Fear not to pay the price of change (letter to friend )

After the events of 1st Jan 2011, I wrote this to friend who was concerned about the future of our country – I thought it worth sharing after the Tunisians have awaken up us with their desire to change and their readiness to pay the price with not fear.

My dear friend,

Nothing free in our world dear.
Precious things come at high price, and in some cases it may cost lives. Change costs, The question is does it worth to give life in return of desired change?
When the change is huge, it is not about paying little bit extra to make it reality. When the needed change in reality is fundamental, i.e. the existing one is no longer working and adjustments will not suffice to transform it into the new reality. Then, the only way forward, is a Rebirth of Reality and a whole new start from scratch, I.e. The old reality must die and new one must be born. The death of old reality will not be bloodless and the blood shed to make it happen will in fact baptize the new reality and give it new name and nature.
Our world reality today is the result of many small and big sacrifices of the generations before us. Some people prefer to be always even, give as much as they take. Others might take or give more. Few ones give everything in return of better reality for the coming generations.
My friend, I think the time now is calling for a whole new reality and our destiny is to be the generation who give more or in fact give all for the better future of our loved ones. This is not new story in the history books, it was written many times before but with different names. If we fail to stand up to the mission we have before us today, we will make it harder for those who come after us and our names will be forgotten.
Blood will not be spilled in aimless acts of violence or vengeance but will be spilled in legitimate endeavors to change reality and confronting the oppression. While no one wishes to go for war, it is legitimate in some cases to go for war when it is only way to return own rights.
I'm not advocating blind violence or vengeance, but I am stressing that fear has no place now in our lives while we pursue all legitimate ways to get our rights, we should not fear loss of material things and in extreme cases our lives ...
The only fear I see now, is the fear that we are not ready to be fearless. We should ready ourselves in all ways to be fearless before it is too late to fully capture the opportunity OR else we will lose our lives in vain with our weakened hearts.

Yours,

M. Habib

Love..

Recently I was thinking – as usual :) – about something … this time I was thinking about Love …love between man and woman .. I mean true love .. How can I know it when I am in it? what are the signs of true love...

Is it when I miss her on my way back home after I drove her home?
Is it when I want to hold her hands forever?
Is it when I feel her hug is my universe?
Is it when I am a baby in her hands ?
Is it when I want to move the world for her ?
Is it when a journey around the world to see her feels just like a step away ?

Yea it can- even should - be all of these, and the list can be longer and longer …but the only issue with the above signs that they are a bit selfish … all are focused on myself and how do I feel in a love relationship …and not what I do for my loved one ..

After a bit of thoughtful thinking and looking back, I discovered that true love has two main signs .. true love is about two words “give” and “forgive”..

Yea true love is to give all yourself to your loved one and forgive her/him for all the wrongs s/he might do or have done…It was only then I recognized how little we had given or received true love over the course of our lives …but good news is we can still truly love from all our heart, if we want to ...

As for me, each day I will judge my love by how much I gave or forgave my partner .. I hope you do the same …

M. Habib

Why smart people do mistakes.. ?

I have always considered this question an annoying but easy one.

First, it is annoying; because in my eyes being smart is the key for doing the right things and things should not go wrong if we are smart enough to handle them. Right ?

Second, it is easy because, if we are smart enough, we can always analysis how things went wrong and come up with valid reasons which may turn to be lack of information, wrong assumptions, actions of other stupid people or any kind of these reasons. Right ?

Few days ago while I was reading a book about the challenges of managing people, the author raised the question “why smart people do dump things?” Actually I was surprised to find this question raised in a textbook and got the attention of academics.

My surprise did not stop here, the answer was even more interesting, the author referred to academic researches which have led scientists (Fienberg and Tarrant 1995) to identify what is called “self-destructive intelligence syndrome” as the reason of why smart people do dump things. How could intelligence be self-destructive?

Based on their research, these scientists concluded that smart people act stupid due to personality flaws. Yes personality flaws, things like pride, arrogance and what so-called unconscious need to fail. The list of personality flaws is not comprehensive and it can include things like shyness, lack of assertiveness or inflexibility. Other scientists (Lundin and Lundin 1998) came to similar conclusion: dumb behavior is the result of self-love and ego.

