bahrain started, I could only think of my Bahraini friends and what they were going through; I would recall their thoughtful quiet concern for me and my family when we were facing our own forms of conflict in Lebanon, and I shuddered at the analogy. That sweet island nation that I had always held as the pride of the gulf (from the opinion of an expat who grew up in one of the gulf states), that country and those people were too sweet and, well, innocent to become jaded like us.

The twist that drove me completely mad was when the ripple effect of a Lebanese leader’s speech led to the discontinuation of all flights between our two countries, also cutting off phone connections. We were left to the one last channel of communication – the gracious internet.

I was ecstatic to see Dunya appear online and could not find larger letters in which to greet her. Her sweet subdued greetings were immediately followed with a sardonic “See, we can’t come to Lebanon these days”. I could imagine her mirroring my disappointed restrained smile at her end of the connection, and a simultaneous unspoken thought “thank goodness they managed to come for a visit to Beirut late last year”.

I wanted to know how she and her family were, if the images we were seeing on the news were accurate or exaggerated, and I wanted her to write about it. I so desperately wanted to hear the inside voice of someone as secular and balanced as her infusing the overriding discourse with simple humane insight. She had already started it with a short poignant email that she sent to her friends, simply saying “My name is Dunya, I’m not Sunni and I’m not Shiite: I’m Bahraini; I want to live in peace and justice”. This would be the sentiment she would repeat when I asked how she was, “we are all a mix in Bahrain, you see it in my family and others (families of mixed religions) and we are all okay… (how can) we have a clash between Sunni and Shiite? We never thought of it that way, we were always only Bahraini.” She was upset at this instigation of sectarian confrontations, insisting that they represented a smaller portion of Bahrainis trying to change the system, which was not accepted by all of them. “Even here”, she continues, “we say that not all who acted were Shiite”. And right then came the exclamation that news reporters and politicians often overlook, “I just hope everything will finish soon”, she sighed, “so we can get back to normal life.”

These are the voices that people needed to hear, I insisted, and went on trying to persuade, push and goad her into writing something, at how important it was for the outside world to access what was actually happening on the ground. “We are trying”, she would say, “but we need them to be stopped first…” I would insist, then she would demure “I am not a good writer”, I would continue with offers to assist, trying hard not to push her too far. I paused, waited for a response, a little silent lapse was followed with “will try, but writing is very emotional these days”.
I stopped. I just continued with our chat instead, and found myself asking her when we were wrapping up if I could share what she had told me with others.

“I know you know more thank you think, you met my family which gives you a sample of what it is in Bahrain. I am Bahraini, the thought of being Sunni or Shiite was irrelevant, we live in one house and you can see that I am Sunni, my sister is Shiite, but quite simply we are all Bahrainis.” She continued, “We all need more rights in Bahrain, as everywhere, but we want the royal family because we don’t want the country to be ruled by religious men, like in Iran or Saudi Arabia. When I was in the UK, I hated it when people looked at me suspiciously because I am Muslim (because of my veil), as if I was the one who had a hand in what happened in the US or the undergrounds, so I will never do that to a Shiite. I believe that in this world we have two types of people: good people and bad people, regardless of religion and ethnicity.” Dunya was raised in a Sunni-Shiite home and I asked whether that balance from inside the family and home might have had the larger influence on her. “I’m sure it has”, she said, “but this is how we all lived in Bahrain. I might have been more affected, but you will see that even Bahrainies today, when this is passed and forgotten, they will get back to how we were. As we always say ‘al deen lillah wal watan lil jamee’ (religion is for God and the country is for all)”.

But if that was the overriding Bahraini sentiment, then why were some people resorting to protests and clashes and touting them as rights along sectarian lines? “Politics is a dirty game”, she said simply, “people play it for their own agendas.” As much of the protest was against the royal family, I wondered for a moment what would happen to Bahrain without them, “We would be like Lebanon”, she stated plainly, the analogy that I had chased away at the beginning of our chat re-emerging on its own. “We would end up in civil war, because the Shiites and the Sunnis will fight for everything, and religious leaders will rule. So, yes, we do need change, we all say we deserve a better life, more freedoms, more rights, but removing the royal family is not the way to get those things. Besides, those factors are not all controlled by the royal family, and if you compare us to other gulf states, it’s clear that Bahrain is better off than the others.”

With that insight, I was suddenly a little more confused and had to ask what other factors were there, then, that stood in the way of reforms? My wise diplomatic friend lobbed it back at me saying “people like you will know the truth without me saying it; some will only believe what they want.”

The subject somehow changed, could have been by either one of us, as we both needed a breather to take in all that was said. I was still bewitched by her response when I asked her what it meant for her to be a Bahraini. She was quiet for what seemed like a very strained minute and replied “Bahrain nour el ‘ein (Bahrain is the light of my eye)”. That statement took my breath away.

We got a little distracted with news of impending storms when she said, “You know, when the tsunami happened in Japan, I told all my friends (Sunni and Shiite) that it would be very bad if we died hating each other, so let’s work for improvement instead.”

Well said.

You Get Proud by Practicing - A poem by Laura Hershey

I feel sad that I found Laura Hershey's work so late in the day, after she had passed on. I have not been able to let go of this poem since I read it, and felt it really needed to just keep spreading.

You Get Proud by Practicing
by Laura Hershey

If you are not proud
For who you are, for what you say, for how you look;
If every time you stop
To think of yourself, you do not see yourself glowing
With golden light; do not, therefore, give up on yourself.
You can get proud.

You do not need
A better body, a purer spirit, or a Ph.D.
To be proud.
You do not need
A lot of money, a handsome boyfriend, or a nice car.
You do not need
To be able to walk, or see, or hear,
Or use big, complicated words,
Or do any of those things that you just can’t do
To be proud. A caseworker
Cannot make you proud,
Or a doctor.
You only need more practice.
You get proud by practicing.

There are many many ways to get proud.
You can try riding a horse, or skiing on one leg,
Or playing guitar,
And do well or not so well,
And be glad you tried
Either way.
You can show
Something you’ve made
To someone you respect
And be happy with it no matter
What they say.
You can say
What you think, though you know
Other people do not think the same way, and you can
keep saying it, even if they tell you
You are crazy.

You can add your voice
All night to the voices
Of a hundred and fifty others
In a circle
Around a jailhouse
Where your brothers and sisters are being held
For blocking buses with no lifts,
Or you can be one of the ones
Inside the jailhouse,
Knowing of the circle outside.
You can speak your love
To a friend
Without fear.
You can find someone who will listen to you
Without judging you or doubting you or being
Afraid of you
And let you hear yourself perhaps
For the very first time.
These are all ways
Of getting proud.
None of them
Are easy, but all of them
Are possible. You can do all of these things,
Or just one of them again and again.
You get proud
By practicing.

Power makes you proud, and power
Comes in many fine forms
Supple and rich as butterfly wings.
It is music
when you practice opening your mouth
And liking what you hear
Because it is the sound of your own
True voice.

It is sunlight
Wen you practice seeing
Strength and beauty in everyone,
Including yourself.
It is dance
when you practice knowing
That what you do
And the way you do it
Is the right way for you
And cannot be called wrong.
All these hold
More power than weapons or money
Or lies.
All these practices bring power, and power
Makes you proud.
You get proud
By practicing.

Remember, you weren’t the one
Who made you ashamed,
But you are the one
Who can make you proud.
Just practice,
Practice until you get proud, and once you are proud,
Keep practicing so you won’t forget.
You get proud
By practicing.


More can be found about Laura Hershey, including her publications and how to order them, on her webpage: www.laurahershey.com