Reservations of Familiar Love

I was serving these customers once. An old married couple and the husband’s brother. They were visiting from the states, they were dressed like they're always prepared for an afternoon by the lake. You could tell they spent lots of time together, all three of them. They wore their grievances with each other like a broken record player wears its melodies. The husband was this hardboiled yet kind patriot of a man, he tried very hard not to be inconsiderate of my Arabness. It’s the trying that made it awkward, like there was some distance between our skin colors he had to bridge. Anyways, I didn't really mind, it was kind of cute coming from an old man. You could tell his wife was the soothing waters to his fire, she translated his sternness with her kindness like it was a dance they've shared many times. She reminded him to tip, asked me questions about my day, she had a bright and gentle smile. The brother, at least in this life-long brotherly dynamic, felt like the runt of the pack. Like his brothers wife had to defend his soft and gentle heart from his brothers remarks on the regular. Their conversations, although new, rang the tune of a practiced dance, their coexistence and their adaptation to each others personalities, vulnerabilities, became routine. The gentler brother even went to the bathroom when I brought out the check, like clockwork from the look of his older brother scoffing reflexively, like some things never change. Now outside this little bubble of familiar love, those individuals could very well express themselves in drastically different ways, but together, they were brought back to a role they've habitually taken on, like going quiet around my cousins out of a reversal in my psychological clock. Putting on the face they remember and loved me in, despite their love remaining irrespective of how I show up in our relationship. There was this wonderful sense of a shared history, shared moments of joy, inside jokes, and even grievances that would lose all sting if taken out of this exact dynamic. Words that only take on meaning when spoken from the lips of a loved one. These circles of shared time we keep our hearts alive and in company in, circles that also ask us to relieve lots of static phases of our selfhood. 

I find it much easier to be all that I am around strangers, funny, talkative, outgoing. Around family or people I really care for, I have this weird habit of being reserved. I quiet up, take more care in our interactions, my sense of self is muted. Maybe because with my people, my heart is on the line, my love for them makes me vulnerable to their care and their harm. In the 1400s in Medieval Europe, infant mortality was so high that adults who have survived and can afford to, made it a cultural trope not to develop relations with their children. Kinda fucked huh, a whole generation of neglected and unloved children. Point is, love can be a terrifying thing, it takes root in your heart and once it’s in there, it's almost impossible to get it out without tearing piece of your heart out with it. If a stranger insulted me it wouldn’t phase me, if my mom doubted the quality of my heart, whole different game. If a stranger died, I’d feel for them, if my loved one were to die, I’m going to carry their memory, the time we shared, and the pain of their absence for the rest of my life. Love can be a terrifying thing, but without it, life would be meaningless. I’d rather feel the discomfort of a love that overwhelms me over the abject meaninglessness of an existence void of any feeling at all. As my homie Swagdon once said “feel everything, or nothing at all.” In any case, pushing someone we love away is not going to make their death, departure or abandonment any easier on us.

Life is meant to obliterate us, our hearts are meant to sit in the flames and burn till nothing is left but its most basic loving essence. A spiritually mature heart embraces suffering as part of the pyres of this Dunya. The heart remains open, because it’s expected to break, again and again, for the love we choose again and again, despite the painful mess it leaves behind. Our hearts are meant to break themselves open. 

12 Things I learned from my dog Sunny

1. Your needs, for Happiness or entertainment, aren’t always going to be fulfilled nor predicted by others. If you’re bored, find a toy, if you’re sad, find some comfort, alone or with others. Don’t wait on others to mobilize you towards your needs. 

2. Every animals and person has a unique set of skills. Sunny has a great sense of smell and a selective hearing. She sniffs everything, retraces who passed by this tree or that rock, remembers if she knows them. She can tell if this other dog that likes to pee on the fire hydrant passed by recently from miles away. She likes to leave her own mark on the world too 🙂

3. She taught me that a free spirit can never be subdued by fear, coercion, deception or command, a free spirit only moves for love.

4. Guilt and shame are unproductive remedies to mistakes. Shame is the unhealthy mutation of remorse. Remorse keeps us accountable to those we choose to unconditionally love and care for. Too much of it might be caused by a selfish, self-imploding, self-seeking pursuit rather than the need to do better. If we’re so busy drowning in our own shame or guilt, we’ll fail to seek forgiveness, or will be paralyzed from correcting our behavior due some entitlement we weigh our deprecation with. Uncle Iroh from ATLA once said “Pride is not the opposite of shame, but its source. True humility is the only antidote to shame.” 

5. Children are impressionable, their beliefs are so very malleable, always ready to change direction at the gentle guide posts of a heart that knows itself. As we grow, adults become rigid in the beliefs they cling onto for dear life, afraid of what they might find when they dissolve into the freedom of emptiness. Everything, is open to children, cus kids are open to the world. Life shuts that down with muck and pollution, blocks up the creaks of our hearts.

6. Depression sucks, for the person depressed, and their loved ones, unable to help a friend unwilling or unable to help themselves, 

7. When I feel worthless, when I’m heavy, joyless, frustrated, I put up shields of self-protection to keep others out. I may even take these frustrations out on the people around me. I feel generally powerless, and try to apply control on Sunny to feel some kind of control. Wack af huh.

