Gravity -episode 1

On life, love, sex, and the (vain) pursuit of happiness

Am I living a good life? How do we measure how well a person is living? What measuring stick holds truest? When I’m on my death bed, will I be able to say that I lived well without suspecting secret disagreement from loved ones around me? Will my brothers and sisters agree? Will I imagine a smirk on my cousin’s face? Will I believe my friends’ pats on my shoulder? Will my partner break down and cry?

Fools may agree that a better measure of quality of life is not monetary or professional but that it’s about happiness. I may have a trillion dollars in my account and still be a miserable Scrooge. On the other hand, I could be a penniless struggling actor and be the envy of the world for the life I am living: the friends I have, the love I share, and the unfussy unadulterated happiness I experience every day in my life. Still I don’t think I am alone in wanting financial and professional success. It’s when I start sacrificing my happiness to get to that success that the alarm sounds. That’s when I would start having less life, if that makes any sense. I would lose sight of what’s important and slowly empty my life of joy and love. Life is about living with joy and love.

But what is this thing we call love?

Love can very well be the most sung subject in the world. The word ‘love’ may be the most frequently used word in the history of film, music, and religious discourse. If you don’t ‘have’ it you are likely to feel insecure, deprived, ostracized, and unhappy. If you do have it, you’re supposed to not feel insecure, deprived, jealous, and unhappy. But mostly we are not sure if we have it, and we feel insecure, deprived, jealous, and unhappy.

Is love over-rated? Have we been placing a little too much emphasis on it?

My earliest recollections of love are like fuzzy dinosaurs. They feel big but little is left of them besides the sweet feelings, which are still with me today, hanging around, like memories, like the corners of my mind. So sweet and tasty are those feelings that -I realize now- they are still the yardsticks against which I compare my feelings today. More than that, I think that they are affecting the way I deal with people I’m attracted to. I’m sort of still there on some level. What I feel must measure up to them or else it’s not strong or real enough.

My love life started at my pre-teens. At that time, I always imagined myself in love. Whether this love had an actual object was beside the point. The feeling was there anyway. I was moving from one person to another in my head, editing and perfecting the image and along the way using different personas to suit my mercuric moods and dispositions. Sometimes the person was real, but often it was a figment of my imagination. At times it would be a crush over a star or total infatuation with a song or a book and its singer or author. But most of the time it was an imaginary person. I’m not sure if I was actively cultivating those feelings or whether they were there by default and I was just basking in them.

As a teenager I went through several crushes, one after another, only abandoning one for the stronger force of another. Another way to end the crush was by some sort of consummation, which did not happen frequently I might add. Later, in my early twenties I moved to another realm, adding a physical element but losing something along the way. Love, now in the form of relationships, was not based on crushes but on needs and emotions. I found myself dragged into and through relationships for more reasons than I can assume. Love became a quest for satisfaction. I think I developed a need to be with someone. The need was about personal satisfaction as much as it was about a social need to be like everyone else. I think a lot of people are in relationships because they need a partner -be it for social reasons or sexual fulfillment. So many people are in love with love as opposed to in love with a partner. I understood much later that I had to discern my feelings. I learned to take a step back and look at them. At one point I decided I was never going to fall or be dragged into relationships, that I was going to only accept what I thought were real emotions. I wanted to be satisfied and I looked for satisfying relationships. That was a whole other issue.

With time and experience I rearranged the way I understood satisfaction. I found that small measures of satisfaction were a sure way to go forward in life. They are the toes in the water, the taste buds on the tip of the tongue, our defense against full-blown catastrophes. I divided my satisfaction target into smaller progressive units. I started to enjoy my life more. My relationships became more stable.

Needless to say, before I figured out this system, I went through a crazy period where I was looking for more and more satisfaction: higher intensity, more feeling, superior emotions. I was running faster and jumping higher and, in the process, falling harder. I didn’t notice that I was actually getting less and less. I do not regret this period. I think that the path of excess is OK too because it eventually leads us to our balance. Some people are luckier or smarter at using experience than others and will learn quicker. The danger is that a few may end up stuck in the excess, drowning in the ineffective quest of reaching new heights and not realizing that their highest point was at the very beginning.

So then, what is love?

My dictionary defines love as an 'intense feeling of deep affection' or a 'deep romantic or sexual attachment' to someone. Buddhists define love as the wish for others to be happy. They regard it as a step further from compassion which is the wish for others not to suffer.

What else? Love is the answer. You gotta have love. Love is pain. Love is jealousy and betrayal. Love makes the world go around. Love is a cliché. Love is all there is. Why can’t you get it through that thick head of yours that all you need is love? Love is a need. Love is need. We are needy for love.

Love is damaged by need. Take the need out of the love and you have a better relationship. Of course, we cannot easily do that. What we can do is recognize. That’s the surest way to liberation. When we recognize that we need, we start needing less. When we need less, we love more. Then, jealousy decreases, friendships become better, families become closer and more open to each other. Love becomes more about giving than expectations. It wouldn’t be so often transformed into hate because according to this definition, love is not the opposite of hate but the absence of it. No longer will love be about the search for happiness through others. Rather we will realize that love and happiness are one and the same. The illusion that happiness is a feeling equal in intensity to suffering but opposite to it in direction is actually what ruins our happiness. We search and search for it but it’s not anywhere over there. It’s right here. Drop the search and you will experience it.

