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My Birthday

Today I turned 20. I spent the day with some great people, ate some great food, good icecream cake, dressed up pretty for pictures, passed the hours like I would any other day. Moumita's mom came over this morning to give me a big, long hug and to insist that all I need now is a balo cheele, or a good boy.

There is no good boy because of fear. I felt that my 19 years had prepared me for this moment, this particular time in which I would choose between risk and safety. If I am to believe anything I write on this blog, I must do what is difficult because it is the only thing worthwhile. If I believe that the meaning (of love and companionship) is truly superior to form, and the external prettiness of French pedicured toes and new clothes, then I need a change. I write about rationality like it is the bulk of my soul, but the fear of commitment is 98% irrational. If I believe that the beauty of knowing somebody else is significant, then I can make the time. I must make the effort to try before I begin to run.

Today was all about fear. First I talked to Janet about her emotional hang-ups. Janet exhibits the qualities I would want my own little girl to have: strong-will, confidence, savviness, independence, brilliance, integrity. But Janet also has serious intimacy issues. Like almost all girls I know, she is afraid of boys leaving her. She is afraid of sharing her emotions with another male. She is overall paranoid about the opposite sex. But I told her that she chooses to keep her hangups, that she chooses to remain distant, that she is allowing an irrational fear hijack her happiness. All this I said with the masked face of hypocritism.

Today I also watched The Village, a movie about an isolated community that is constructed around a fear of Those We Do Not Speak Of by a gerontocracy that tries to safeguard innocence from the pervasive, inescapable violence from the outside world. The central concepts are love and fear: (1) Love can conquer fear (2) Fear/Love can manipulate your mind to see and believe what it wants to see and believe. But the question is, why choose Love and not Fear? This was not a question asked or explored by the movie, but one that I would like answered nevertheless.
With some friends who came over, I also watched Hitch. A romantic comedy about the fears men have in committing to women, or even in approaching anything serious with women, Hitch reminded me of the risks we all take in making the effort to know somebody else intimately.

These movies, and conversations have allowed for greater emotional flexibility this summer. I was allowed to know a different kind of happiness, a joy and excitement I cannot normally derive from my studies or the library. Despite all this cerebral activity (and this ability to verbalize what I am feeling and thinking), I am still unable subdue my fear.

Comments

  1. Anonymous9/07/2005

    There are always the meek, and then the transgressors, and then those who wait to be shown the Path.

    Like many other dilemmas in life, this is probably a dilemma where dividing a blank, crisp piece of paper into a Pro and Con section and hoping that the miracle of science and scalpel-precision thinking renders less than desirable results. Undesirable not in the sense of an answer, but rather in the sense that the answer is somehow, right.

    Unfortunately that only arrives with a pondering and reliance on a force greater than the human intellect to explain and guide. At which point, the last post you wrote about the shahada becomes extremely relevant.

    cheers,
    Shah

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sadia9/13/2005

    When is honesty a violation of trust? I want to cry.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous1/04/2006

    for the person who said "stop thinking so much" - dont even try to tell her to stop. as a fellow virgo, i understand entirely what it means to think too much!

    and as for you sadia - a fear of committment? a fear of getting to know another person? why choose love over fear? how can you truly understand happiness and love without there being sadness and broken hearts in this world? surely from your philosophy classes you have come across this theory of "there is no happy without a sad," etc.

    furthermore, i dont care what any of ur classes say. if u give off the vibe of fear, a man will pick up on it and back off. u need to go in there with an open mind - and think that you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from the experience of meeting someone new. even if they break your heart. it's just another experience in life.

    this quote is cliche but so true - that its better to have loved and to have lost than never to have loved at all..

    ReplyDelete

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