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 Well, not so much fun and leisure as...get some damn writing done, you fool! |
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A while ago, I attended a writers' workshop and the lady who hosted it told us all to go away with this bit of advice - to write for just ten minutes a day. I was determined to go ahead with it and I did...for two days. So today I remembered that I'd resolved to do so and I whipped out my journal and wrote for fifteen minutes. I'm typing out pretty much the same thing that I wrote earlier, with some differences. I find I can go a lot more in-depth when I'm typing than when I'm writing by hand. Writing by hand is such a chore! I've struggled with loneliness a lot throughout my twenty-nine years. I struggled with it when I was the only one home with my mum when I was a teen and everybody else had other places to be. I struggled with it after marriage and when we moved into our own house for the first time. I struggled with it after my son was born and I felt torn between pursuing my writing and being a good mum, because my culture seems to indicate that a woman has absolutely no chance of living her own life - or at least, she has no chance of attaining any goals she hasn't already attained - once she has children. I feel it occasionally still, even though I get so little time to myself nowadays that any alone time is simply awesome. I've tried to come to terms with the idea that being alone isn't a bad thing - and a lot of the time, it isn't. My friends don't live nearby so I don't get to see them often, and even when I do, I feel like there isn't much depth to our conversations. I'm surrounded by people who do not think like me, who do not share any of my interests and hobbies. I feel like I've become desensitised to isolation. Loneliness is my preferred way to be. I walked into my college cafeteria at lunch today and it was the usual hubbub of activity. Youngsters walking around, chatting animatedly, shouting across the room, laughing, eating, socialising. I could recall how that clamour wouldn't have bothered me ten-twelve years ago, when I would have been one of the youngsters talking excitedly with her friends. But, as this moment, I just found an out-of-the-way little table and sat down. I watched the crowds for a while, wondering why it was only at moments like these that the sense of isolation became so strong. In the middle of a crowd, I feel most alone. |
| 20:46 I have no idea. I'm sure I've had a few over the years - I'm pretty easy to impress - but I can't recall exactly what they were about. Generally, listening to Muslim speakers talking in-depth about my religion blows my mind as I feel so much more connected with Islam and God at that point. I'll just talk about that. You see, for a long time, I thought religion was only understood by the scholars and my sister had cassettes upon cassettes (remember those? Or am I going too far back into the past?  ) of hours-long talks in Urdu. That always used to put me off. It was like it wasn't open to me - it was open to serious people who read the hard-to-understand books in tiny Urdu print. Although I was born in a country where Urdu is the main language, I was brought up on a regional dialect and Urdu had to be learnt. I was not a terribly good student. I still struggle with the language. And then YouTube happened. My God! I have a lot of complaints about YouTube (one of them being that I am hopelessly addicted to video-surfing) but it certainly opened a lot of doors for a lot of people. I'm pretty certain the idea of English-speaking Muslim scholars and general speakers wasn't a new thing - Islam is not confined to one race so of course all these Muslims who spoke languages other than mine had to get their Friday sermons and their general Islamic education from somewhere! But English-speaking scholars who gave anything up to hour-long lectures were now available to me, a small-town Asian girl whose horizons had never expanded that far beyond the boundaries of her own culture and local community. I got to see Islam in an entirely new perspective - I got to see it and experience it for myself, rather than by the culture-hashed version I'd been brought up with. I got to form a personal connection with my Lord and I found out how to nurture it and let it make me a better person. All in all, I guess YouTube blew my mind!  And that's fourteen minutes! I need to go and prepare the food for my iftar! The fast opens in about five minutes! ** Images For Use By Upgraded+ Only ** |
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