This academic sound conclusion was shocking to me because, it is unusual for us to question our personality when things go wrong. We simply think that the enemy is always out there and we are perfectly fine. Even we start – after looong time - to consider if there is something wrong with ourselves, it is hard to spot what is wrong and immediately shift our thinking to ready made excuses to justify what went wrong.

Moreover psychology tells us more interesting thing about how we judge and evaluate our actions and the actions of other people. We strongly tend to judge other’s people actions – specially their mistakes – as result of their personality or character while we tend to justify our mistakes as result of situational factors which are external to our control or personality. It is very common when someone does a mistake, we quickly jump to the conclusion that s/he did it because s/he is stupid while if we do the very same mistake, we refer to situational factors other than our own personality.

In summary: ... When things go wrong or turn to be stupid, the reason does not have to be our flawed logic, other people mistakes, missing information or wrong assumptions; it can be us who need to change and develop healthier personality. And when we judge other people actions, we need to learn to understand their situation more than judging their characters.

To All The Girls Who ...

It has been always on my mind to dedicate this song on my wedding day to all the girls who loved me before.

I was sure that some of them will be there staring at me and thinking how could it be that I marry the girl who is standing beside me, and may be they will be asking themselves “why She?”

To those girls, I just want dedicate the song now and say to them, it was not you who meant to be … it was always She.

To all the girls I've loved before
Who traveled in and out my door
I'm glad they came along
And I dedicate this song
To all the girls I've loved before

To all the girls I once caressed
And may I say I've held the best
For helping me to grow
I owe a lot I know
To all the girls I've loved before

The winds of change are always blowing
And every time I try to stay
The winds of change continues blowing
And they just carry me away

To all the girls who shared my life
Who now are someone else's wives
I'm glad they came along
And I dedicate this song
To all the girls I've loved before

To all the girls who cared for me
Who filled my nights with ecstasy
They live within my heart
I'll always be a part
Of all the girls I've loved before

The winds of change are always blowing
And every time I try to stay
The winds of change continues blowing
And they just carry me away

To all the girls we've loved before
Who traveled in and out our door
We're glad they came along
And we dedicate this song
To all the girls we've loved before

Rising above thought

For those who complained about my previous post "life ..", please read this

"Identification with your mind causes thought to become compulsive. Not to be able to stop thinking is a dreadful affliction, but we don't realize this because almost everybody is suffering from it, so it is considered normal. This incessant mental noise prevents you from finding that realm of inner stillness that is inseparable from Being. It also creates a false mind-made self that casts a shadow of fear and suffering. The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: "I think, therefore I am." He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic error: to equate thinking with Being and identity with thinking. The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the ever-increasing fragmentation of the mind. Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being "at one" and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested - at one with Being. Enlightenment is not only the end of suffering and of continuous conflict within and without, but also the end of the dreadful enslavement to incessant thinking. What an incredible liberation this is!

Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate "other." You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is. By "forget," I mean that you can no longer feel this oneness as self-evident reality. You may believe it to be true, but you no longer know it to be true. A belief may be comforting. Only through your own experience, however, does it become liberating.Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance. For example, there is nothing wrong with cells dividing and multiplying in the body, but when this process continues in disregard of the total organism, cells proliferate and we have disease.The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease. You believe that you are your mind. This is the delusion. The instrument has taken you over. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity - the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. "

From the "Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle

يـا إلـهــى أنـت تعلم

يـا إلـهــى أنـت تعلم ضعف نفسي كم يكون
إنـمـا فـى الضعـفِ أنـت تحي روحي بـل تصون
أدنـو مـنك يا مـلاذى وسط همي و الشـجون
أنـسـى معك يا نـجاتـى كل دمـع في العيون
سيـدى علمنـى كـيف أسـكبُ النـفسَ لديك
واثــقـــاً أن الأمــور دائـماً بـين يـديـك

شــكلـّـنَ فـى إنـائـى ليـسَ حسبـما أريـد

بـل بروحـك الـمُعـَـزى كيـفـما أنت تريــد

Life ..

