Ahmed AlFailakawi

Why Does It Hurt?

March 24th, 2021
The more someone is so nice to you, and the more he matters to you, the more pain his death will cause. That’s the rule.

Death is a subject that will never be neither new nor old to us. It keeps on living. Death, is another way of living. People who pass away, will definitely live inside us. A kind of life that profoundly hurts. An existence that makes this pain easy to us, however, never too easy.

We begin at the very instance we are delivered to this world. We start growing. Developing. Becoming who we are. It’s a journey. We wake up everyday. We go back to sleep at night. The cycle keeps on going. Yes, life can be cruel and on some days it can be a bliss. But we are always moving to it. Approaching death.

Our collective experience of death is nothing but someone we know dies. You pick up your phone and you know he or she has passed away. Sometimes someone might tell you the news. Then, you feel death. You feel how close it is, but you didn’t realize. I sometimes even think, every time I witness death taking someone away, I begin to wonder… How close is it to me?

These thoughts some might think that they are a bit dark. I personally don’t. I keep embracing life for making me more present and feel all the feelings in this universe. Whenever I’m feeling something, it means that I’m alive.

Photo by Matthias Neufeld

Time

I guess no one can argue that our time here isn’t so important. Time is so valuable to us. When I was a child, my mother used to always say that it’s shocking how time is moving too fast. “It’s so shocking how time moved so fast and you’re going to middle school. It’s so shocking that you’re going to high school now!” Never understood why she would say that. And why everyone cared that time is running. Now, I think I get it. I see myself changing. I start to wonder, “how come have I changed this much? I have a beard. I have a heart that is full. I’m someone. I’m no longer something waiting to become someone.”
Photo by Balazs Busznyak
I’m beginning to adore each moment of my life. Enjoying the music of wind, the music of trees, and the music of Earth. All the sounds now matter. All the moments where strangers on streets laughing and enjoying their time. All the moments that I can curl up into bed. Listening to the noise of the AC. The ambiguous creaking in the room that might be from the furniture. As I said, each sound now matters. Each moment and feeling is way too precious to ignore.

Featured image by Morgan Housel
The Untold Story of Humans

January 1st, 2021

❝ Being a human is a privilege that has its own burden. ❞

We suffer. We question. We are, simply, unpredictable. But at the same time, easily predictable species. We have so many complicated things, and other simple stuff. We are amazingly ingenious and interesting. However, vulgar sometimes. We are a sophisticated mixture of behavior and actions. We are called Humans.

It’s 2021, the 21st century, and humans have a generous amount of things. Lots of things. we can’t even count them. Most importantly, they have a lot of history. So many experiences that either written in books or on the internet. The internet itself is a detailedly built network that humans initiated and developed.

Photo by Pixabay

Interests

Going deep into who we are, we can find a wide range of interests. Look at everyone in your life, you’ll find every single one of them has an interest, even if it was a silly one. There are people who are interested in their field of study. People who are interested in cosmos, space, animals, movies, music, art, books, traveling, tech, coding, blogging, writing, crafting, painting, poetry, society, history, psychology, agriculture, baking, cooking, fishing, gaming, gymnastics, football, basketball, and other kinds of sport. They might be interested in their family, cars, and possessions. The more I write, the more I know there’s something that I didn’t put on the list. YouTube is a platform that made me realize people have tons of interests. Believe me, as long as you’re alive, you’ll find someone who has an interest that you didn’t even think that someone in this world would be interested in this particular thing.

We can’t survive without it

As long as you’re a human, you are absolutely creative. You might be so lazy to notice that, or you might even be afraid to push yourself to be creative. What I know for sure is that humans are incredibly creative. One of the major issues of studying computer engineering is that I frequently lose myself thinking “how come we created these systems? How did we even reached to this limit of building these networks? How did we use all of the other sciences to create a machine called computer?” The details of this masterpiece are shockingly overwhelming. You are reading this post without even knowing what’s under the hood and how many lines of code are there, so you can read this post. Now if I started talking about programming, I wouldn’t even stop. We are the ones who created the computer and those programming languages to communicate or send our demands to the machine.

Humans live on creativity, I believe. We cannot live in this world without creating something, or at least thinking of creating something. Think about it for a moment, look around you, how many things you’re using that creativity is within its core? People created and invented those stuff that we’re using daily, which are making our lives easier and way simpler. We can change. We can facilitate. Surely we can be creative to live a better life. Moreover, we can be over-creative by thinking how to modify a pre-created invention. Isn’t it mad? Isn’t it wondrous?

