Time to head "home" whatever the fuck that means.
I finished packing, and counting the hours with dread...I don't like where am heading to. Can't stand the people, their non existent sense of humor, their frowns, their avoidance of life, their stupidities and shallowness, however hard they try to be sophisticated...their lack of imagination, their lack of passion for anything, anything they are incapable of copying. Because this is what they do best, copy. They copy everything. They are the most boring, infertile, tedious people I have come across...
I guess places are like people. One either loves them or hates them. It is indeed a package.
Love and hate are also a package.
You can say I like this about this place and dislike that. That is very rational of you. But then I will tell you that you don't love the place. As simple as that.
If you can dissect something then you don't love it. Love takes it all. Liking and disliking are for tourists not for lovers. Lovers live love. Be it a place, a person, a cause, a piece of music or a painting... You live it, you love it or hate it.
You experience it, you love it or hate it. But liking and disliking are for lukewarm, cold feet fellows. People with no fire in them. I can't stand people with no fire in them. Fire brings warmth and light but it can also burn and consume - granted. But life is tasteless without it.
And love, or loving a place is the sort of fire am talking about. It means opening yourself up to totally experiencing whatever it is you need to experience. The sounds, the colors, the smells, the streets, the faces, the hidden meanings, the overt and covert...Only then can you really say you love or you hate. But not before.
You don't have to travel throughout the whole country. It is not the distance, it the one who does the walking, who makes the miles...not the other way round.
It is not the number of people and places you have encountered or visited, it is how you encountered them and how you visited them that counts. This is not about the bulimia of the senses and adventures. This is about experience on a deep soul level.
I have met people who have not left their own cities, yet in my eyes they have travelled the world. And I have met some who have travelled the world and lived in various places and in my eyes, they have not left their own doorstep.
Immune to change and to learning or open to experience, that is the question.
If you don't do the latter, how will you ever discover and find your own element ? Impossible.
Finding one's element is crucial in life. Well, it is in my opinion at least. Once you are in your element whatever that element is, and you say to yourself - this is me, I have found myself, finally - then you can do and achieve great things. Before that, you are only buying time...And you may buy time till the rest of your days and until you reach your grave.
I am a great believer in taking one's passion to its ultimate realization. In the positive sense, of course. I say in the positive sense, because some have a passion for destruction and nihilism, this is not the kind of passion I am talking about.
I am talking about your heart here and your heart, deep in its recesses, only knows love and its flip side, hate.
Love with passion, hate with passion if you need to, but harm not nor destroy what you have not created.
And when you think about it, you have created nothing, for you are only another creation among millions of others...
Painting : Iraqi artist, Fareed Zaidi.