8. Sunny often looks pissy and annoyed at home, but when she goes outside, the pent up life-force she’s been working hard to hold back in the four walls of our home, bursts in a frenzy. She doesn’t know what to do with all that energy, her eyes bolt left, right, up, down, she sees a squirrel, she flies off. Continuous, sustainable life, joy, contentment, has been unusual for her, just as it has been for me. She works in cycles of restraining all the energy she has, and letting it burst in a frenzy. Ideally, both of us would be able to consistently let life move through us. 

9. Sunny will fake joy to get some extra snacks sometimes, kinda bizarre huh? I guess she believes she’ll be rewarded for joy, or appreciated, maybe even receive more pets from strangers when she’s gleaming on a Sunny day. Given treats or compliments when she’s smiling. Faking joy to receive attention, acceptance, or reward from others sounds like an exhausting emotional labor I'm familiar with. 

10. I’m a terrible dad, and have a long way to grow before I’m remotely responsible enough to care for the growth of a human being. I've come a long way, but she'll always deserve more. When she was younger I was pretty harsh, reactive, intolerant and angry. I had to change significantly to be a better care taker for her, to parent gently rather than confrontationally. The changes worked wonder for both us.

11. There’s something so special in this little doggoe, a fire, a life-force, a personality that I can’t betray. It’s tough man because it makes her so special but also such a pain in the ass sometimes. Her excited wildness (and adhd ass) gets her banned for peeing on her uncle's couches, dirtying strangers pants on snowy days, ripping my best friend's winter coat, even gets her in trouble with the strangers whose strawberries she swiped at the park. A good balance between structure, discipline and mercy is important to make sure she's still special but welcomed in the places she wants to be. I've tried communication, discipline, restraint, redirection, positive reinforcement, but she's still a free spirit, a troublemaker with a good heart, and I will protect that freedom for as long as I can.

12. If you don’t find something to do with your time, you’re more likely to make your appetites and desires commanding, and suffer every second of your unmet wants. Sunny is always hungry hahahaha.

Why Language is cool and the Relativity of Inquiry

Language is an underrated epistemic tool. In post Wittgensteinian philosophy, language is incredibly important in forming our world view. Kinda wish I read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus when it was assigned. My point here is a more personal excitement about language. Language gives us the tools to conceive, experiment with, express, even experience the lifeworld of different groups of productive knowledge making. The trouble is when members of these communes fall into gatekeeping and linguistic obscurantism to keep the general population of minds out. Knowledge production is more productive when it’s decentralized and opens its doors to all who are curious of the wisdom and understanding they’re accumulating. We open those doors by making the language and the operational concepts of different schools of living and interwoven though, accessible. Philosophy shouldn’t fragment its living essence into combative and oppositional camps that fail to see the larger truth all camps are trying to capture throught their relative frameworks, shouldn’t fail to synthesize their views however contradictory; all camps must house their epistemic humility and suspension of disbelief on the tips of their pens. 

For Kant, while thinking is merely a concept produced by the faculty of our own understanding, knowing something requires a concept to interact with an intuition that is imparted from the world onto our senses. Thinking takes the form of free-floating concepts that are neither grounded in an object that our senses can experience (B147), nor the spatiotemporal conditions that underlie our perceptions of the world around us (B148). When I call on the concept of a cloud, the image that pops in my head is a foaming white puff floating on clear winds. Whether it's rainy or sunny outside, this cloud doesn’t extend past my mind and into the sky nor change its white puffy composure. This concept isn’t subject to the same pure intuitions of space nor to changes with the linear course of time which human sensibilities are conditioned by. If I decided to attend the annual cloud convention in Mississauga and discuss my findings on clouds, my concept of a cloud alone wouldn’t suffice to produce knowledge that can be empirically verified nor reconstructed by the form of our pure intuitions. In Wittgensteinian fashion, this concept would remain an infallible private language, ostracized from the knowledgeable world of intersubjective claims. Where thinking lacks in “objective reality”, knowledge is remedied by its synthesis of concepts with their empirically experienced counterparts (Kant B148).  

When we look to a cloud from the perspective of possible human experiences it is at first shapeless. Once a human actually experiences the cloud, they give the cloud a shape through their perception, their associative imagination’s ascription of form to the cloud gives the cloud an identifiable shape that other conscious minds can notice in the outline of the cloud as it shifts on the winds of time. They may also not see the shape you’re outlining, they may see something entirely different when they look to the cloud. So what is the shape of the cloud, as it is, in-itself, by itself, without any watcher to point out its shape to itself? Surely the concept of a shape describes some actual geometric quality of the cloud, its substance, consistency, trajectory over time. So whether there is an observer to evoke the concept of a shape for the cloud, the actual properties of this fluffy form are still real. The closest perspective and sensible attitude we can assume while experiencing and investigating the shape of the cloud as it is in itself, beyond the observer, is Love (or positive, methodological and scientific investigations too).