When you are writing, even when you curse, do not delete it. You can come back to it later and adjuste it to something else. You need it in order to capture the mode of the sentence. If you omit it, you alter the mode, and undermine the ultimate meaning.

To write well is to not be aware of your writing when you are writing. You are all into your thoughts, and you don’t pay attention to your style or punctuation. You are free from the limits of style, grammar, judgment, or expectations. The only factor that is in play is your thoughts. Whenever you start paying attention to how you are expressing your thoughts, or how they would be perceived, you lose track of your thoughts.

In short, don’t think about what you think, just think it.

The biggest waste that we can encounter is not recognizing the moments when some of our dreams come true. It’s like that moment is passing unnoticed in the noise of our struggle to survive. Recently, I realized that there are moments in my life that mimic images about how I imagined my life to be, and that some of them were going away, unnoticed.

About four years ago, I was asked “where do you see yourself in five years?”

My answer was not at all what my life is right now, but there are some areas of similarity. I said I wanted to be living in Vancouver, in a house with a view of the mountains, where I can wake up in the morning, fix myself a cup of coffee and write.

I currently live in Vancouver, I woke up today in an apartment with a glimpse of the mountain through the two buildings across the street. I couldn’t drink coffee because my stomach is very irritated by it, and I am writing this now.

I can either dwell over the missing parts or be miserable, or I can recognize the existing parts and be happy. I am happy that I am here, where I want to live, living, at least partially, the life that I want to live. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean that I am living in denial of the areas that need to be enhanced; it just means that I am not allowing them into my heart, just into my mind.

My heart is enjoying my successes while my mind is working on my failures. That’s how we can be happy.

Happiness is to be grateful. If you are grateful then you are acknowledging the happy moments in your life, and not letting them flow away in the inevitable noise of daily life. In other words, being grateful is recognizing the happy moments that each one of us will have in his life, cherishing them, and enjoying them, before allowing them to fade away.

The more conditions we put for our happiness the less happy time we will have. If we are to learn to enjoy the little happy things that come amidst the other unpleasant moments, we can live a happy life.

This is probably the single most difficult things to deal with in life. We need to perfectly distinguish between accepting our mistakes that led to that failure, and accepting failure itself. The first one will allow us to work on something in ourselves, to modify our worldview, and try again. The second one is going to make us give up, and accept our inability to succeed. Failure should never be accepted. Mistakes, on the other hand, should always be.

To measure our success in life, therefore, be able to identify when we are failing, we need criteria. We need something to tell us how does success look like, and how does failure look like. If we don’t have that measure, then we are failing at the beginning of the “game”. Our first task in trying to be successful in any endeavor is to know where we are going. Failing in that task is going to be reflected in a grand failure of the general task, and in small failures and disappointments along the way.

In other words, in order not to fail, we need to know what success is, because otherwise we might pursue failure under the illusion that it is success. The result will be failure AND disappointment.

After you know the objective, and you know what success is, then your failure might only be in not being able to succeed in it. And if you learn how to deploy your failure successfully in your life, then you will never be defeated. That skill is an essential one in hunting for success. We are humans, and we make mistakes, and we fail, if we get passed that, then we will be able to objectively deal with our failures, examine them, and use them for our benefit.

Sometimes we need failure because it helps us to wake up, and to re-examine our path. Failure can be a positive experience if a person can benefit from it. We should not be intimidated by failure to not try doing what we want. Because that is worse than failure, it is actually the fear of failure. We don’t even try because we are set up for failure. We are expecting failure in whatever we are trying to achieve, and that’s why we never do it.

The first step to defeat that is to never stop expecting success. When we expect success, we are setting ourselves positively, and are not being intimidated by failure. When you are expecting success you trust yourself, and this trust encourages you to do better and lifts your spirit when you will inevitably stumble upon a small failure along the journey. It’s like having your “self” at your own back, taking care of yourself.

Failure is a lesson. If we learn that lesson, we succeed, and if we fail, we fail.

I have learned a lesson today. I learned that the reason why I have not been successful in my life is that I don’t have clear criteria of what does success look like. At this moment in my life, one of the biggest challenges that I have been facing is determining what is the measure of a man? How can I be a man, and according to whose concept of a man I should be? In short, I learned that my failure was in the lack of criteria. I was failing at the beginning of the game.

Now I found my criteria for success. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) is the measure for success. He is how a successful man should look like, and he is the man I whose model I should aspire to follow.

Up until now, I have not been set up for success. I have the same message that he had, but so far, I have been failing in approaching his standard, his manhood, his persistence, his patience, his compassion, his forgiveness, and his heroism in delivering that message.

Of course I do not by any mean expect to be as great as he is, but at least I should try to adopt his example and follow his steps. I want to at least try to live like he did. That, I guess, is the missing puzzle of my life. I needed a role model.  I needed someone to look up to; someone to admire, and aspire to. I found him.

I will consider this revelation to be today’s success that I squeezed out of my failures. I succeeded in finding out what success is. What should come now is succeeding in being successful.

