What is the point?

What is the point? of anything, really? This question is more often than not asked in times of despair or pessimism. But when I present this question, I present it out of neither despair, nor sadness. It rises out of a realistic, perhaps overly grounded, point of view.

Every single day, you wake up in the morning- eventhough you would much rather stay in bed than go to your 8 am class. You choose to go anyways, or at least, you make yourself believe that you have a choice. You try to push yourself forward and not make it seem so bad by visualizing yourself in some form of a successful- or to be more precise, socially praised position that your education will eventually lead to. But, do you really wanna go to school? More likely than not, the answer is a big no. I mean, I fully understand if you love learning, I do too. But who wants to pressurize themselves in an attempt to get a grade that could potentially make or break their future? Who wants their self-worth and value as a human being to be determined by a numerical value? No one. Yet, we still "choose" to abide to the system and try our best to succeed by it's standards, because simply, we don't have a choice. Okay, so you finish all your schooling and higher education and you finally get a job. A job that you've once convinced yourself that you are passionate about to give yourself an initiative to finish your higher education. But are you, really? Or were you originally in love with art or music? Did you mildly like science and chose to pursue the "passion" that is going to get you somewhere in life? What does that even mean? Why do we let society define what "getting somewhere" is and isn't?

You end up liking your job- I mean, it's better than many others and it provides you with financial stability, right? But you don't like it enough to voluntarily go to work. You will spend your days looking forward to the finishing hour, your weeks looking forward to the weekend and your months anticipating the vacation. Basically, you spend your entire life looking forward to something. Something that might not even be that great or exciting but you look forward to it anyways. You chase dreams that you might not even have to provide your life with some sense of purpose or direction. You choose to abide by social laws that you very much despise. You become more focused having a successful existence than living a happy life. & in spite of all your futile attempts, you end up getting absorbed into a life of terrifying predictability.

I look around me and I can't help but notice that this world is filled with people who exist but aren't, and might never, come to be alive. I really wish that I could just live and ignore, but I couldn't help but keep asking myself, what is the point?

On inadequacy

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?" -Marianne Williamson

I often came across this quote as I did the usual "quotes by famous people" search for my school assignments, or otherwise. Very often, this quote is wrongly attributed to Nelson Mandela. However, it is actually a paragraph from the book 'Return to Love' by the author Marianne Williamson. The fact that it was attributed to the famous and universally respected Nelson Mandela, is probably the reason why this seemingly contradictory quote became so popular, but that is a digression from the main purpose of my piece.


"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."

'What on earth could this possibly mean?' I thought as I read this quote for the first time. Looking at my own life and the lives of others, I came to notice that the fear of inadequacy is something that so many people struggle with, whether or not they have the courage to admit it to themselves. People are scared of not being smart, pretty or witty enough. They are terrified of not ending up successful or loved because of some form of inadequacy that they might feel like they have. How could it be possible that we actually aren't terrified of inadequacy, but of it's absolute opposite, immeasurable power?

I found the answer to this paradoxical question in what could seem like a pretty irrelevant situation; while I was revising for physics. Although I don't remember the exact problem, there was this specific type of problem in two-three dimensional motion that I seemed to never get my head around. I strongly believed that I will never be capable of getting the grade that I want because how much I suck at identifying the variables correctly and working everything out. However, one time, I decided to give this problem- related to the specific topic, which was marked as 'challenging' in the book a shot. To my surprise, I managed to get the correct answer. At this moment, I experienced a strange feeling. I wasn't happy that I got the right answer, as much as I was troubled. I wondered, if I'm able to get the right answer, no matter how difficult the question is if I try hard enough, does this mean that every single time, in every single situation in which I got it wrong, I simply wasn't giving it my all?

This example doesn't only apply to the silly physics question, it applies to everything, really. Our deepest fear is that we are capable of much more than anyone could ever imagine. We are terrified of our power, what it could do and how we might not ever fully harness it during our lifetimes. On the outside, it might appear as if humans have a fear of inadequacy, when the reality is that humans aren't scared of being inadequate, they're scared of leading inadequate lives.

Thursday evenings(2)

"If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart." - Nelson Mandela

I never realized the significance of this quote, until very recently. Being a native Arabic speaker who attended an English speaking school, bilingualism came quite naturally to me, as it did to many others in the same situation. I was able to perfectly understand anything said or written in either language, and it didn't make much of a difference which one was used. As I grew up, I started to no longer study Arabic at school; most of my interactions with friends, or even family (sometimes), were in English. I began to feel more and more unfamiliar with my native language. I stopped reading and/or writing in Arabic and sort of adopted English as my unofficial first language.

A little less than a year ago, a friend of mine introduced to me Fairouz's music. I mean, of course, I've heard of Fairouz before and I definitely knew who she was, but I've always thought that classic Arabic music was for "old people" and never thought that I would enjoy it. So, anyways, I decided to give her music a try once when I was on the airplane, on my way back to Qatar. To my surprise, I incredibly enjoyed Fairouz's songs and loved their lyrics. I connected with the words in strange and beautiful ways, even though they, more often than not, described experiences that I don't necessarily relate to. This made me curious, since no English songs have ever made me feel this way. So I went ahead, and started reading quotes and poems by Arab authors, which I ended up being obsessed with. I gradually began to recognize the truth in Mandela's words. Perhaps, this is purely subjective, but no matter how many languages one could understand, none would reach out to them quite as deeply as their own.