Choosing Life

Copyright (c) Maheen Hamid

My deepest apologies for the long hiatus in the blog.  

The past few months have been difficult, as the news wires get clogged nearly every day, with some senseless tragedy somewhere in the world or inexplicable outcomes of elections across the globe.  Where innocent lives, of adults and children alike, are cut short by actions of other human beings, or the threat of such continues to increase.  Be it a militant attack, military sanctioned event, police brutality, irresponsible leadership, revenge killing or honor killing – they all amount to human lives being cut short in unnatural ways as a direct result of choices made by other human beings.  I struggle to understand the depth of inner toxicity required in one’s heart to resort to such killing, let alone the many twisted ideologies driving them or the puppeteers behind the scenes.  

The types of killings are not new.  Machetes, guns, vehicles are not new weapons of choice.  What has changed significantly is how imagery and news of these massacres are propagated to the populace.  Over the past several years, as media has gotten more pervasive, it has been difficult to escape the onslaught of sensationalized negativity or, worse, be influenced by fake news.   Somehow, such horror stories seem to resonate with the consumers more than stories about human kindness. Stories about the human endurance.  Stories about love.  It baffles me.

Not wanting to be owned by such media created frenzy, just a few weeks ago, I even declared that I refuse to create temporary hashtags to show solidarity with the most talked about massacre of the day.  I feel it disrespectful to the many lives that get cut short prematurely in many other places around the world.  My heart cries for all losses, and I stand with anyone who is kept from living their life to their fullest potential.  I stand with the victory of humanity.  After crying every time I saw a new media story, I decided that I cannot change the world for everyone, but I can certainly choose to make a difference in accessible need areas. I felt internally aligned with my purpose in this universe once I had taken this stance.  

And then #Holey happened. 

On July 1^st, my hometown of Dhaka came under militant attack in a most vicious way.  Instead of going into full details of the sequence of events on the blog, I share some links here and here.  The event was life-changing in many ways.  This was close to home, in a locality I frequent(ed) often, affecting people I knew, perpetrated by young men from families not dissimilar to mine, claiming to be an ardent practitioner of my faith, with the ring leader an alum of my alma mater, and the victims killed in the most inhumane and deliberate manner.  One of the victims was a freshman from UC Berkeley, a school that is a mere 45 minutes drive from my current home, working on an internship arranged by a good friend. There are so many paths from my life connected to this incident, and its continuing implications in Dhaka, I can no longer treat it as an event that happened ‘over there’.  I fell into an abyss of asking “Am I doing enough?”

In the last couple of years, writing has been a way for me to reach for the light.  When I have jumbled thoughts, I try to pen them to understand where I wish to arrive.  Since Holey, I questioned if I could embrace the light, if my heart felt so dark?  How could I even think of sharing my thoughts when I couldn’t understand them?  I was numbed into silence. Numb as I read numerous accounts from different people about loss, responsibility, governmental failures, the methods of conversion in the young from innocence to militant, the breakdown of the social fabric which allows such conversions, procedural failures and purported triumphs.  I, like many other practicing and God-fearing Muslims, wonder how these heinous acts remotely reflect the teachings in our faith.  The media outlets of every kind have been clogged with people positing theories of various flavors and as the chatter intensified, I went into a quieter place trying to understand my role in all of this.  

I am all too common in my way of life. Working hard every day to maximize my potential as a human being, and to raise my two young children with a strong sense of love and reverence for the living and God’s creations.  I truly believe that this is at the heart of Allah’s message in the Quran, a Book that I view as a code of life with examples of how to treat relationships and transactions, with fairness.  Much of the suggestions need to be read in the context of 600 – 700 AD, when the Book was scribed.  I cannot claim to be a scholar of the Book, but I have certainly found these messages to be consistent throughout its chapters – do good, be good, don’t forget you need to answer to Allah.  Recognizing this, I keep questioning what more I could do to uphold the beautiful nature of our faith, for my children and for society at large. I find that I still don’t have good answers.  

Am I being too simplistic in my choices?  Is it cowardly to focus on raising respectful, responsible citizens, to the exclusion of being able to reach out wider?  Is it wrong to feel a sense of gratefulness for the blasé life-style?  Is it a sign of deepest despair that I choose to focus on my immediate world instead of reaching out and helping out the groups who are in need of help?  Or is it survival that I am focusing on the things over which I have a modicum of control, while so many things in this world spin out of control? I do not know the answers.  

What I do know is that I take time every day to say a prayer for anyone who is in need of them.  I thank the Almighty for bestowing me with relative peace and health.  I have come to accept that I cannot right all the wrongs in this world, and it is egotistical of me to think that I could even if I tried.  Allah created a beautiful tapestry, with knotty ends beneath the surface, and we must accept that not everything is meant to have closure.  Of the nexus of people I have the privilege of associating with, if I can keep harmony with the majority of them, I think I have done a decent job of engaging with people at their levels and have tried to get along while respecting our differences.  I find a sense of calm in realizing that my life’s pattern has been the same.  Injustice, inhumanity, unkindness – all throw me off kilter for a while, but then human endurance surfaces and takes charge.  The mind convinces the heart that trying to do the most good within my given constraints is still a life worth living.  I don’t need to feel the burden of the world’s unhappiness.  Perhaps, this is the survival instincts of today’s times, where it is easy to get drawn into the broader global stories and feel a sense of deepened responsibility for humanity.  Or perhaps my hope is that as I live my life making the best choices I know how, the underlying kindness and love will serve as a beacon for those who feel lost.

As the chapters of our lives unfold, I hope I continue to question my purpose in it.  And I pray that the lost souls around the world also take a moment to find the calm in the storm within.  I hope we all question: are my choices driven by my ego or by the need to create a world that my children could learn to love?