I’m not sure if titling some of my posts in the Arabic language is going to start becoming a theme throughout, but there are concepts that are described with so much more beauty and depth in Arabic that I feel I cannot express what the post is about better than by titling it in Arabic.
Last year, I was in a class called The Psychology of Happiness where we broke down elements to our day to day happiness, our every now and then happiness, our deep prolonged happiness, our life’s happiness. We were discussing in one class our hobbies. The kind of hobby that you delved into and couldn’t feel anything else around you. That happiness that drapes over you and shuts out the world for an hour or two. I couldn’t even understand.
One student raised his hand and started recounting his music writing. He said he couldn’t feel anyone or hear anything else except for what he was engaged in. He said his friends would call him and he wouldn’t hear his phone and people would ask where he’s been when he’d be gone for hours but to him it felt like a few minutes engrossed in a happiness of his own. I felt jealous of this boy’s story. Not because I wanted to feel happy when writing music, but because I didn’t understand what it felt to be so immersed. You know how they say time flies when you’re having fun…but how can time fly when you are alone? You are engaged on your own. How do you pass your time?
I watched the sky last night. I had come out of one my late classes and glared into the black abyss of glittering stars and enormous clouds then understood something. It was free. The sky was free of everyone. It was magnificent, filled with time and space for someone like me to glare, to meditate, to think and absorb. I understood it. There was space to be absorbed. Oh, how it was created this sky, how its Creator must have been greater than it, how Great must that Creator be, how many other Greatness must have He created, can He create, will He create. The sky was great. Everything around it was filling it a majestic darkening, so so beautiful. I didn’t know how relaxing beauty was before, I suppose. Or how beauty passed the time. Beauty was absorption.
This is how one fell in love, I think. One is sunk into a beauty so vast they do not wish to leave. They wish a stay, forever.
I wanted to live in the desert then. I thought, living under the sky like this must be filled with an absorption all the time. You don’t forget how quickly you’re leaving. You don’t get sucked into the ugliness of the world a little too much.
That’s it on this for now, but I’m sure they’ll be more for later.
the featured photo is my own photography©
A Profound Cup of Tea 