England has a peculiar way of making foreigners feel exhilaratingly free and depressingly alone.
No one can survive alone – except the Almighty God. And remember, in the desert of life, the fool travels alone and the wise by caravan.
Do you know that the Sufis believe the world is a mother’s womb? she asks. We are all babies in a womb. When the time comes we have to leave the world. We know this but we don’t want to leave. We fear that when we die we will cease to exist. But death is actually a birth. If we could understand this we wouldn’t be scared of anything.
Knowledge requires reading. Books. In-depth analyses. Investigative journalism. Then there is wisdom, which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy. For that we need stories and storytelling.
Perhaps in a world bound with rules and regulations that made little sense, and usually privileged a few over the many, madness was the only true freedom.
Don’t underestimate the good in you.
The child had indeed shut up but all the questions that had accumulated on his tongue circulated in his mouth, moved through the passages of his nose and climbed up from there to tickle into his teardrop ducts, so in his moss green pupils, curious, insistent, accusing sparks of questions continued to light up and fade away like fireflies flitting about on summer nights.
Listen, canim, I know you might get cross with me for saying this, but remember, good advice is always annoying and bad advice never is. So if what I say irritates you, take it as good advice.
Not a very sensible thing to do, I admit, to fall for someone who is not of your kind, someone who will only complicate your life, disrupt your routine and mess with your sense of stability and rootedness. But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.
Whether in the name of God or science, there was no satisfaction for the ego quite like the satisfaction of converting someone to your side.
Love cannot be explained. It can only be experienced. Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all.
They ooze down slowly, a flow so slight as to be imperceptible, moving across time and space, until they find a crack in which to settle and coagulate. The path of an inherited trauma is random; you never know who might get it, but someone will.
Today, I think of fanaticism – of any type – as a viral disease.
Believers favour answers over questions, clarity over uncertainty. Athiests, more or less the same. Funny, when it comes to God, Whom we know next to nothing about, very few of us actually say, ‘I don’t know.
Well, think about it: a friend is someone you can walk with in the dark and learn lots of things from. But you also know you are different people – you and your friend. You are not your depression. You are much more than what your mood is today or tomorrow.
Truth is a rhizome – an underground plant stem with lateral shoots. You need to dig deep to reach it and, once unearthed, you have to treat it with respect.
For the same reason, he believed that love had nothing to do with “plans for tomorrow” or “memories of yesterday.” Love could only be here and now.
If a stone hits a river, the river will treat it as yet another commotion in its already tumultuous course. Nothing unusual. Nothing unmanageable. If a stone hits a lake, however, the lake will never be the same again.
In the sheltered bosom of faith, one found the answers by letting go of the questions; one advanced by surrendering.
His honesty offended others, but he liked to provoke people to see what came out of them in moments of anger.