This World is No Good Place for Me until It is Good for Others
Here I am today as a 24 year-old woman looking at my little self in this picture where I am standing as a girl who seems to be spraying some kind and peaceful vibes in the corridor. Yet, my dark little eyes are flashing some soft focused serious gaze messaging a determinited goal to be mentally awake. It is as if I am saying “This is for you to know that I can come out of the straight path if it is no longer leading to what is right even if that requires internal chaos.”
Having lived in 5 different countries so far, I am increasingly becoming more conscious of my ignorance of this world and of how much there is to learn of history, languages, religions, cultures and different fields for me to be a good citizen of the world of today. The more things I understand and mental growth I undergo, the more silent and careful I am with the choice of my words in general but that does not mean that I will never come across people who can misunderstand my words or judge me. Everyone is at different stages of development and with different faculties, so not everyone will always understand what I am feeling or even care about what I am feeling and the insight I seek to convey.
Having gone to law school, I have always believed in justice and I have very much enjoyed reading countless Common Law judicial decisions where I came to grasp the spirit of law and just thinking. But my experience made me see that justice today will not be globally possible without the involvement of individuals in the creation of safer communities and interaction with each other. This means that people need to embrace certain universal values of freedom, respect, love and peace.
From my long term thinking, I saw that the world is divided into two main blocks of people that the conscious people are facing in their movement of conscious awakening: those who are selfishly living for themselves and those who are living hostilely to others. The first group I would say support the moto “This life is all about me and my existence” whereas the second group’s moto is “This life is about me against you and which of us both should keep existing.” If those two kinds of people keep being fueled by the wrong beliefs, then truly the planet will keep suffering and no one will get peace. Peace has been misconceived as material but although material security and peace are part of peace, they are not the origins of it. The origin of Peace is pure love and understanding of who we are. We are here on this planet with abundant resources so there should be no problem for material peace as long as everything is fairly distributed. Peace starts from the understanding that we are here to exchange empathy, caring, giving, positive emotions, compassion, kindness and sharing of our time and attention. For example, if one has empathy, they wouldn’t think of exploiting the poor, the suffering and the disadvantaged because they would feel the pain they are inflicting upon the vulnerable as one who has empathy is capable of feeling what others feel. If one had the quality of caring, they would not turn a blind eye to injustice and inequality or accept the abuse of others. If one had kindness, they would not seek to hurt and would show love first. Those are the qualities that, if there ever is material insecurity and destabilisation, can ensure that those who have will share and support those who don’t have and those who don’t have will become best friends and can be ready to offer their lives for whoever saved them in need. This is the bond and unity of humanity through which we perceive that we have not been given all those resources for the purpose of material pleasures but rather God has given us all this abundance and all those trials for us to sense the unity exeperienced through giving and love because there is no love without giving and service to others. Perhaps also through this unity of love we will realise the unity of God and that it is pointless to fight each other for our religious differences because if we get unified through love we will see that religious divisions and fights are preventing us from this wonderful feeling of unity that God has put in our original human nature from which we have walked away. God has sent more than one Prophet to different parts of the world and at different times of History so no one should be forcing another to embrace the Prophet whom God has sent to their part of the world or whose message has spread to those different parts of the world.
We as individuals of planet earth living in this very technologically advanced world, an era of information and advanced knowledge, we should realise that our human race is not human until all humans have recognised each other’s humanity, diginity and right to live. Our ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic diversity should be a source of creativity, enjoyment and discovery rather than be used as a basis for hatred, exclusion and war. It is important for individuals to daily show any single step and act of kindness and love around while maintening the belief that growth is always possible and that we can move away from the negative aspect of certain modern values of materialism and individualism.
Zina Balkis Abdelkarim