Everyone wants to be happy. Everyone. Canadians, Americans, Brazilians, Palestinians, Israelis, Lebanese, Syrians, Black people, White people, Asians, Latinos, poor people, rich people, young people, old people, Muslims, Presbyterians, and Hindus all share this very same basic desire. Madonna, Haifa, Bush, Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, Ahmadinejad, and Bin laden are all moving out of the same exact place in their hearts. Why is it so hard to believe that we are all the same in wanting to be happy? It is not in wanting happiness but in the pursuit of it that we go our separate ways. The search for happiness is causing us unhappiness.

The basic mistake that we often make is excluding others from this search. We forget that terrorists are looking for the same things that we are. We assume that they don’t have mothers and lovers and that they hate their own children. We become so swallowed up in our search that when we collide with someone else who’s on the same search, we think they are only there to deny us our trophy. My precious! If only we can see that we all want the same thing and that what we want is inside each and every one of us. The supply is infinite.

I remember a song that I used to hate in the 80’s. It went: “What is love?
Baby, don’t hurt me.” In that lame song, I see meaning for life. Go figure.

Oh Lord, won't you buy me an undo button...

Do I always have a choice? Theoretically, I think I do, though it is quite often that I'm tempted to feel that I'm forced to do something. Is it because the choice is too difficult, so I make believe there is none?

However, even when dabbling in the illusion of forced action or situation, I find that I still do have the following choices:

1. Deny any responsibility in what's happening and surrender to anger and depression or wallow in self pity, never allowing myself to hear the end of the story. In this case I find I get stuck in trying to get back to what was before only to realize really late that I can't undo anything. No one can.
2. Open up to the possibility of personal responsibility but remain unable to find my share. In this case, I would be able to shake off some of the anger, depression and self pity and improve my mental state a little but I wouldn't be able to improve the situation drastically. Frustration builds up from day to day, in time returning me to the cycle of anger and so on.
3. Face responsibility head on. I understand that I must have taken steps along the way leading to something which led to something else which eventually led to where I am and that I have never been completely helpless or choice-less. In fact, anything happening at any point in time does not just suddenly appear out of God's situation bag. For anything to happen there must be a set of causes and conditions that can be traced as far back as the afternoon of the biting of the first apple. Therefore, I generate acceptance and make the best of the situation and move on. When I take this option I often find that the situation does change for the better. Many times I find good fortune where nothing but you-know-what was in view. I may not be able to undo but I can move things around a little to make them more suitable for me and others.

If only I can remember the third option all the time...

One of my teachers once asked: if a person gets shot at the door of your building, are you responsible? What if the person is hit by a car in another part of town? How about if someone dies in an train wreck in a far away country? My answers to the three questions were no, no, and certainly not. He proceeded to say yes you are. You are responsible. I didn't like that. He said as long as you are alive, you always have the ability to respond. Life and responsibility suddenly became faces of the same coin.

Responsibility is not guilt. It is not blame. It is not about deciding who did what. The word responsibility comes from response-ability. Whatever happens in this world, whether it's to me or to someone I never imagined existed, is my responsibility. My situation is my responsibility. It is so because I always have the choice of response. This is what life is made up of: responses and responses to responses and responses to the responses to the responses and so on, endlessly.

I still wish for the undo button though.

Saucy Tales and Bikini Veils (Excerpt)

I DON'T REMEMBER GROWING UP. I remember being a little baby, I actually do. I remember craving milk, sleeping in a cradle, and looking at people from far below. I remember holding experiments to find out things like 'does the refrigerator light stay on when its door is closed' and 'do noises and sounds actually dampen when I shut my ears -in other words are my ears the volume knobs to the world or are they just mine?' And I remember being a dorky little kid who read till he dropped. I just couldn't stop reading. I remember listening to my elderlies' and school teachers' saucy tales and asking them questions they didn't answer. I remember them telling stories about why they wouldn't, and I remember me thinking, and eventually saying, that they probably couldn't. I remember stubbornly arguing with everyone about almost everything. I was rarely satisfied.

Now apparently I've 'grown up' and, suddenly, I see myself getting smiles, often sympathetic, sometimes hypocritical, and at times empty. I hear myself being branded with both good and bad adjectives. I'm frequently reassured that I'm only reacting, that I'm passing through a phase, and that I'll change with time. Who doesn’t! Every moment in life is a phase. That doesn’t change what’s going on in its span.

