Closing Pandora's Box

“Gravity is a force,” I said. “Caused by attraction between things.”

“So how was it discovered?” my brother asked with the distinctive I’m in the mood of asking a lot of questions look etched all over his face.

“Ummm, some guy called Issac Newton was sitting under a tree one day and an apple fell and hit him on the head or something along those lines. He sat down and thought why it happened,” I replied trying to remember physics from a long time ago. I stopped liking physics after year 9, so the direction of this conversation was not good. But It was my fault really; I had promised him that I would help him with his studies.

“That’s a dumb thing to think about. He got hit because he was sitting in the wrong place! And he’s so weird too. Whenever I get hit on the head, I get a headache and can’t be bothered to work. But I still don’t know how to answer this question. What is gravity?”

“Everything that has mass has gravity. So basically that means everything attracts everything else. Those things that are big have lots of gravity and attract smaller things to them. Small things also have gravity but it’s so weak it isn’t really noticed. That’s why things fall to the earth and apples hit you on the head because the earth is just so huge.”

His brow crossed even further. “But then why does my fart smell go in all directions?”

“Why would anyone or thing want to be attracted your farts? They’re lethal man!” I replied, trying to supress my laughter at his logic.

“You know when I get married, does that mean my wife has to be really fat because I want someone that’s really attracted to me?” he asked in his 12 year old confused and innocent *cough* voice.

*****

Do you remember the days when you could run around naked or just in your pampers and everyone would smile at you and hug you (if your pampers were clean) and it was all perfectly normal. You could say and ask pretty much any thing and no-one would think of you as a complete dufus. Asking questions I think is extremely important. It helps us understand, pass exams, and sometimes lets us know we’re doing the right thing and brings us peace of mind.

When I was 16 or so, I came to a stage of my life where I began to question. Life hadn’t really been a joyride and I wanted answers. One of the things I began to doubt was God. Where was He when I called for Him? Why did it seem as if He wasn’t answering any of my prayers? It was a bit of a downwards spiral falling into an abyss of darkness.

GCSE exam time came. I hadn’t really prepared, due to the ‘baggage’ that was weighing me down but biology is a subject that I’ve always enjoyed and it was probably one of the few subjects I had put some work into. As I sat down in the big hall with bright lights above, the heat became noticeable. I needed some water but my bottle was ice and literally frozen because I had forgotten to take it out of the freezer in the morning. I licked my lips trying to stop them from drying too much. On the table in front of me I could see my shadow; hair pointing skywards with something moving in it. What the hell? After a few minutes I managed to remove a minute spider from my hair. At that time I used to be hysterically scared of spiders and a spider in the same room as me would be an excuse to get up and run like my younger brother (read here). It was small and I felt sorry for it having been lost in the gelled up jungle on top of my head. I put it on the the table and left it to do what it wanted climbing and crawling all over the place.

The biology exam begun. It was going okay; I’d done most of it and with 20 minutes left there were only a handful of questions I couldn’t answer. One of them was about mitosis, a process which results in the formation of 2 identical daughter cells from one parent cell. There were 6 diagrams on the page labelled A, B, C, D, E, and  and at the bottom of the page were 6 empty boxes into which we had to place the letters in order of what stage that picture represented of the cell division cycle. I had done the first 2 and the last 2, but the middle 2 were giving me problems. I know this. I had spent 3 hours the night before learning this exact cycle. Help me God, I know this. Please help me. I just sat there for a few minutes reciting all the prayers I had ever learnt, relevant and irrelevant, hoping that something would happen, hoping that He would plant the seed of knowledge which I was after in my mind. He did better than that.

I don’t really know how to describe this next bit because sitting there watching things unfold, I could not believe what was happening. The spider that had been walking all over my arm and enjoying the freedom of the table suddenly stopped and made its way to the centre of the exam paper. It was so small and helpless I decided to let it do what it wanted. Anyway I had much bigger problems to deal with. Subsequently, It walked onto one of the 2 pictures I was confused about, changed direction and faced the empty box on the right. I couldn’t believe what was happening. When the little insect walked into an empty box, I was too stunned to do anything. How could a spider so small answer the mitosis question I was stuck on for so long? The overwhelming warmth and awe of the moment left me momentarily stunned. It was then that I realised He was there, listening to me. It was then any doubt I had about His existence were removed and I once again became a true believer. It was also then that I stopped being scared of spiders.

