Two years have passed since I had left Japan. In these two years, I have left so many dreams behind that I can’t count. I came to see my country in a new light; I saw all the darkness and light in it. And I am not being cynical when I say all I have done in these two years is to observe my fellow men under new light after my Japan experience and personal experience abroad. What seems to them very important seems to me irrelevant. When I see how they get mad or angry about some things and totally miss the things that are important .things that is eating our country alive from the inside. When I see the amount of pessimism in everyone talk and I can now get it after two years. When I see the number of assholes with no human compass what so ever who have acquired money and power in different communities and how most of the scientifically and good sensed people with a high sense of justice and humanity have been washed to shadow and no one listens to them. How the communities become so much absorbed in their everyday needs and can’t feel or understand anything different from their perspective, and how I become dull not feeling as if I was catching the new disease of this country after the war. When I remember my mother as part of a full generation of mothers, which beg their children never to speak the wrong they see. Never to interfere to stay walking under the umbrella of self-doubt, hoping one day everything will be alright only then I become sick of my optimism…..then suddenly I remember those nights I spend abroad the really cold ones... I remember the warmth of home and my family laughs. I remember how always I was busy never to feel that anything I do is enough in Japan, and how here I don’t care and my compass is my inner self, that I am doing everything I can to be honest to my work, to my life regardless of the results. I still remember the first time I read the quote by Frederick Douglass that said (when you will learn how to read you will become forever free). How does it hit me like a storm? Like a lightning ball. how many nights I sat thinking that I will read all the books I want when I come back to Syria and let the world laugh on my naïve … it was then I knew I never will be ever the same. These countless hours I sat reading things no one ever here cares about will be my definition of happiness. It’s my weapon in a world trying always to change me to be something I am not..to something you know inside its not you. In these minutes sitting reading alone I feel total freedom to be whoever I want to be.the freedom to sit with the most brilliant minds in history. To discuss their opinions without anyone to interfere, without the need for anyone else. I always thought if I only have a mentor. Someone older than me to just sit and ask his opinion about different things in life, someone more knowledgeable with a nice spirit, that is true, only then my life will be perfect. Yet I never thought that I will have all these mentors. All these older friends in different books. I started to feel with every good book I finish that I lose a good friend, and I do the best I can to save it in a place I will never lose and can come back later to take his advice. Now after these two years although on a professional level in Syria for sure was worst. And although I knew from the start this was the price I will have to pay when I come back to a country with no future in sight. Yet it was the price I am willing to pay happily to be the human I am today. The human I planned to become. The one who feel this happiness when he is sitting alone with a book in a room. Fuck all your money and fancy things world. I never felt more happy to be alone with this small family I have, with all these mentors who never disappoint me, and always succeed to surprise me with their ideas even in the worst place to be as described by the world media to make a future.
