Strolls Through The Land of Nightmares

Here we are trapped at home again. It's not that it is that unsafe to go out, it is rather to go where and do what and for what. So that's it, you, yourself, the news and some times the live scenes too.

I stood on our balcony and watched the quiet street in the early morning. You would hardly suspect that instead of the few people walking about slowly and the builders in the nearby construction site, there had been thugs carrying swards and trying to beat up a man to death in front of the screaming viewers from the buildings on the street just some hours ago. It is hard to believe that it hasn't been the first time this quiet street witnesses such violence. The residents are used to such scenes most of the Fridays for many months ago. They are also used to finding notes stuck on the entrances of their buildings on the next Saturday morning from the quarters of the political party at the end of the street saying "We are sorry for what you have to go through. When we located ourselves in your neighborhood we didn't know that being among you would cost you all of these troubles."

The pet shop in the next building is closed, of course. The owners display the pretty Shirazi cats in front of their store along with some little puppies and birds, but hardly any of them were sold although they had been sitting there for so long. I had to leave my pet there for last week and I was a frequent daily visitor at the store. I remember looking at the store owners and wondering why would they -who evidently look like they have little to get by- consider pets as a business in such a country during such times? I remember looking at the beautiful animals, pitying them and envying them at the same time because they have no idea what's going on.

My surgery books lying on my desk reminding me of the tons of work I have to do to go through them. I picked up a book and read one of the surgeries that we have been studying repeatedly during the past week. Going through the procedure and its alternative options, I thought of how long it took the surgeons who developed its numerous steps, of their trials and errors that cost them morbidity and even mortality of their patients, to arrive at the final most ideal shape of the operation. Of how it is even likely to develop more or even get replaced by a newer operation. What a breath taking art! I thought of the passion of such surgeons/ artists and of their dedication. It's hard to think they cared about anything else in the world other than their work to be able to device such life saving beauty. I wondered how many of us here had such care and passion. How many of us here had them but was battled and defeated by corruption and frustration and lack of resources. I thought of how how I had been separated from the ones I love all my life, one after the other, because anyone who has a dream has to leave. I wondered what does that make of us all.

I thought of every time I went home with unwashable ink staining my fingers foolishly thinking I've contributed, I've shared in deciding the future of my country and consequently in deciding my future, but then every time some one erased my vote. The referendum on the constitution was a fraud, the elected parliament was dissolved and the opposition is rallying for the fall of the elected president and dragging the country into violent confrontations on the streets. I know I would never vote again. What's the point anymore?

My TV and computer screens are full of images of public figures starring meditatively into the horizon and uttering words, destiny shaping, stirring angry crowds desperate for the simple rights of basic life, uttering them words with ease, with a laugh, with minimum feeling of responsibility towards the impact of their words on lives, on the future. The hissed hate from both sides tinged with a thirst for the blood of their opposers. The mad fury in the eyes of people during political arguments. The aggressiveness towards a political group that has deepened into aggressiveness towards a larger majority of the fabrique of who we are. To know that some people are afraid to walk through the streets with a beard or a face veil in a country of a majority of Muslims. I blame every politician I see on my TV screen, every single one of you all from all currents. Feel the pain, do you?

While all of us sit in front of our little computer screens typing words out into the digital globe in a false hope that anyone would read us, would hear us out, or a killing prevented by our pleading words; both fighting teams are out there on the streets, taking away our right to have a say in our futures by enforcing their say by the threat of blood. I can go of writing forever of our pains, of how we have been denied even our barely tolerated simple lives, of how I see the dream we all saw back in 2011 fade and escape further everyday. And the only One left who I can trust is God, and to Him I pray for an undeserved delivery from all of these evils. 

 

The Musings of Life in A Soundproof Bubble

I woke up this morning with this gut feeling that my world will be alright today. For awhile there have been a back to back series of trials of patience from God, and I was caught in the middle and couldn't cope properly. A priceless gift from God though is to be given the ability to observe your own behaviour. To be able to consciously observe the way you react to inevitable events and modify your reactions little by little till you can finally arrive at a sane peaceful attitude towards the events. That's not an easy thing to do but I believe it is possible and I believe it is teachable, but no one can teach you how to do that but yourself.

I was starting to think things will be fine today because I've decided that it is in my power to decide that things will be fine today. Sipping at my coffee and reading the news, the train accident came up. Another train accident within a couple of months' time. Continuing through news about the accident and commentaries I realized this will be just a reliving of the first one. Everyone will jump up at the opportunity to make something of the sad event for themselves. The media will broadcast heart-breaking episodes of interviews with the families of the victims full of insensitive painful questions directed at the aching family members aiming at bringing them to tears in front of the cameras so that the channel would have higher viewing rates and sell more commercials. The politicians will use the event to show the incompetence of the president and the government. The public will watch the ongoing game between the opposition and the government, they will divide and take sides, throw accusations at each other, fling their work aside at their jobs while they discuss over tea with their work colleagues how everybody else is not doing their jobs. And then everybody will gradually lose interest in the show and go back to the sufferings of their own hard lives.