*****

There’s some more things I have to add to this but I’ll save them for another post.

=].

University officially started yesterday, not that I had any any lectures to attend. But I woke up and drove myself in for some reason. It was nice seeing the friends who I had not seen all summer and what a long summer it was too. The night before uni started, I sent a message to a friend of mine asking them to send me something nice and long to read in the morning. She sent me the following poem (author unknown):

To realize
The value of a brother / sister
Ask someone
Who doesn't have one.

To realize
The value of ten years:
Ask a newly
Divorced couple.

To realize
The value of four years:
Ask a graduate.

To realize
The value of one year:
Ask a student who
Has failed a final exam.

To realize
The value of nine months:
Ask a mother who gave birth to a still born.

To realize
The value of one month:
Ask a mother
who has given birth to
A premature baby.

To realize
The value of one week:
Ask an editor of a weekly newspaper.

To realize
The value of one hour:
Ask the lovers who are waiting to Meet.

To realize
The value of one minute:
Ask a person
Who has missed the train, bus or plane.

To realize
The value of one-second:
Ask a person
Who has survived an accident...

To realize
The value of one millisecond:
As k the person who has won a silver medal in the Olympics

To realize the value of a friend:
Lose one.

Time is so valuable, a message the poem above portrays quite nicely. Sometimes we forget its importance and indulge ourselves in wasting activities the cost of which we rarely feel at the time, but later on we are left wishing we had spend that time a little more wisely. When I read this poem it reminded me of a small speech our Headmaster at High School had given to us a few months before our A-level exams. It contained a simple message but a very valuable one and I thought I’d share it with you.

Though I can’t remember the exact words of what he said, I still remember a gist of the message he was trying to get through to us. “Work hard to such an extent that when the exams come, you will go in and leave the examination room in such a state that you will be content with the effort your put in. If you cut down on the socialising and the partying a little and focus these last few months on your studies and work to the best of your ability then and only then will it stop you from having to say those two dreaded words; if only.”

Being honest to ourselves how many of us are there that have sat an exam or done something after which we had thought ‘if only I had…’. Sometimes unforeseen circumstances are to blame, but in most cases it is only our own fault. I’ll be first to admit, I’m guilty of over-using those two words and because of that I’ve lost out on a lot. But I’ve looked at my mistakes and realised the importance and the gravity of the year ahead. Many of you are starting or have just recently started a new year of study and I hope you too realise the importance of those words so that when the summer comes you can enjoy it without having the thought of bad results ruin it. The guilt doesn’t leave you and you’ll spend countless hours of the day thinking if only. It’s bad enough to cheat others but it’s worse when you cheat yourself. If you can’t be honest to yourself, you can’t be expected to be honest to others.

For everyone that is starting or has started school, college, university or any other type of learning institution I’d like to wish good luck to you all. May this year bring you success in all that you try your hand with.

The email continues:

The human animal is a beautiful and terrible creature, capable of limitless compassion and unfathomable cruelty. If you wish to find that which becomes the dividing line between mankind and other biological classifications, it rests not in brain size, dominance, or even emotional capability, but lies in the unique capacity for human beings to reflect on their actions and show regret, what is most certainly the ability to empathize, that gives them their position. All animals understand love and affection, but only man shows the propensity to place himself into the shoes of another life form. Losing this capability, among individuals of this species, reduces them below their much heralded position, and readies the climate for the likely fall of man, the fall from grace.

I’d like to finish this post with a quote I once read somewhere which I think is something we should all remember:

“Success only comes before work in the dictionary”.

(Thank you for sending me the lovely poem bubblegum!x )

A few days ago I was reading the news and came across the following article:

You can read the full article here. If you choose not to read the full article I’ll give you a brief summary of what it contains. If you have read it then feel free to skip the next paragraph.

