Tag: Pakistan

The Barrier Of Conditions

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“Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.”

It’s always nice to start with some Camus. These French (-Algerian) intellectuals really knew how to get people thinking and living. So thinking we must do. What conditions have we attached to our own happiness then. A momentary chance for some introspective thought perhaps. If we are honest with ourselves we will see the conditions we either try to live by or aspire to. If we are willing to take that further we may just accept an imbalance between the desire to achieve an idea over allowing happiness to happen. How much of this then is influenced by our habitual responses to moments and life. The conditions we set on life are nothing but ideas and learned responses to moments. We are fixed. If we create these conditions, or we have these conditions created for us and we accept them as such, and either refuse or are unable to view any other version of happiness, we likely set ourselves up for failure.

If there is anything this year has taught it’s that being fixed and not being able to look beyond our narrow ideas of future and desire will only lead to our own suffering. I doubt there are many people out there currently who have managed to live the exact version of 2020 as they had foreseen and hoped for when the first of January ding donged into existence. Most people are either working from home, still furloughed, back in their workplace or redundant. Had anyone here not been able to accept this change then they would suffer. Their previous conditions of happiness would be impossible to achieve. Habits have had to change.

This can only be a good thing. One benefit of immigration as people come from different cultures they view the one they’re entering with a fresh perspective. Those who live within their own culture are more likely to view their world as normal and in that case how it should be, this is just the way it is both good and bad. People see what is missing because they bring part of what is normal for them with them. They see a hole with fresh eyes, fill it and changed the habitual structure of society. The populace embrace this but fear it too.

Will what we are experiencing do similar. The circumstances and events are different, it is unlikely to be about people entering a society as our miserable little island appears more closed off than ever before, but there will be tangible changes which may only become evident in a few years. What is the point of principles if they’re so limiting as to restrict any possibility of happiness. We are living in what appears to be increasingly evolving conditions and how we deal with that will determine how we move forward as a society and individually. Habitual flexibility and happiness may just turn out to be one and the same after all.

The News Today, Today

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While looking for something to write about I stumbled upon an article describing a very recent fight between the Indian and Chinese armies on the border in the Galwan Valley in the Ladakh region of the Himalayas. While border squabbles happen quite often in that part of the world, be it with India and Pakistan, India and China or China and seemingly every neighbour they have disputed borders with; this one raised a few eyebrows. While versions of events seem to differ with which nation is recounting the story, it does seem twenty Indian soldiers and an as yet unspecified number of Chinese soldiers – forty according to the Indians – were killed in the fighting. While both sides have tried to play it down, certain quite shocking details have still been released. On this border they have since 1996 agreed that there will be a two kilometre ‘no gun zone’ either side of the border which means these soldiers fought hand to hand combat. According to an Indian official fifty-five Indian soldiers with nothing but bare hands faced off against a three hundred strong Chinese “Death Squad” armed with metal bats wrapped with barbed wire. Some were beaten to death while others died from drowning in the river after falling or being push in. This all just seems completely remarkable and in a perverse kind of way; comic. To keep the border from being a flash point they remove guns but come armed with metal bats. Perhaps it’s not just the guns that are the issue here.

The second story I came across is less brutal for sure and is about Elon Musk’s quest for world domination, or at east in the realms of batteries that he operates in. Apparently he has invented or is close to inventing a game changing battery that will render the combustion engine the equivalent of film cameras in the age of digital technology. When put like that it actually sounds feasible, it’s amazing how the mind works. This will be a great step on the journey to save the world from runaway climate change. The article thankfully mentioned the ethical reality of lithium mines in South America and cobalt in Congolese mines renowned for the use of child labour. Bolivia which recently was taken over in a right-wing coup, coincidentally has vast reserves of lithium which Evo Morales didn’t make freely available to foreign corporations but perhaps that’s for another time, and I heard recently Afghanistan has such vast reserves it’s being viewed as the Saudi Arabia of lithium, lucky Afghanistan. There’s just something demoralising about us celebrating the movement away from fossil fuels to another finite natural resource. The long term implications may be unclear but it’s as if we haven’t learnt anything. It’ll also be interesting to see if we start using less fossil fuels in the world economy or this use of ‘green’ energy is just supplementing our increased energy consumption. There is certainly much evidence to suggest this is the case.

To Help Others And Alleviate The Loneliness Within

Hamar Williams1 Comment

One of the pleasures of my day is strangely enough the five hours I spend working. Not always, but one of my current jobs is a little home renovation for a friend and I find myself in a flat just working away at fixing and building while listening to podcasts. I’m in my own little world with whatever I want to listen to. It’s a real pleasure. Today I was listening to one of The Economist‘s podcasts and part of it was about loneliness and how helping people can alleviate this sense of loneliness, but more importantly boost our immune system. Apparently it leads to the down regulation of inflammatory genes, which are their words and I’m guessing a good thing. It was in relation to this current virus and the paradox of quarantine, loneliness and our health. As I said they discussed how helping people can alleviate our sense of loneliness but they also discovered that helping people can make us happier and more connected with those who we help. They used two groups of people for this study, one who helped themselves and one who helped others.

This made me think of a period in my life when I helped people. I spent six months in Greece about three years ago working with refugees crossing from Turkey, having come from countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I don’t like the word helped because it is loaded, patronising and self aggrandising. I prefer to just say I handed out food and clothes, fixed things, drove my van around a lot and played football even more, as well as just hung out with people and tried to make them feel like human beings. The group I was doing this with generally left around the same time and I remained in contact to varying degrees as we all spent the next year trying to get over everything we had seen and felt. It feels and sounds self indulgent, and I don’t even like writing these words because of that, but it’s true, as is the fact I’m sure some people left with what I would describe as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder. My point though is that I have discussed with some people and we agreed there was a sense that this was a good time, in the moment we had been truly happy. I always put this down to the fact it was a real true moment and you were needed urgently, there was no time for this fake bullshit we live in our regular existence. I always thought that it was life in the true sense that made us feel this strange paradoxical happiness but perhaps it was just the fact we were helping people and feeling more connected on a human level. I still don’t know the answers or the truth and I don’t always feel comfortable talking about it as I feel self-indulgent considering everything else that was going on to others and is still going on, but these were my thoughts and what better than this daily monster I’ve created to share them on.