Now that, I guess, I've grown up, I realize that I maybe right or wrong on issues. And although I am not completely sure about anything, I do know some things. I know that I belong to a veiled, censored, and often violent society. It's veiled, both physically and morally. Some women wear head veils, others wear bikini ones. The men? They're just as veiled as the women. Individualism has been dying in this society. But then again, maybe it was never exactly kicking. The veil extends to many areas of society: music, movies, books, the media, and all forms of expression. Is it a coincidence that Lebanese artists and writers have traditionally been unable to make it in our society? The list is long starting as far back as Gibran. Today, we are seeing glimpses of change. I hope this trend will mature and prosper. Still, most of our collective talent is scattered around the world, lamenting their luck, stuck in 9-5 jobs in Dubai or Saudi, or struggling to make it day to day in the west. All our society does is take foolish pride in them. Those who dare come back may be threatening their intellectual freedom and span. The boundaries of our collective intellect are LBC in the north, the name of the airport in the south, Crystal nightclub in the east, and the large unending sea of mediocrity in the west. We have killed each other so many times, and we may just do it again. Once around before there’s no one left. We prolong our own suffering by grasping on to worn-out political and social traditions and regurgitating the same slogans without pondering their meanings. It never occurs to us to rethink our ways. We can’t think further than our own hairdo’s. Bleak picture? The bad news is that instead of anyone constructively criticizing, trying to know the real story and telling it as it is (after all, that would be the first step in bringing about positive change, wouldn't it?), everyone is caught up in what I like to call the Rahbani syndrome: singing praise of the beauty and perfection of our country and of our ways. We grew up with a nauseating national pride. We knew we were it. The country. The history. The heritage. Don't get me wrong; it's fine to say that Lebanon's beauty is the envy of the rest of the world. My problem is, where is this beauty today? OK, so you drive a while and you find some of it untouched, kind of. But how long would it be till someone else finds what you have found and does the perfectly Lebanese thing to do -cut it up and sell it? It's great to take pride in the commercial success of our Phoenician ancestors, but what about their literature and intellectual heritage? Where is it? All right, it's also fabulous to boast about our monotheistic traditions and of our being the ‘model’ of inter-religious coexistence, whatever that means! But, say we accept that coexistence is a good thing, my question remains, where is it? Where is this coexistence? More importantly, how is this spirit of coexistence affecting tolerance of others who are disqualified by monotheism? What issues is the political establishment debating besides who puts up which tents? Will my asthma ever get better given the levels of pollution and smoke in public places? How many more people have to die before we enforce traffic laws? When will I be able to see a movie, read a book, or even receive a mail package without the active participation of our lovely censors? Who decides who thinks what?

As my generation began 'growing up,' with Fayrouz and Sabah’s patriotic songs ringing in our heads, many of us started comparing notes: Oh, oh! We're not the greatest society in the world. We're not better than everyone else. Actually, in many ways, we are a bit worse! Oh my God, Lebanon is not God's paradise on earth. A goat’s dwelling in Lebanon is not the envy of the whole world. The result was a black hole in our minds. Some of us couldn't, or wouldn't, see the forest because of the trees. They denied what they plainly saw and played on with the charades. The rest treated this new insight in one of two ways. Some trusted their vision and stuck to their ideas. They revolted against the status quo and waged little wars, facing little losses, little gains, or general marginalization. Others started looking for another paradise on earth: Canada? The US? France? The Gulf? What, they're all the same? They all have faults? So many of us today are caught up in limbo, living somewhere and waiting to grab the chance to move back or forth somewhere else. In, out, tick, tock, or so the story goes for our lot. Are we finally waking up and smelling the coffee? Or is it the smell of mendacity, as Tennessee Williams so delightfully put it, that’s finally awakening us? Are we growing up? How can we know if we are?

I am forty years old. How in the name of all Broadway shows did I get here? I still habitually forget that I’m not 17 anymore. When did I start realizing all the above? Why don't I remember growing up? I have thought about this glitch in my memory and have found a few potential explanations for this bizarre phenomenon.

The first is that I was never a child. Maybe no one ever is. Maybe we're all born as grown ups, but we're limited by our physical appearance and by our elderlies' need to prove that they're better. I mean juvenile voting is a legitimate idea. Articles have appeared in respectable reviews about it. Could be.

The second is that the process of growing up is so slow and routine that it is impossible for anyone to remember growing up. Instead, though we don't always ponder the meaning of them, we remember growth enhancing incidents such as losing one's virginity and reading long meaning-infested books. Therefore, there is a possibility that the issue is not just mine but a symptom of the human condition. The problem with this logic is that it feels to me as though it's the opposite. The passing of time is not slow at all. On the contrary, it is really fast. It’s still a possibility though.

The third possibility is that growing up is such a hard process that people just push it away from the accessible parts of their brains. Maybe growing up in my society was so hard that I too unknowingly pushed the set-aside button in my brain. That's understandable when we consider the violent mess that my generation grew up in. It's even more understandable when we consider that my generation is being charged with the economic and social cost of resolving that mess and rebuilding the country.

The fourth possibility is that I haven't grown up. Maybe no one ever does. Maybe that's human nature. Maybe we're all just children. That would explain the way we look down on juvenile intellect. We could be jealous that we no longer exercise it. On the other hand, maybe people do grow up, but it's just me and my society that haven't. Maybe we need to finally decide that we want to grow up. Only then can growth take place. Could be.

Revisited excerpt from Edentown, a self published work. www.edentown.org