Watching TV while eating is a bad habit that I decided to quit today. Our mindset shifts when we eat, and our perception changes because we are nurturing a natural instinct, and are stimulating distinct parts of our brains. We feel intimate at those moments.

I assume this might be influenced by our infancy, when eating was associated with having a connection with our mothers. Our brains, I argue, have not yet completely given up on that association. We are more intimately open when we are eating because as a rule, animals only feed when they are in a safe state, and they do it in a social surrounding.

Our problem, therefore, is that we replaced the mom and the group with the TV, and are being intimate with people who do not know us, nor care about anything else other than our money, and therefore, our control.

Talking about remote control!

Every moment that is not lived for Allah is a wasted and shameful one. By that I mean that as a human, your gratitude to Allah for creating you and showing you existence that beautiful should be expressed by living your whole life in pursuit of helping other people see that beauty.

This is the only way you can try to say thank you to your Creator. This is also the only way you can live with yourself, because you simply can’t be witnessing this Greatness and not sharing it with your fellow humans. I feel obligated to write because I see a world so beautiful, that I can’t just be silent about it. Beauty is what forces me to write, I can’t handle it alone, I need to share it with someone else.

I believe in Allah, I know his signs, I read his language, I understand the lessons he is teaching me, and I am humbled by the beauty of life that He is showing me. Existence with Allah is much more beautiful and enjoyable than without him; and I want to share this joy with you.

Enjoy …

Why do we need it?

There is a widespread belief that people are looking for those who can replace their parents in their lives. To me that’s just one possible portion of why people pursuit love. Men might be looking for women to replace their mothers, and women want men who replace their father in their lives, but that’s not the whole picture. We are supposed to be born into a family, and we are supposed to be looking to end up in one. We, as specie, are family oriented.

But there are other areas in us that require this powerful emotion. We want to love in order to be motivated. We cannot be motivated for greater good if our main concern is our individual gain. Because we need to give something of ourselves in order to achieve that great goal and when we try doing it for ourselves we get into a contradiction.

For example, someone wants to stop smoking for himself, but he ends up with a “self” that tells him “I am the one who wants to smoke, and to stop smoking for me is to contradict what I want”, and that is why many people can’t stop smoking, because they are using the wrong motives. Similarly, that is why many people can never reach their full potential in life, because they are caught between satisfying their self’s immediate needs versus their self’s long term desires.

We come to the point in our lives when what we are willing to give for what we want becomes as valuable as what we want, and in that case, we get paralyzed. We need that extra reason to help us give part of our lives, and part of ourselves, to achieve long term goals.

In order for us to achieve our maximum efficiency, we need that added responsibility that comes with being associated with another human being. We need that extra weight in our driving force.

As social specie, we need to be attached in order to create.

Many of us need to find that person who deserves that extra effort. Someone who can make them feel that their own sacrifice is serving a bigger self than their immediate self. They want to have a bigger self in order to be able to put more effort, and live a better life, and they are looking for that extra self in someone else. They want someone to complete them, and make them pursue perfection for their sake. Love, therefore, is a step towards perfection, and I would love to see how that place looks like

It’s amazing how quickly we people take things for granted. Seven months into my life here in Canada and many of the beautiful aspects of life here are becoming expected, and one starts to seek new joys and chase new horizons.

Unlike the first few months, where I had all the time I needed to contemplate and thoroughly examine my life and question my perspectives, the few months that came after that delved me into a rollercoaster. It made me forget where am I going, and even who I really am.

In pursuit of survival, we tend to sacrifice our whole lives. We do not live as we want, we live as we need, and as we have to, and the bigger the distance between the two, the bigger is the sacrifice.

Few months ago I had a clear perspective of where I want to go, and what I want to become. Now, after having entered to a new level of life here I became tamed by the bills and driven by the pay check. I am becoming something that I do not like, something that I have always criticized in the world – a neutron!

I measure my performance in numbers (seconds, mind you!), and measure my days in hourly rates. I am a machine in a system that is crawling all over me like darkness after sunset. I understand now why there are so many people who are not reaching their full potential. I am one of them now. I am becoming more and more afraid to take a risk, and to believe in myself. I hide in the security that my pay check provides, and are afraid to challenge the system. I want the system. I need the system. Even though I know the system is wrong! Now I know why the revolution here failed!

I love my life here, I love many things here, but I need to work on myself. Not being able to blog makes me feel that I am not being able to be myself, and that, in turn, makes me unhappy.

Another question (a constant one) is time. For some reason, I have this idea that there is a definitive way to be right, and I need to find it. Being 34 years old, I find myself frequently questioning my worldview. One of the most pressing questions is caused by my doubt about what I want. It seems like I am unable to find the line between enjoying a young spirit, while living in accordance with my age, and living in denial of my age altogether. It appears as if I have lost a perspective here.

For a person with a very independent worldviews, I find myself too considerate of the common belief in “what is the correct behavior for a man in my age?” In other words, I don’t know whether or not I can trust my own wants and desires, or should I just succumb to the commonly accepted definition of that word. Should I come up with my own concept, or should I just adopt people’s image of it?

Of course I want to adopt my own concept, but age and time can play wicked games with your mind.

