On attempting an intellectual restart...

Maybe an emotional one too..

Dear reader and friend, I apologize. The past few months have been significantly challenging, and I spent the past 3 months traveling between 4 countries, with no significant down time in these travels except probably last week… We’ll get to that, hopefully.. January specifically was a really challenging month, because I had to fly back home (Kuwait) for a month, and attempt to do massive amounts of administrative work.. Luckily, and by the grace of God (if you knew what happened, you’d start believing in the Divine intervention), I was able to get a lot of stuff done, but as my father used to say: “Life ends, but work doesn’t..”

Let’s try to talk once again..

If you’re new here, these musings are meant to be reflections that are unfiltered, non-refined, and as much as possible, non-reviewed. The goal is to write authentically, achieve a state of flow with ideas, and not to think too much about ‘audience’, but about ‘ideas’ both in intellectual, and grammatical mistakes senses. :) Welcome! You’ll read some weird sentences, but English as a second language, and a refusal to “refine” thoughts to the extent they don’t become genuine, are not things I am interested in..

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No Time For Self.

Since January 1st of this year, I’ve left New York and my schedule was: Kuwait - New York - Riyadh - Mecca - Madinah - Kuwait, and I’m planning to return to New York on Sunday - hoping this gets published before - and possibly fly to Bangladesh in April. I would need to start a small state park to compensate for all the environmental damage I've done from all this traveling.

I love being on a plane - although not having to go through food poisoning on a long haul flight - and I do enjoy the quiet time on the plane, where the internet doesn’t work. There is a sense of release to be forcefully removed from being on the phone, although we use our phones as our music jukeboxes, so how much release are we getting really?

During these past three months, the flights were some of the few times where I was able to wind down. That’s why I tend to favor longer flights, since they kind of force you to have some sort of a singular focus.

One Thing.

The notion of focusing on one thing seems to be a lost skill to the vast majority of us in this modern world. It is such a rare privilege that we rarely see people who possess it. We’re distracted people, and our brains do not have the capacity to be this distracted. Hence, we get depressed and tired, and we loathe our phones, and we can’t separate from our phones. I’ve felt myself being increasingly connected to my phone for a couple of years, and I’ve had multiple attempts in curbing this average of 4 hours a day on my phone.

Yes, I work on it, and I read on it, and I get productive on it. Yet, I do not want to read on it, and I do not want to be productive on it. I want to productive outside it. I have a laptop for work, and that should be enough.

Being on a long-haul flight kind of puts you face to face with your boredom. My JFK-Kuwait flight is 11hrs on average, and this is ample time to do a lot of things between sleep, leisure, reading, writing, and the occasional stretching. I’m used to it, and I do enjoy it weirdly enough.

During one of my last flights, I was opening a book, and struggling to put my head in it. It took me multiple attempts, and around 30 minutes of my mind doing what the photographers call “focus hunting” in order for me to be able to be present and read. The podcast world is full of gurus and coaches and psychologists asking us to ‘be present’, yet we’re receiving this advice through a medium of absolute distraction. The irony never escaped me that I have to ‘leisurely’ walk while listening to a podcast

I was able to finish that book on the plane. It was the first book I finished in over 6 months or so. Maybe I haven’t been able to “find” the book that would get me hooked again, but also maybe I am not able to find the mind to read a book.

So, after arriving from that long Kuwait to JFK flight, I woke up at 4 am, jet-lagged as usual - which has been the case for the past 3 months - and after praying the dawn prayer, I long pressed on Instagram on my phone.. and just deleted it..

Reset Button.

I’ve always wanted to detach from the phone, and over the past year of genocide, I’ve became increasingly reliant on my phone for news, which is by design since there’s a deliberate weakening of news institutions. Those of us old enough to remember the days where news were noon time, 6pm, and 11pm, remember how life takes over in between these few slots. If you’re ‘politically engaged’, then it’s top of the hour for a news brief of 5 minutes or so, and you have the other 50 or so minutes to deal with life and process the news, and so on and so forth.

A friend of mine said to me once: “I don’t listen to rap music anymore because it’s full of anger” and that stuck with me and soon after that, I was not able to listen to rap music as much as I did. I owe it to rap music for teaching me the English language.

The same analogy applied to my relationship (and I assume almost every one of us) with social media, and the phone at large. Largely, there is less and less incentive to keep engaged once you notice your emotional state when you’re on your phone. The addiction is real. I urge you to notice yourself when you’re on your phone. Give yourself a moment of reflection, and ask yourself: “How does this make me feel?” and I am certain one of these words will pop up: numb, anxious, stressed, unable to concentrate, worried, jealous, envious, dull, wasteful, and quite possibly, depressed.

I was worried that I would feel the massive FOMO that people talk about, but instead, I felt a satisfying sense of relief, precisely because I’m missing out on things that did not make me feel good in any way. After that realization, I took a couple of days, and deleted all social media apps from my phone. I didn’t delete my accounts, but I made it a bit more difficult to access them. Right now, I can access Twitter or Instagram only on my laptop. That is enough. More than enough. Once that first moment of anxiety passed, the clarity of mind comes back and I am able to put my head down ‘a bit better’ and focus on one thing or two. This is evident because I’m writing to you. I’ve always wanted to write and read again. Only the mind wasn’t there.

I saw a note a few days ago which I’m failing to locate now, about someone who deleted the social media apps, and now he’s checking his email more often. This is very real. The subconscious habit of reaching to the phone still exists. Yet, a week in, my phone usage dropped somewhere along the lines of 30-40%. This time has been freed in my head, and in my day to literally think! That’s why I love a long flight. You can’t but be bored. I am continuing this on a plane. It’s a place of boredom, and thinking, and muscle soreness, and for me, productivity too.

