Tag: stoicism

Immorality

I want to know the turning point of when it became normal for someone to say, ‘I’m not judging’ a person when they find out that person has had an extra marital affair. At what point did society sell its backbone, moral nerve network and courage to the truth, in favour of cowardice, pseudo niceties, and immoral acceptance of lewd and reprehensible behaviour?
What am I missing?

How has it become normal to feel guilty to use words of condemnation against immoral behaviour and normal to excuse that behaviour with faux language of non judgement and reluctance to speak truthfully?

Where in time did the hijacking of language and moral compass take place so that we allow it become so rampant in our society, that by default, anyone that speaks out is supposedly policed and accused of being judgemental?

It should serve as a warning to all that we’ve become complacent and accepted the narrative of a few weasel like post modern pseudo activists who are so far disconnected from the reality of activism that they wouldn’t know what to do if someone stole their lunch money let alone what to do in a real life situation where wars break out and front line men and women are needed to bravely stand against real tyrants and real threats.

They cannot operate on the battlefield, nor in the capital or political spheres. They cannot rub shoulders with intellectual, spiritual or philosophical giants and so they have created a fake arena where they enlist the support of the naive layman to justify themselves not through proper dialogue and solid arguments but attempt to drown out narratives through numbers only.

Notions of patriarchy, false morality, pseudo activism and fighting for causes that just do not exist have become the only currency they can trade with.

Alas, I digress, it’s still our fault as a collective for not standing up to these shills and intellectual dwarfs who sit like trolls at the end of rainbows. Rainbows are, optical illusions after all, and trolls exist in so much as they believe in these illusions.

W.E.

Rudderless

Advice:

Accept insignificance.
Accept your folly.
Accept insofar that it humbles you.

Don’t accept being vulgar and self centred,
and loving yourself is the quickest ticket there.

I know my faults well,
we’ve wrestled until our pulse is one and the same,
we’ve wrestled until both are tame.

When they rise to take control,
I’m there to shut myself down,
when I rise as if accomplished and complete,
they remind me of how lowly I am.

W.E.

Recipe for men

Solitude,
has been a recipe for manhood in my family for as long as I remember. Floors groaned at three am when my father would walk across wooden tiles that I always thought someone had meticulously jigsawed across the whole apartment.
His belt buckle, I can still hear, then came the jingle of coins in his pockets as he set off quietly to his work day, alone.

I still drive by that apartment and assume that it belongs to us, my childhood will haunt whoever lives there until I can buy it, just for fucks sake and keep it as a memory.

My grandfather was a loner too, son of many sons of mountain people wedged in a village and on the other side a sea.

He’d walk, in the early hours of the morning to his work too. He’d toil the mountains, his father a shepherd and farmer.

My uncles, all land people. Quiet men, but robustly strong men.

There’s manhood in solitude yet!

Someone tells us that we’re of prophetic lineage, Hashimi to be exact and this seems to be on the lips of other families in surrounding villages.

I hear it more than once as if it’s a get out of jail free card, but I’ve wrestled with myself in just as much quietude as my ancestors for me to believe that it’s true.

Still on the offchance it is, I think of my noble grandfather – I hope he’s my grandfather – The Prophet who received revelation in……. Solitude but was believed in multitude.

The man who was responsible for transforming the otherwise then despicable Arab peninsula – perhaps now just as despicable – into the centre of the world.

Maybe it’s solitude missing from my people, stopping them from rising to that place again.

I’ve turned too many pages to not know that great men, men who’ve had the biggest impact, real impact were always introverted and preferred the humble sifting grounds of solitude over the cacophany of noise amongst people.

And so distraction feels like an enemy sucking my marrow and I feel bad for even thinking of people as distractions.

They don’t even get a chance to develop a relationship with me before I have ignored them based on their incessantly noisy approach to being heard.

Tap me gently,
wake me softly,
brush up against me with prose,
waft past me with a perfume so enchanting you pull me out of my shell,
but don’t vie for my attention with claptrap and hyde.

I’ll find you, I’ll hear you, I’ll notice all your nuances like I noticed my home, my father, like I think of my ancestors walking alone at night.