We are all caught inside that fragile bubble that has soundproof walls. The bubble has been driven at full speed towards absolute destruction for over thirty years and we have tried suddenly to press the brakes and stop. We are bound, fated to continue with the force of our inertia towards the same destruction target and the inertia is feeding off the selfishness of all the inhabitants of the bubble, off their greed, off their inability to trust each other. We don't realize that the soundproof walls are making us invisible to the rest of the world. That with the exception of the crows watching us to pick up the goods whenever they get a chance, nobody in the whole globe cares at all about the worthless millions that have been burning for countless decades in their own misery in that sad centre of the world that is the Middle East, reminiscing that day hundreds of years ago when they were a powerful nation worth being called a nation in the first place.

Truth that you are taught that each and every human life counts but reality says that it doesn't. Avoidable unnecessary deaths take place over the country everyday with numbers that may exceed the victims of the accident. Everyday. But nobody cares unless a mass of hundred souls dies at the same instant in front of TV screens making it too vulgar or too embarrassing for the rest of the us to pretend that we haven't noticed. To think of the poor helpless figures I see at the hospital everyday who have no choice but to seek help at the only affordable hell spots all over the country. I think of the daily stories of deaths because of incompetence or lack of resources or skills of the healthcare attendants or sometimes their recklessness and negligence. To think of the dangerous killer roads with drivers who do not compel to any traffic or safety rules creating that charade which kills tens everyday in single scattered accidents that don't attract any media attention and thus go unnoticed. To think of the builders on construction sites and workers in factories who work with zero safety measures. To think of the sight of the smashed poor living-dead all over the streets shivering in the cold rainy days. People haven't died just today, people are dying everyday, every minute, while each and everyone of us have been busy trying to find their own way out of all of this.

In the real world, in my country, you have to be a well known important figure so the tragic unnecessary end of your human life would count. Otherwise your life has to end along with some other hundred lives so that anybody inside the bubble would notice.

When will the driving inertia run out of energy? when do we stop? We all know theoretical correct answers but none of us knows any practical plans for the solutions and those who know the plans have no idea how to execute them. And least of all I don't claim any knowledge of that.

With a national scene like ours which is nothing short of a daily mad circus, you need to learn an essential survival skill, that is to draw very clear distinct limits between your limited personal world and the rest of the world. You need to accept that fact, do whatever that is in your power to give help, concentrate al your efforts your energy and emotions on doing the job that has been assigned to you right, but you need to move on. Grieving at every event will be a life of continuous mourning. The world as we know it through the news screen is never alright and always miserable, and today it will have an extra shade of misery added, but that doesn't mean that your personal limited world doesn't stand a chance today.

Of Controls

I believe that most of the time you have a very sharp insight into a choice that you're about to make. You can tell what is exactly the right thing you're supposed to do, except that you can see it for only few seconds before you realize that it looks very difficult or just not appealing. Before you have a chance to start a potentially painful struggle against your reasoning powers, some defence mechanism is turned on in your head that blurs the previously very clear facts that led you to the right deduction and leaves you completely convinced that you're in a confusing situation and that you have no clue what to do. The thing is that you're not feigning ignorance now, you actually do believe that you don't know. At that moment your defence mechanisms have done their deluding job and have set you free. Now you can dwell on all possible options and pick one of them blindly not fearing that you'll blame yourself later for what you've done, because you'll be able to tell yourself that you didn't know any better then. But if you can recognize the scam your head plays, if you can detect the truth in these few seconds of awareness and hold on to it before it gets blurred...

I believe that we don't arrive where our actions have led us but we rather arrive where the hidden motives behind our actions did. That guided by the wrong motives even the right can be wrong. The fear of taking all the pains of a difficult errand, of thinking very highly of yourself all the time for doing the difficult right thing, of going to sleep with a smile of satisfaction with the achievements of your day, while you've shut yourself off completely from confessing the "why" behind them. But if you can turn this fear of arriving at the wrong place while you've felt so secure to the safety of your destination all the time, into the power to wake up to the knowledge that God looks into your heart and soul and can see the truth about them even if you're pretending to yourself that you can't see it, if you can really wake up to that....

I believe that the will to change to the better is cumulative and gets stronger every time it is opposed and defied although it seems like it has been broken and vanished. You will want to change, and your  repeated failures will make you think that may be you don't have the strength or the state of mind it takes and at some point you'll just stop trying while in fact this very failure that made you stop could have shown you a new path inside yourself so that the next day you would  know how to take that path and fight you. But if you can persist for longer, if you can have full faith that The God who can see into your heart won't see a real yearning for the good and then let you down or push you away...

It's because of this beleif that setting the facts, the motives and the will straight means that I've arrived at some place where I've taken full control over my life and placed it in the hands of God. If I arrive there, my greatest fear of the possibility of purposelessness or worthlessness of my life will be soothed to peace. I'll know that if I arrive there I will still fall but at that time my falls will be more of the course adjustments that I needed to be set on the right way instead of being the drift currents that pull me away. It's because of that tempting chase of peace, of the dazzling beauty of that place, that'll wake up everyday thinking life worth awhile, I'll take a deep breath and I'll start again..