Aging makes you more careful, and leaves you with less time for errors or sidewalks. It becomes like a gamble at one point, and you need to know when to stop.

Is there such thing as “right life”? Or it’s just that every person finds his own right and lives according to it? I guess my only comfort is that I will never know for sure the answer to both of these questions. Even if I get one answer, I will never know for sure what would’ve the other one been.

The only thing that I can do is to act according to my best knowledge at every moment, and count on Allah to lead me. That way, even if I will be lost, He will be with me.

So, finally, after few months of unemployment here in Canada I found a job. It’s just a temporary position as a technical support representative in a cable company, but is still paying the bills. The work is good, and the payment is not bad. I work mostly with nice people. In a way, I feel that I have entered into another level of my journey into the Canadian society, and the Canadian way of life.

Two days ago I was having a conversation with a colleague, who told me about some of the journeys that he made to other places. He was specifically excited about the differences in cultures that he witnessed while visiting other nations. One of the things that he was very impressed by is the family life in the Philippines. He said that people there have big gatherings, and they prepare big meals, and eat together and they socialize and are living together, whilst in Canada “We just go to work and pay bills”!

His last sentence rang a bill in my mind. It was a quick diagnose of what I was beginning to feel at this time of my life.

That is not to say that all life in Canada is like that. Canadian lifestyle is a mix of different cultures, traditions, and religions, and putting it all in one category would be unfair.

But at the same time, this was not only specific to me, since I am beginning to see the general pattern in this society that is explained by the above description.

Working here makes you feel like a tool in the system that complements the software, the hardware, and the overall marketing strategy.

Your performance is evaluated by numbers like how many minutes you spend on a call, and how much time you spend in reporting the problem in the system between calls. It is almost irrelevant how much of your soul you put into trying to help people, or how much emotions you invest in sympathizing with them, or in dealing with their frustration and, in many cases, their rage.

There is no “Me” as I know it in this context. There is no room for whatever else that is me other than that mechanical part that I am supposed to play in this huge machine that is the corporation. This role requires you to adjust your way of thinking to the devices that you are using, and to use all your brain capacity for that. As a result, you end up mentally drained and, in a way, unable to creatively use your brain in the little times that you have between your shifts. Your mind simply doesn’t have enough time to readjust itself to think freely, outside of the “mindset” that is imposed by the limitations of that system. By the time you begin to reclaim your mind, you are reimmursed into another session of conditioning in this machine. Eventually, thinking becomes a luxury that you cannot afford.

I find that here in Canada many people have been living like that for decades, and continue to live this life. Many of them only “have” their brains on weekends. And even then, they don’t want to use them, they just want to have fun. They go out, drink, play, and dance just to relax their brains before falling back into that rollercoaster.

They need these distractions to remain sane. They can’t afford to live without them, and that is why they can’t afford to be without their paycheck. Of course no one can, but when your only refuge is having “fun” then you are vulnerable. They won’t risk getting out of their jobs and looking for another job because they can’t afford to stay without the “fun” that this job is allowing them to afford. The result is that they remain stuck in this place forever.

No wonder in many western countries, people don’t know what their governments are doing to other nations. No wonder no one in the west has the time to follow up with politics enough to formulate an informed opinion about whom to vote for. No wonder people always consume packaged opinions about other nations that “experts” need to put in a 30 second sound bite in 6 o’clock news.

Most people here just know their job, and that’s it. They just work and pay bills. Not much of family life. They live more as individuals rather than a society or families. And this increases their vulnerability, and turn corporation into the only consistent social circle in their lives. As a result, people get emotionally attached to it, and corporations are becoming increasingly skillful in taking advantage of this attachment and this loyalty for their own profits.

It is weird how many aspects of life companies are controlling in this capital world. It is sad to see that he only institution where people behave as a group is geared towards profit, while other, more ethical, causes are nurtured by individuals.

This scheme is causing these enlightened, educated, and overly humane societies to be manipulated on all of these levels for the profits of few people. It is suffocating to see how these societies are chased by their bills to the extent that they can’t even afford to look up and see what exactly is causing them to endure these miseries.

I am going to continue my journey deeper into this society, and I am going to hope that I will always keep my perspective. I hope I will never turn into a component in a “for profit” machine to the extent that I lose my faith in my individuality, my strengths, and my worth as a unique human being.

If there is a way to balance the two, I hope I will be able to find it.

So, I have the flu. My brain activity is at its lowest (as if this is not the case all the time!), and I am lying in bed, bored, and have nothing to do. I started searching Google for something, and one thing led to another, and … voila. I discovered how Google sees the world in which we live. If Google will become a living and conscious entity, it will probably have these views about the world the moment it is born:

Google insists Americans are NOT stupid, although he offers other definitions for them:

Polite is missing!

Where is Islamophobic here?!!

White, not white, who cares you mother ******?!

Now this is really rude, Google! Yeah yeah, we know the owners of Google are Jews, you made your point guys!

No comment!

Do I smell a lawsuit?

What an inflated self-image!!

Sometimes Google does make sense.

A lot of sense

O, and by the way, Google loves me!

Who said Google is complicated?!