04.20.09
Lose hope, but never lose your belief!
A dear friend of mine told me yesterday… Lose hope, but never lose your belief!
I promised him I will try not to… and in the process of trying to fulfill my promise, am giving it another trial to be optimistic… and as I always quote Tom Hanks in Cast Away movie… “I gotta keep breathing… because tomorrow the sun will rise… and who knows what the tide could bring!”… Who knows indeed… maybe it’s for real that the best day of my life haven’t arrived yet…
Anyways, below are the lyrics of one of my favorite songs ever…
Happy Colors and Happy Sham EL Neseeem,
Rou…
“The sun’ll come out tomorrow…
Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow there’ll be sun!
Just thinkin’ about tomorrow clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow ’til there’s none!
When I’m stuck with a day that’s gray and lonely…
I just stick out my chin and grin and say…
“Oh! The sun’ll come out tomorrow…
So ya gotta hang on ’til tomorrow…
Come what may…
Tomorrow! Tomorrow!
I love ya… Tomorrow!
You’re always a day away!” ”
03.11.09
Life is not a fairy tale…
Am not a heavy Arabic music listener… If it’s not for Fairuz, Moneer, or some chosen tracks for other singers, you can hardly ever find me listening to Arabic songs… However, a few days ago a dear friend of mine sent me a song by Mahmoud El Essiely named “مش زي الأفلام”… the song is not that impressing, yet a particular sentence from it kept popping into my mind that said:
“و أتاري الدنيا مش حلوة كلها، مش زي الأفلام اللي هو بيحب يخشها”…
Listening to it, I immediately remembered some words from a scene of one of my favorite movies (The mirror has two faces), that said: “… it’s like going to the movies and we see the lovers on screen kiss, and the music swells, and we buy it, right? So, when my date takes me home and kisses me good night, if I don’t hear the philharmonic in my head, I dump him!”
Though quite different, both phrases triggered the same thoughts in my mind… that real life is not a fairy tale… that no matter how relationships appear to be at the beginnings, at some point in time people seem to be losing that scent that their relationships used to have and things become a sort of a duty… and days come when they feel completely overwhelmed with their relationship that they can’t seem able to take anything anymore… this is the real world kind of love… this is real… not a fairy tale…
But, the thing is that I somehow tend to believe that when relationships fail or even turn into this kind of routine, it is more likely that both partners are responsible for this… not because one them is bad… but rather because the two of them never knew what to expect from each other… they got into the relation just for the sake of being in love… and their definition of love and its consequences was mainly extracted from movies and fairy tales… she’s expecting him to be acting like prince charming, while she totally forgot that she’s not Cinderella… and he’s expecting her to be the Sleeping Beauty, while he totally forgot that he have no clue how to save her from her hundred-years curse…
And speaking of fairy tales, I always believed that anything can be seen from a different perspective… so after all maybe it’s not about prince charming who saves Sleeping Beauty… but rather it’s about dozens of young princes who die horrible deaths trying to get through the thorn hedge that surrounds the Sleeping Beauty, just because they had the bad luck to be born before her hundred-year curse expired; while one young prince, no better or worse, no handsomer or uglier than the rest, gets through merely because he has the good luck to arrive just as the hundred years are up; and so on and so on… and hence, you can see that fairy tales are not always splendid…J
So, either ways, my point is that we need to learn to understand the difference between a real life relationship and movie fantasies, we need to understand our needs along with our partners’ needs, we need to set our expectations based on solid grounds, not mere fantasies, and we need to love our partners the way they really are, not what we imagine them to be…
Am not a fairy tales hater… I just learned to be a realist…
Anyways, below is the full lecture scene from “The mirror has two faces” movie, it’s an amazing one, worth reading/watching…
Enjoy it! J
Rou…
As I stood at the altar beside my sister and her husband to be, it struck me that this ritual, called wedding ceremony, is really just the final scene of a fairy tale…
They never tell you what happens after…
They never tell you that Cinderella drove the Prince crazy with her obsessive need to clean the castle, cause she missed her day job, right?
They don’t tell us what happens after because there is no after…
The be-all and end-all of romantic love was…?
Sex…?
Marriage…?
But it wasn’t always like that!
Around the 12th century there was a notion known as ”courtly love”, where love had nothing to do with marriage and nothing to do with sex…
In most cases it was defined as a passionate relationship between a knight and a lady at the court who was already married, and so they could never consummate their love… In this way they would have to rise above… your ordinary… you know… ”going to the bathroom in front of each other” kind of love…
They would go after something more divine…
They took sex out of the equation, and what was left was a union of souls…
Clinical experts, scholars and my Aunt Esther are united in the belief that true love has spiritual dimensions, while romantic love is nothing but a lie… an illusion… a modern myth… a soulless manipulation…
And speaking of manipulation … it’s like going to the movies and we see the lovers on screen kiss, and the music swells, and we buy it, right? So, when my date takes me home and kisses me good night, if I don’t hear the philharmonic in my head, I dump him!
Now the question is; why do we buy it?
We buy it because whether it is a myth or a manipulation, let’s face it… we all want to fall in love… Right?
Why…?
Because that experience makes us feel completely alive…
Where every sense is heightened…
Every emotion is magnified…
Our everyday reality is shattered, and we are flung into the heavens….
It may only last a moment, an hour, an afternoon… but that doesn’t diminish its value… Because we’re left with memories that we treasure for the rest of our lives…
I read an article a while ago that said, ”When we fall in love, we hear Puccini in our heads”… I love that… I think it’s because his music fully expresses our longing for passion in our lives and romantic love…
And while we are listening to La Bóheme or Turandot, or reading Wuthering Heights, or watching Casablanca… a little bit of that love lives in us too…
So the final question is: Why do people want to fall in love when it can have such a short run and be so painful?