Quiet men,
noble men,
men of fortitude,
sunken in solitude,
bathing in introversion,
aching in longing for answers to all their ponders,
too proud to ask,
stoic in acceptance of their fate.

Men that thought so much, that their hearts beat double as fast, silently away from the masses,
men who all died early.

Maybe they all die when their need for solitude is no longer met, when they can’t keep enough of themselves away from people.

Maybe they die when their secrets are exposed.

Feel more, think less

Don’t listen to psychologists trying to box you into categories of being, categories of feeling, categories of your mental state.

You can think someone is a total fuckwit and genuinely care for them.

You can hate an attribute of your spouse with enough rage to want to punch them in the throat yet settle to spooning at night.

You can think people are total idiots in their life and still be utterly attracted to something about them you can’t put your finger on.

You can feel fifty shades of fucked and still be normal.

The idea that your feelings should be contained and ostracised, cut down and pruned to suit an idea of normal, that a long dead looney fantasised is normal a hundred and fifty years ago is total and utter bullshit.

What’s abnormal is not ever being taught how to carry yourself with dignity irrespective of those feelings and instead use that feeling or state to justify shitty behaviour.

Feel more, think less about it,

but act proper for fucks sake.

W.E.

Quiet rapport

I’m patient like that.

Where others will demand and hold you to account,
I know vulnerability waits for a soul to be ripe with sincerity before it spreads itself,
before it undresses.

I know that if I bottle my anxiety and show a face of indifference,
I run the risk of losing many,
but the ones that see with the eye of their heart also know me from a thousand thousands.

I’m patient like that,
because I know where I’m from and how I’ve travelled to be here is beyond just forty two years of worldly existence.

I’m not just matter and that’s what matters,
but I never let that matter to the point that it’s all that matters.

We matter said no one of intelligence and worth except who think their lives are but a series of what people owe them.

I’m still patient for them.
Waiting for their poems to undo themselves.

I’m always a poem away from myself.

W.E.

release

Give in to being overwhelmed,
or don’t,
you’ll be overwhelmed either way.

The reality is,
choice is only a comfort idea.
The mature person knows,
it’s a thing ordained.
Is it hopeless?
Hardly,
rather, it allows you to focus on what’s important.
W.E.

Image Credit: Brandon Kidwell
http://www.brandonkidwell.com/wisdom-for-my-children

Introversion – seventy six

 

Introversion isn’t an inability to socialise,
communicate, or come out of my shell,
it’s a choice not to.

 

When you are not overwhelmed, influenced or feel the need to conform to the social behaviours, to the appropriated practises and often mechanical actions of the rest of people around you, when you don’t feel the pressure to be a certain way to please others or fit into their comfortable habits, you become a subconscious agitation in many uncomprehending minds.

It’s the irreconcilable idea that you have the ability to overcome anxious desires to be around others and can do it alone. It’s not social anxiety at all, it’s the opposite for a true introvert. It’s the ability to not be lured by anxiety to any extent and carry on your own way without even batting an eye.

But do you know what it takes to be like that?

Yes you can be born with stubborn resolve and an ability to see things beyond the average person, to overcome otherwise paralysing and habitual ways to respond to stimulus. But it also means there are things you must learn and train yourself in, things you practise and grind repetitively, things you drill ad nauseum, revisit and keep drilling. It requires discipline you don’t wane from, and that path is stoic and noble. It’s dignified and shows character that frightens people who haven’t got the balls to grind it out.

W.E.

affinity of a man

If your spasm to do,
is not stronger,
than your spasm to speak,
or even think,
then you are involuntarily living.

You’re merely a collection of material markers,
your spirit, has not been tamed enough,
to learn the wisdom of temperament,
and the power that comes with serving,
nor the control that falls into your hands.

But manhood has been washed away,
into the abyss of in-definition,
to appease the lazy.

Your affinity to help,
must be stronger than your affinity to judge,
that is,
using ones hands or other abilities,
should be at the battlefront,
as opposed to looking from afar.

-Wesam El dahabi