The restart of the year starts with trying to create space in my day, my intellect, and my mind to get back to reading, and to engage again with others, away from social media and its poisons.

While I was writing this piece, I also came across Antonia Malchik’s essay on going “Analog”, and I definitely share these sentiments.. In fact, I don’t know what are you doing if you’re not subscribed to hew newsletter..

The Emotions Are Healed

The restart is an emotional one as well. I was blessed to visit the two holiest sites in Islam: Mecca and Madinah. The city of the holy mosque, and the city to which Muslims immigrated after being persecuted.

It’s a privilege to be able to plan, and embark on this journey after a few years of wanting to go. Being in the US makes such a planning an ordeal. I had some work to do in Saudi, and used the opportunity to take some days off, and be joined by a friend and a brother. I flew in from New York by way of Riyadh, and he did fly from London by way of Cyprus. And it just worked. This is what we call in Arabic as “Tawfeeq” which is an Arabic word that encompasses, good fortune, solid planning, and Divine blessing and support. The “Tawfeeq” also meant that the two of us would end up on the opposite sides of the train ticket gate with his ticket checked in, and mine isn’t, with 7 minutes of the train departing, and we were aided by an employee who let us catch that train.

I didn't want to be a "tourist" in a holy place, where the reverence of the place of worship is diminished by the phone, but I documented a few photos.

The religious experience of ‘struggling’ with other people, and engaging in rituals that span across millennia emulating Hagar¹ and replicating her walks across the valley in Mecca, and the submission that involves an act of complete obedience, camaraderie, and joining millions if not billions across time who have engaged in this same devotional act, solely as a response to a Divine call; It is something I wish people could experience and enjoy. That same experience of being an a place of worship that takes you out of place and time, and moves you to another realm. This is the magic of belief I guess.² I heard from not one person that they’re going back to church, or attempting to return to their own faiths “to find communal support” and that is the essence of being a person of faith.

Also, there’s the heightened sense of sound. Here’s a clip of the call to prayer, from the ‘Masjid Nabawi’ or The Prophet’s Mosque. There’s possibly around 100 thousand people in that spot, yet the quietness of the place is something really striking, and the musicality of the call to prayer is possibly the most beautiful I’ve heard all my life.

I also think that the Muslim religious experience is unique in its universality. While South and South East Asian muslims constitute around 40% of Muslims around the world (Arabs are a Muslim minority, but the media perception doesn’t show you that), going to a place like Mecca or Medina, you never fail to see the diversity of the people who share the same ideals as you do. This is such a soul enriching experience, beyond the devotional aspects and the relationship to God, or Allah, or any Deity, however one expresses it, that one engages in while in these places.

This one is special: A South Asian, a North African, 2 West Africans separated by an Eastern European/Russian.

During these times, and in these places, one of us is reminded of their place in the world, and what it means to be of a certain faith. This self reflection sometimes is missed in the mundanity of the daily life. This can also reflect on people in sports stadiums, where religion and fandom have many parallels. That’s why they say “Football is the world’s religion”.

There is also the magic of observing your own religious experience which you’ve engaged in for decades being manifest on other people from other races and walks of life. Conjoined by being in nature, one cannot escape this relationship of being in the elements, and engaging in the religious experience. It is not a surprise that all of the faiths and doctrines place nature in high regard. There’s a famous saying of the Prophet where he says: “Honor your aunt, the palm tree.” The serenity of dawn, watching people be at peace in the Divine presence, and noticing how this observation reflects on myself was something I rarely experienced before. Maybe this renewed sense of emotional wellbeing has really taken over. Generally after the dawn prayer, people tend to enjoy the serenity of the morning, they sit, or even lay down and close their eyes for a bit…

A Yearly Reset.

Speaking of renewal, when Ramadhan comes - and the Substack algorithm has been feeding me nonstop - each one of us observing this month engage with it differently. I've written about it before, more than once, and possibly there’s a renewed sense of self that comes with the yearly experience. The lucky ones among us are the ones who take with them one (or more!) good thing beyond the month’s practices of abstention, discipline, and self-mastery, and compassion.

I’ve been thinking of Ramadhan this year in relation to its emphasis on love. The ‘brokenness’ that comes from the abstention generally softens one’s heart, and cultivating that brokenness into acts of love towards oneself, others, and towards the community is a clear manifestation of benefiting from this yearly school. Once one observes how communities come together in support of each other, and how families join together to break their fasts, and how mothers (generally speaking) spend hours preparing meals for whole houses to feed 10 and sometimes more people who join each other across the world in unison, and do one thing at the same time, one can not but feel how love manifests itself during Ramadhan. We see this specifically and more evidently in Gaza, where people lay out the tables among the rubbles and the demolished homes and lives, just to share this one meal, and participate in an act of communal love towards each other.

I think of Ramadhan this year, and I think of love, as an emotion to be nourished through devotion, community, and even cooking.³

May your days be filled with love..

📚: Next book in Line: David Graeber - The Dawn of Everything.

📰: Interesting read on Malcolm X’s love for poetry, highlighted in these notes from prison.

That being said: how are you? 🙂

1. Yes. The same Hagar in the Bible. The spouse of Abraham.

2. There’s a very interesting book called: “Why We Need Religion” by Stephen Asma, which delves into the psychology and sociology of the religious experience across faiths. It’s such an interesting book, and I can’t recommend it enough! Here’s a NYT article from Stephen.

3. Timothy Winters, or Abdul Hakim Murad, gave a beautiful lecture about ‘the light’ of Ramadhan. It is full of prose and eloquence (once you skip the brief Arabic intro), in case you are interested in exploring what Ramadhan means from spiritual and emotional perspectives.