Swinging Door

"When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door and we are purely independent of and at the same time dependent upon everything."

My mother has always told me I say too much, by which she means she would appreciate if more of what is in my head stayed inside my head. I have only followed her advice when I have done or seen things which have been outlined to require grave consequences if revealed, and in regard to those instances, I feel like I oppressed my soul for having taken part in something that must be hidden. Listen, I know that I wouldn't feel that way if those things hadn't been outlined as such, but they were and I do. So here's everything else.

If you don't do drugs, you will learn other ways to step back and look at your own life. You realize that's what you wanted in the first place, when you still had control. You will remember you always knew how to tear yourself away, if necessary, to open your laden arms and stop time to take stock-- what exactly are you carrying? Do you need all that? The questions have changed, and I'm getting better at making the assessment, but this act remains essential to maintaining sanity. It does matter what you step back into, too.

I need a close look, so I'm up late tonight. It's only 1:22AM in California. Still late for me these days, but I don't have to work tomorrow or the next day, I'm not tired because I didn't work yesterday or the day before. I don't have to worry about falling asleep late and missing the dawn prayer because I'm on my period, so excused this week. I'm not studying for a certification exam and I'm not in school or recovering from being in school. I haven't been in love in about 18 months. And my life has taken shape recently (read: I got my shit together) in a way that I had once imagined over twelve years ago and then completely forgotten about. Oh, and the world seems to be going to shit and I have never felt more calm about it. In other words, the universe has aligned and conditions for reflection are perfect. And I'm going to do that publicly because, don't you want to know how I did it all?

Awh, internal laudatory chorus. Stawpppp. It wasn't narcissism. I swear.

We've come a long way since the two whitest kids at my school asked me if I was related to Osama Bin Laden and if I believed in god, respectively. The other day, the whitest person at work asked me what the Muslim community thinks about ______. Chicken? Printer cartridges? Toilet Paper? I'm not actually sure. I faded out for a second and for that paranoid second, I wondered if he was asking me for A Reason and reassured myself-- this is not something I need to hide. Whatever he asked, I recovered in time to read him the first sentence of this paragraph, minus the bit about white kids. I think he got my point because he went on to express a bunch of sympathy for the disenfranchised (while maintaining a fiscal conservative stance). At least the one time that a non-Muslim POC bullied me, he had the awareness, in 2002, as a pre-teen, to put a towel on his head and imitate a muezzin. If I hadn't been terrified, I might have been impressed.

I've lost track of details. Are things worse now than they were fourteen years ago? I think so. But I can't say I've been trying to keep track of everything. It takes a considerable amount of work to go from literary studies (academic analysis of written cultural artifacts) to maintaining and building data systems. (That's a horrible description of it. My profession is not good at descriptions of our work. I apologize. I work on distributed databases. Sometimes I say, hey, it's still a matter of understanding the organization of information. Or, like, you know, the basic human experience of understanding.) First, I had to change from being a person who engages through only observation, however creatively or intelligently I did so, to a person who takes initiative and moves both ideas and resources. I also needed both an art degree and a science degree. I also fell in love and broke my heart a bunch of times. I swallowed my pride. I treated depression with unsanctioned drugs. I moved halfway across the country, and then entirely across the country. I pursued esoteric religion.

So I can't fully tell you how I ended up back on the path I meant to take when I was fifteen, the person I wanted to be before I realized how complicated global politics was going to make my life. You can't contain my whole life. You don't need to. No one can. But there are some parts that are critical for us to share.

I do still occasionally catch the news. Sometimes it can't be helped. I don't exactly avoid it, but I also don't feel constantly threatened. I do care. I pray for the dead. I pray for the living. I give what I can to people who have lost their homes, their families, their livelihood. I hope to do more of that. I work because I can and it's okay that some people can't do as much.

But I don't have all the defensive arguments down. I refuse to. I understand why they're important to some people. But I need more than that, deeper and wider. Yet, I already have everything I need.

I'm not who I'm not. I'm not even who I am. Identity, or what I project, where I feel I belong or who I show alliance with or however you want to define it, is only a small part of the self. I think most people only use a small part of the self. And when you have very little, you are likely to hold what you have very tightly. And probably spend all your money on it. But that's not the point of self. The point is to let it go.



the quote at the beginning is from a zen member of my family

Apologetics in Religious Dialogue and Development

This post is a follow-up to my previous post, Dreaming of Potato Chips During Ramadan. A reader pointed out that my explanation of what Ramadan means to me was somewhat of an exercise in apologetics.  First of all, I am thankful to have this pointed out because I have never examined or really acknowledged that it's something I do. Next, we were agreed on our primary motivations behind religious action, that being "the admission that you do it primarily because you were required to, and you submit to that requirement." However, I do think there is a place for apologetics in religious dialogue.