A study carried out be researchers at Oxford University involving more than 500 participants, aged 18 or over, found that as we enter into a romantic relationship we do so at the cost of losing a few of our intimate friends. These friends are those who we would go to ‘at moments of crisis’. When we are in a fresh new relationship our support network can becomes smaller as we no longer spend as much quality time with those people that are close in our lives.

This topic of ‘love’ has been on my mind all summer. Love is a great thing, something the world really needs nowadays and we all know of it’s good aspects. But I’m going to look at it from the butt end and analyse some of the negative things or problems it can lead to.

Blind love or a blind you?

A few days after the beginning of Ramadhan I popped onto MySpace early in the morning just to check if I had any new messages or other notifications. It was 5.00 am so I wasn’t planning on staying for too long. In my inbox there was a message from a friend I had not spoken to for a good few months: “I could really do with talking to someone like you right now.” That’s all it said. It was sent just 5 minutes before so I signed onto MySpace chat to see if the person was online. She was. Turned out she was on holiday in Mexico visiting family and while there something had happened which upset her boyfriend back home here in England. No matter how many times she apologised and begged him to forgive her, she would still end up crying herself to sleep at night because of the hateful things he said. Another friend was madly in love with a guy who returned her love by calling her hurtful names and giving her nothing but grief. But being so head over heels in love she was just accepting it all; wiping away the tears of today hoping tomorrow would be better. Why the hell are you letting yourself be hurt so much?

People say love is blind but after thinking about it a bit and observing others in love, I’ve come to realise actually it’s not love which is blind. It will make YOU blind. Love is a good thing and being in love is great too. But some people are so obsessed by the whole thing to such an extent that they allow themselves to be used and trodden over repeatedly day after day and still cling onto the old memories of the way things were. Even when the other person obviously doesn’t ‘care’ any more and doesn’t ‘love’ them any more, they are unwilling to let go. Lying, cheating, breaking promises are all signs that maybe things have reached their end.

I guess you have to find out whether the happiness you derive from a relationship outweighs the trouble or tears it brings you. In some relationships you observe that one person spends their days in tears, in hurt and in sorrow and this has been going on for a very long time. It is those people especially who need to ask themselves whether the pains they face every day are worth it. When it comes to that stage, I think there are 2 choices. Firstly you can either keep going, hoping that things will get better. But how long will you wait? From what you can tell, it seems like the hurt isn’t going stop any time soon. The other choice I think, and most favourable one is letting go and saving yourself from a ship that has already started sinking and from which the other person took the lifeboat. Yes it’ll hurt too, but at least this time it wont be constant. At least this way the pain will lessen day by day and you can actually deal with it without having crap thrown at you all the time.

When you ask someone why they’re in a relationship from which the love and happiness has died, they either say, ‘because I love them’ or ‘I dunno.’ That’s when you know love has clouded their vision and is stopping them from seeing the pain they are allowing others to inflict on them. Like my lovely friend said, it can sometimes be insecurity and fear of being lonely. If you asked me, I’d rather be single and happy, than in a ‘relationship’ that would give me grey hair.

Nothing’s free, not even love

Back to the topic of the article that I have included above. Professor Dunbar, one of the members of the team that carried out this study says:

“The intimacy of a relationship – your emotional engagement with it – correlates very tightly with the frequency of your interactions with those individuals. If you don’t see people, the emotional engagement starts to drop off, and quickly.”

I think he’s got a very valid point. In our happiness of a new love, we spend so much time with them that sometimes we forget all those other people who were with us before. Those people, that helped us up every time we fell. Those people who we would run to in our times of need. It’s a big slap in the face to them when you no longer reply to their messages and texts or have time to go out with them or in some cases even have time to listen to them. Though people rarely ever say it out loud, but trust me they sure do feel it. And slowly slowly you begin to drift apart. It sucks.

I was discussing this with one of my friends yesterday and she said:

“Yes. It sure does. But in a way you can’t really blame anyone, it just happens yano.”

I agree with her completely. It isn’t really anyone’s fault as such but isn’t it a bit of a high price to pay for something that may not even last a week? And when it does screw-up, you’ve just lost yourself a friend who you would go to in such a situation. But it’s always avoidable right? You just have to play your cards right.