Many times I forget my very personal philosophy about life which is in three words “life is Love and war” … everything we do or face can be classified either as a love or a war .. Love is the merge of two powers and War is the struggle between two powers.

You might ask why we summaries life only in two things; “love” and “war” , I can not find better explanation than the duality principle which dominates our human thinking like the “good vs. evil” and the “black vs. white”. To complicate issues, the interesting thing about duality principle that its both sides have to exist at the same time, as by definition we can not realize one side unless it is contrasted to the other. We can not realize the light unless we know the darkness, similarly it is completely unrealistic to hope to free our life of war because then we will not able to realize and taste love.

Even if we adopt the duality principle, I know that for many of us, love is not the opposite of war and vice versa, but when I look deeper into the meaning of both words I find it clear that love is about unity and war is about separation, love is about embracing the other and war is about rejecting the other, love is about new life and war is about death. I just took the word love from its limited definition as “mere feelings” to wider definition that is close to be “source of life” and “way of living”.

The implication of this “love vs. war” is so fundamental, as because of it the question now is not whether we should live or die?

The question now is ….
For what love I may give up my life and die … or .. for which war I should keep my life and keep fighting?

In each step in our life we must chose a love to stick to and a battle to go through …

M. Habib

Success !?

Success is reaching your righetous goals, goals that are in harmony with the right principles. Goals that satisfy the deep needs in the human being and the needs of his soul. Reaching any goal is not success, only the goals based on the truth are the real success. Success is working hard to reach these goals, the right goals.

Success is not being gifted with what you want, but it is working hard to achieve what you have made in your mind. Real success is not a gift for the people who wish to success, neither is living a life full of joy, entertainment, comfort or free of troubles. Success is not any of them. Let’s take a closer look to see ...

When we review the lives of the great people who most of us consider them very successful, we face the fact that none of them had one of the good chances we are always dreaming that we might face someday to be happy or reach our goals. On the contrary, most of these people lived with pain as part of their daily life and despite of it they achieved what they wanted to do ..

Never think that success is dependent on the circumstances, but it depends on you and your will. You are the one who make your chance and create your future .Do not blame anybody on your current conditions. The real problem is not out there but it is here inside us. You will not get what want when the circumstances change or when the people change. If you wait anything to change you will have to wait too long before you reach your goals. You always can do something about you want, but never let down your hope in the future or your faith in yourself or in your principles.

Do not wait .. begin now... , now is all what you have, and tomorrow is the result of now ...

Today.. state your priorities, define your goal, keep it always in your mind … stick to your principles to guide you in the way.. make your plan .. and last but not least accept any pain you face in the way..

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed..

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up ..

M.H.

To my Dear Cat

In the 10th year ... here are few words i wrote on 1996 right after I had to abadon him ..

To my Dear Cat

I love you so much and I miss you so much

Thank you for every happy moment we had together. I wish you are doing fine now without me. I know that to say “thank you” is nothing.

I know it is hard now to leave you but we had to go different ways. Please forgive me and do not let our memories makes me feel guilty, but let it encourage us to continue our fight to overcome all obstacles we will face on our way. I will always keep you not as a mere memory but you will live inside me as long as I remember you.

We can still love even we can not see, true love will make us last forever not only in our minds but in everything we have shared together. Let’s make love an infinite power to bring life in our lives.

Yes, we should not let down our hope. Love without hope is pain and I have enough pain for not having you.

Words are so poor to tell our true love feelings.

Miss you,

Magdy Habib
11 Feb. 1996

FEAR and COURAGE

FEAR is False Evidence Appearing Real.

COURAGE is the mastery of fear, not the absence of fear.

Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have and should have. Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatl.

Freedom and Victory ...

I am dreaming of a day when Freedom and Peace will be for every man, woman and child ....
I am dreaming of a day when there will be no hunger and no war ..
I am dreaming of a day when love prevails ....
I am dreaming ..
please do not wake me up... till it happens..

Welcome

this is just to say welcome to you ...