Photo by Shukhrat Umarov

A world full of systems

Most of us are drifted by our careers, studies, and work. We face a problem of not having the sufficient amount of time to explore, which if you asked me, I’d say it’s not accurate. We do have time to explore once we deeply want to give it the time. On your way to work, you pass by a lot of systems. The highways, the traffic lights, your car has a lot of systems, or even the building you work at. Our mobile phones, computers, gadgets, the internet, shopping malls, cafes. Once a system is corrupted, we cannot live with the fact that this system is no longer useful because it’s wasting our time and energy. Speaking about time, we even arranged our time in a systematic way. Your college classes, your appointments are all arranged. You cannot go one day and decide not attending or cancelling your weekly appointments. For a full semester, you just have to attend the 8:00 AM class on Sundays. It’s all within the system that you should stick to.

Humans did not want to waste any time or energy randomly. This time and energy should be wasted according to something, which is a schedule. Arrangement is the key of success if you wanted to become a successful human. We all share that feeling of dissatisfaction and infuriation when something is not following specific rules, or even something is being made randomly without any system that makes it feel professional and well-considered. We all hate it when we are late or falling behind the schedule. We absolutely hate it when someone is late.

Creating a system is a total different story. We need to invest a lot of time to create and establish a new system. We need to consider all the inputs and predict the outputs. Prediction might not be the rightful thing to say. Nevertheless, humans work so hard to create a particular system that they already know its output.

We can adapt

Easily. It’s just that simple. We can live with all the chaos around and still can survive. No, we don’t only survive, but we innovate through the survival. We accidentally invented tea bags during a war. We adapt to loss. We even adapt to our flaws that we cannot change. Some people suffer from diseases for a long time, it’s painful, but still if you asked them, they’d respond “I’m used to it now.” Humans are so good at used-to-it. If you live in a freezing part of the world, you’d get used to it even if you keep complaining that you aren’t.

One planet, multiple connections

Now I don’t know if there are some scientific facts that animals have sentimentality or they can feel love and connection, but what I know for sure that humans are so good at emotions and feelings. Humans can grow feelings and they can, simply, feel. We know how does it feel to be sad. How does it feel to be happy. How does feel to be lonely. At the same time, we can relate to each other. We can also support each other. The level of compassion is so high. Yes, we can still commit horrible things to each other. Nevertheless, we all agree that everyone should love one another. All religions support love and compassion. No one can deny the fact that seeing any sight of love and tendency makes us feel comfortable to be living in this kind of world. A world that someone in the Middle East supports his brothers and sisters in need in Africa, or any other part of the world. A world that an invention made somewhere in the US reaches to every single person around the globe. Having a common tech language made us connected. The opportunity of having a world connection is impeccable that we forgot the fact that it’s so easy to meet people virtually. Friends are made without even a face-to-face communication.

Photo by Itzyphoto

Humans have opportunities

We understand each other, at least sometimes, which makes it easier for us to communicate. We deeply know our truth. All of us have a motive inside us to make this world a better place and sometimes this motive is not obvious to us, but deep down it’s there. On the contrary, we all know people who look at the world as a chaotic box. They actually believe that this world is nothing but a dream killer.

The world is what you see. What you perceive. Whenever you decide to see it dark, it will be darker than you ever expected. If you see it a place where opportunities are waiting for someone to find them, when you start seeking them, you will see that the world is nothing but an opportunity awaiting.

Photo by Ben Sweet

❝ Knowledge is finite. Wonder is infinite. ❞
— Matt Haig

When there are people who doubt climate change, on the other side, there are people who believe in climate change and with their utmost capabilities trying to solve the problem. While some are constantly fighting and craving blood, vengeance and war, there are more people who stand against shedding more blood. Feeling a victim of some kind of a universal prejudice on this planet is way easier than standing and committing to change yourself first before forcing to change others. Standing up is something that everyone does alone. You don’t need to ask someone to stand up instead of yourself. It takes a little of courage and lots more of a commitment to change the world. Humans are not that simple. When it comes to applying changes to the world, it won’t be simple as long as the human factor is included. What I believe and know for sure is that looking at humans’ awful mistakes and ignoring all of our achievements and ingenuity is totally unfair.

Being a human

Opportunities, feelings, achievements, questions, answers, innovations, curiosity, and the list goes on. All are what humans share and mostly long for. We are all eager to know more, and to achieve more. Humans cannot live without making noise on their planet. Most of the noise they make is something that other humans of other generations will remember. Just let’s all make sure we make the right noise. The noise that will aspire to a better life for other humans, so then they would live an extraordinary experience on this planet. Stop the foolish noise, and start making a better noise.

Featured image by Joshua Earle