Propagation of the species…?
Psychologically we need to connect with somebody…?
Are we culturally preconditioned…?
Good, but much too intellectual for me…
I think it’s because, as some of you may already know…
While it does last, it feels f*kin’ great…
12.11.08
Of an Old Dream: Not just Roses and Champagnes!
A while ago, I was listening to John Lennon’s song “Imagine”, and a particular part of it kept popping into my mind ever since; “Imagine all the people sharing all the world… You may say that I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one… I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will live as one… ”… May be the reason I so much related to tat part of the song is the fact that I used to have this dream of one world, one love… and I confess that in my early teenage years, I naively thought it is possible to achieve… that dream of changing the world starting with yourself… remember it? Yes! I used to be one of those dreamers… and I was never ashamed to say it…
Yesterday I was having a long talk with a dear friend of mine… about life happenings and the way it affects one’s character throughout the years… and suddenly out of nowhere I came to the fact that along the road of my life, I gave up some dreams, one of which was that particular dream… I guess I kinda lost it somewhere in-between my disappointments & frustrations, and my struggles to find the real me… Realizing this, I felt really ashamed of myself… See, even though I kept my belief that I can change myself to be a better person, but it was my belief of changing anything or anyone around me that faded away…
Anyways… Those of you who happened to know me, know that I am usually in my best moods in winter times… sa7ee7 winter haven’t really started awy yet, but the autumn weather of the past couple of days along with the lovely Eid spirit made me kinda reconsider some of my life happenings… and what made such consideration have a greater effect is the fact that I truly love this holidays’ spirit that seems to surround us lately during December and January… I just LOVE these couple of years with all these happy holidays following each other; Eid Adha, Christmas, Hijri New Year, New Year, Eastern Christmas… I remember last year I was so fascinated with this spirit and I even wrote a post on the importance of giving gifts in such days… but with the true meaning and sense of a gift… something given with love, care, and passion… not just… ta2deyet wageb… So, if you can get how such happy days make me feel, how high my spirit is with the cold breeze, the nostalgic feeling that John Lennon’s song put me in, along with my usual stand with myself at the end of each passing year… you’ll probably understand how much I feel am yearning to get back to that old dream now… and how much I am trying to re-live it, and work for making it come true…
I know what you’re thinking of… “Life is not about roses and champagnes… face your reality and dream of things that can be achieved… Dreaming of something differs from making it happen!” … I do agree walahy… and I promise you am not naively thinking of it this time… I know very well that lots was lost throughout the years, it’s just that I am standing for the hope that remains…
I mean… Why do we always tend to think that great events demand great causes, while the truth is they don’t!
They often require just one voice – good or bad… That, as much as their genius, is the legacy of, you name any… Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and many others…
My point is that we should all try to be that “one voice” … for good. We may think it will not matter. But the thing is we can’t see ourselves through the long lens of history… Your “one voice” might actually be the difference!
Martin Luther King once said: “Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”
Happy Days,
Love,
Rou…
I’ll leave you with John Lennon’s song lyrics.
Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
07.28.08
حدوتة مصرية
ما نرضاش يخاصم القمر السما…
ما نرضاش تدوس البشر بعضها…
ما نرضاش يموت جوه قلبي نداء…
ما نرضاش تهاجر الجذور أرضها…
ما نرضاش قلبي جوا يغني… وأجراس تدق لصرخة ميلاد…
تموت حته مني… الأجراس بتعلن نهاية بشر من العباد…
دي الحكمة قتلتني و حيتني وخلتني أغوص في قلب السر…
قلب الكون…
قبل الطوفان ما ييجي…
خلتني أخاف عليك يا مصر… وأحكيلك على المكنون…
مين العاقل فينا مين المجنون…
مين الي مدبوح من الألم…
مين اللي ظالم فينا مين مظلوم…
مين اللي ما يعرفش غير كلمة نعم…
مين اللي محنيلك خضار… الفلاحين غلابة
مين اللي محنيلك عمار… عمالك الطيابة
مين اللي ببيع الضمير… و يشتري بيه الدمار
مين هو صاحب المسألة والمشكلة والحكاية والقلم…
رأيت كل شيء… وتعبت على الحقيقة…
قابلت في الطريق عيون كتيرة بريئة…
أعرف بشر عرفوني لأ… لأ ما عرفونيش
قبلوني… وقبلتهم…
بمد إيدي لك… طب ليه ما تقبلنيش…
لا يهمني إسمك لا يهمني عنوانك… لا يهمني لونك ولا بلادك ومكانك…
يهمني الانسان ولو ما لوش عنوان…
يا ناس يا مكبوتة… هي دي الحدوتة…
حدوتة مصرية………
07.10.08
I can no longer pay…
“So after all those one night stands, you’ve ended up with heart in hand…
A child alone… On your own… Retreating…
Regretful for the things you’re not…
And all the things you haven’t got…
Without a home…
A heart of stone… Lies bleeding…”
“I never wanted to know… Never wanted to see…
I wasted my time… Till Time wasted me…
I never wanted to go… I always wanted to stay…
‘Cause the persons I am are the parts that I play…
So I plot and I plan… And I hope and I scheme…
To the lure of a night filled with unfinished dreams…
And I’m holding on tight to a world gone astray…
As they charge me for years…
I can no longer pay…”
07.06.08
Hold On Tight to Your Dreams!
“When you get so down that you can’t get up…
And you want so much but you’re all out of luck…
When you’re so downhearted and misunderstood…
Hold on tight to your dreams…
Hold on tight to your dreams…”
– E.L.O.