But then again, you may ask, you’ve never loved, how would you know? Question is, have I?

Don’t you just hate it that just as you’re about to go to the toilet a queue forms. And it's the same when you're in the toilet. Just as you sit down, and start to doze off someone knocks really loudly or shouts at you from the outside. Whoever invented the toilet seat was a right legend, but I'll not go into that for now. Anyway, so there I was just getting out of my room heading towards the toilet when my brother ran in, turned on the light, SCREAMED so loud and high pitched-ly and ran out faster than he ran in (except this time he was half naked). Normally he likes to annoy me and goes to the toilet when he sees I’m about to answer nature’s call. But today it was different. It’s very rare for him to spend less than 5 minutes in there when he knows I want to go in.

“What happened to you?” I asked quite amused by the whole thing.

“There’s a HUGE spider in there,” he replied in between his constant screaming.

I rolled my eyes and laughed. Out of the four of us, I’m the only one who’s not afraid of spiders or any other insect for that matter. If a fly, moth, spider, or anything which doesn’t resemble a human or anything that is not big and furry enough to be a domestic pet enters the house, the other 3 tear the whole house down with their screams.

Personally I quite like spiders. A teeny weeny one helped me get an A* in my biology GCSE exam. It’s another story which I think I’ll leave for now. (If you remember, feel free to remind me and I’ll tell you that too!).

*****

Everyone has their own fears and phobias. There’s more phobias then you could possibly imagine. Just think of it this way, there’s a phobia for pretty much anything and everything. For example there’s bogyphobia (no that’s not a fear of bogey’s but it’s close) which when coupled with achluophobia may lead to fromclinophobia. There are some phobias which can seriously affect a person’s day to day life. For example some people suffer from withchronophobia or hypnophobia or logophobia or hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. The list is endless. (No I’m not going to explain what each one means. justgoogleit.com).

I remember just before we started 6th form, we were all taken out on an activity day to help us get to know our form members better and partake in various team activities. For each activity points were awarded for how well we completed it and how much time we used. There was one challenge that involved climbing up a ladder to a small platform approximately 10 metres up a tree from which we had to jump and touch a ball that was suspended some distance away in the middle. No-one was volunteering to do it. So I mustered up some courage and decided I’d give it a go. What’s the worst that could happen? Let me tell you something here, I’m shit scared of heights. But I still love to stand on high places and look down just so I can have that weird feeling in my stomach. Just as I reached the top and stood on the platform did I realise just how high off the ground I was. It was then that my fear kicked in and I questioned why the hell my balls had grown suddenly for me to volunteer. The fastening heart-beat, the sweating, you know the classical symptoms all followed.

Whenever fear tries to over take me or helplessness tries to stop me from doing anything I have a certain ‘ritual’ to focus and overcome those feelings. I close my eyes and give fear 5 seconds to do what it wants. That’s all. Then I recite durood-shareef and think of someone close like a family member or a dear friend and dedicate what I am about to do to them. It melts away the darkest of my fears. After that nothing can stop me…

How do you deal with your fears and what do you do when you are in a situation where quick action is needed but your body just freezes?

 

Hoping that Eid day will be bright and wonderful for you
A celebration that's perfect in all that you do.
Bringing all the blessings you're wishing for...
Love, happiness laughter and much more.

This is my prayer for you my friend,
May Allah bless you and your loved ones till the very end.

 

 

Whether you are celebrating on Friday or Saturday a very very happy Eid Mubarak to all the readers.

=]

I like writing. It's my pressure valve which I can use to relieve the excessive build-up of emotions and feelings that sometimes threaten to blow me up. It's a way I can put down onto paper things that are eating me up on the inside so that I can face them and deal with them.
There is one such piece of writing, which when I showed to a few friends of mine they suggested I should share it with others for reasons you'll find out when you read it for yourself. I started writing this back in February, a few days after my birthday and it's only just recently that I have completed it. Many of you have been waiting to read this 'story' for a long time and at first I had decided to put it into one pdf file which could be easily downloaded. But seeing as how time consuming that is, I shall now upload each part as I finish typing it. This is where it begins...