Looking back, I grew up in a culture of Islamic apologetics. I was okay with that when I was a teenager. Back then, I did need to rationalize/defend my religion. This was for two reasons, both of which go back to my immigrant experience. First, I was constantly surrounded by people who thought I was a complete weirdo with my brown skin and head scarf and the second is, because people thought my way of life was weird, I was all too aware that mine was not the only way of life and that the religion I practiced was not something I had chosen but, like my skin color, something I had inherited. I was taught, via the American dream, that being American means you are not tied to the inheritance you receive from you parents. In fact, even if that inheritance is great, you are expected to make your own name. So, to convince the people around me (and myself, because it's hard to live in America and never find yourself believing in the American dream) that I hadn't just inherited my religion, I took up an apologetic stance .

I admire my reader's irritation with having to defend a religious choice. However, I am still defensive. Yes, 9/11 and the Arab Spring have happened but the vast majority of people I interact with on a daily basis know very little about being a Muslim and/or a minority. In my post, I acknowledge that I am trying to address both Muslims and non-Muslims and I think the second group still brings out my self-justification. I am also trying to address Muslims who are, like me, defensive. I think that religious rationalization has a place in society and in the religious development of a person. After all, in the Quran God provides rationale, too, and also urges people to seek knowledge. Not everyone can easily concede to doing something simply because they are told to, perhaps especially not anyone raised in America on a steady diet of questioning authority. For many people, rationalization serves the purpose of relating the lives they live with the abstract idea of God and pulls them toward faith.

For the record, I got sick of apologetics pretty early on in college. A lot of the time, an argument is only as good as its argumentation. Anyway, I have always been Muslim by default, which I tried not to take for granted, but I needed to experience unconditional love before feeling like I chose Islam. Having experienced it, I bear witness that it's not easy to find. Other people probably have other things that pull them toward God and/or religion. I don't think that's wrong. I think there is also a guiding sense besides whatever brings you to religion. Those times when you just know something is the good thing to do in a situation and submit to it without thought or hesitation. Just like there's nothing wrong with starting with a rational, social, political, etc reason to act on a religious command and working your way up to this guiding sense with practice, there's nothing wrong having this guiding sense already and then gaining knowledge about how/why God's creation works the way it does.

Curation and Cultivation

Since finishing college, maybe even since I began living away from my family, I have begun to realize that the way most people define themselves is in relation to a given set of rules. Some people follow rules provided to them and identify themselves as followers of those rules. Some people defy rules that are provided to them and consider themselves to be rebels, often also identifying themselves with the reasons that they need not follow those rules. A lot of times, people hop between different sets of rules, looking for a set they like. Even more often, people take their given set of rules and modify them to suite their lifestyle.

However, because people use rules as a basis for their identities, they tend to take it personally when others defy, reject, modify, or even follow the same rules as they do. To take a lesson from Huck Finn, rules also have an intimate relationship with morality and justice. On top of which righteousness often involves choosing between following rules that can mean saving yourself and sacrificing others or saving others and sacrificing yourself where "self" is interchangeable with rules and identity and mired in the realm of choice.

Even the way we learn and know can be boiled down to understanding, accepting, and following rules.

Since I was a kid, I have always had a problem with rules. They are what I consider to be a narrow minded way of being. As a daughter of immigrant parents, it often seemed to me that neither my school nor my parents, the two institutions under which I had to operate quite knew what rules really made sense to enforce upon me. My mother thought this was because my grandfather had spoiled me as a child and lead me to believe I was too good for rules, which is probably partially true.

From a young age, I have been choosing when I wanted to follow whatever rules suited my interests. I kept my enemy close when it came to school, by getting such spectacular grades that the teachers just assumed I was a stickler for the rules and neglected to enforce them for me, eventually deeming me an exception-- which I was. Unfortunately, my mother saw me for what I was and defying her over-protective rules required covert operations.

For me, defying rules has never been action based in carelessness or recklessness. In a true mastery of defiance, getting caught should be an act of defiance itself. Or is it an act of identity, identifying the perpetrator simply as a rebel? But I am not happy with being someone who is just "against" some other thing. I crave to learn, not destroy.  

As someone who has never followed rules indiscriminately, I struggled in college-- navigating disciplines and bureaucracies. And even more so, I struggled with the freedom to choose and make my own life, freedom I have only gained from leaving my parents' home and from finishing school with zero job prospects. However, I refused to follow any beaten trail guaranteeing success.

Obviously, I have no choice but to make my own rules-- rules I will myself to follow in a lifelong test of my own capacity for learning, adapting, and perhaps teaching others to do the same. I seek not only to know but understand knowing and to pass on that understanding and pass on my refusal to tailor myself to any principles but my own. This is what I do best. Having nothing else to base my principles on, I will have to base them on the curation and cultivation of my interests. Having no platform for the performance of my self-discipline, I begin this blog as a promise to myself and will continue it until my private performance is either satisfactory or preferred.