Peace and Good will to all man kind

(The photo used in this post is by a friend, more of the same can be found here)

It’s the holiday season and I managed to get the 3 odd days between the Christmas and New Year’s off so I was planning a long, relaxing holiday with the people I care about the most. That was until I received a call telling me that my parents have managed to get a ticket and are flying over next week! A bag of mixed reactions landed in my lap, Wow, I love how things are done in Syria, I was trying to get a ticket to fly home for the holiday but the cheapest thing I could find was £500+ (way out of budget) while my parents were able to find tickets within 24 hours from getting their visas! My house, which has been getting the shorter end of the stick with regards to my spare time is in real mess, now every where I look, I can just imagine my mum shaking her head in dismay at her “not so domestic oriented” daughter while my dad gives me his disapproving look for the garden fence that I haven’t fixed yet! Ouch, the list is just building up and my long awaited relaxing holiday has just gone up in smoke.

Yet, I can’t help but think how lucky I am, I’m warm at home with my family coming over for Eid/New Year’s while some 70K+ people were stranded in Heathrow in the freezing cold for the past few days trying to get back to their families and loved ones in time for Christmas! The newspapers were filled with stories of stranded parents and shivering children forced to spend the time sleeping on the cold floor of Heathrow Terminals with minimum facilities, what a cheerful Christmas this will be for them.

All over the world, the importance of being with your family & loved ones at this time of the year is paramount, it is not restricted to the people who believe in Christmas or celebrate it but just a universal need to spend the last few hours of the year with the ones you care about the most. Near or far, all feel the urge to cuddle up in the arms of those closest, and thinking of the year that passed with all its ups and downs and the year ahead with all the mysteries that it holds. And the world slows down for these last few hours and you get a sense of breathless anticipation for that last stroke of Big Ben announcing to everyone that a year has passed and a New Year is born.

This will be my 4^th New Year in London, but the years before when I was home seem so far away I can barely remember how they passed or what I did then, but since I arrived here, each New Year was filled with the promise of things to come, of adventures to live and mountains to clime. 2003-2004 was the first, I have been in the UK for 4 months by that time, had exams a couple of days after new year’s and suffering a every bad case of heart ache, 2004-2005 was the first new year after I started working in the City, I was still trying to figure out if I made the right decision leaving old stories behind and closing so many doors in order to follow this new life that I knew nothing about in England. 2005-2006 was a very strange one, I managed to get the time off and flew back to Syria but my return was scheduled for 3am January 1^st, so after a rather weird evening listening to Khadam on Al-Arabia with my mum and dad, I drove to Damascus airport, eerily empty at the first hours of the new year and spend the time struggling with a very antiquated PC trying to talk to my friend in Japan. Till today the “Damascus Airport Messenger” still brings smiles and tears to my eyes at the same time!

So, 2006-2007 I wonder how will that one be, off course I wont know till next week, what I know is that 2006 was the happiest and the hardest year in my life, so many things have changed, so many important dates to remember throughout the year. The foundations of life-time changes were laid during this year. A whole structure for the future has been put in place, ripped apart and then rebuild over and over again. Never has a year passed me so quickly, yet so slowly at the some time, it is exciting when one experiences Relativity first hand! So this New Year’s eve should be interesting as well as I try to celebrate it with people spread across 17 time zones (from GMT+9 to GMT-8) it will be one long party!

Merry Christmas to you All, and for all of you trying to get home, best of luck and I do pray for a special miracle so that you spend this time with the ones you love…

Long week…

Long week… this past week was defiantly one of the longest that I had since coming over to the UK. You know when files seem to be pilling faster than what you’re running through and each day you end up with a larger pile, a longer to-do list than the day before and more e-mails to read? Well this week was one of those.

Every day I have to wake up around 6am (pitch black as sunrise is still a couple of hours away at this time of the year) and leave home just before 7 to catch the “moody” bus that takes me to the rail station on time for the 7:14 to London Bridge. You see old faces, passing warn-out places (Mad world, Tears for Fear) heading for another day of hard work, constituting the all famous commuter community around the great capital.

I don’t think that you can be classified as a proper Londoner if you don’t commute at least 30-40 minutes to work every day while hoping against hope that National Rail, London underground or the various bus drivers unions don’t decide to go on strike on that day or even not bother showing up to work that day. This being always more than a strong possibility in this city that the most used excuse for being late to work is “train is running late” or “a fatality on the line” (a favourite of the exposed tube lines on the outer skirts of the tube network).

I talk to friends living in Germany, France and far away in Japan, and I’m always astonished by the notion of buses that run on time down to the second, air conditioned trains and stations that are kept to the highest standards of cleanliness and security! Do I live in a first world country or on a different planet?!! The comparison won’t be fair between, say France and Syria, but you would assume that London is not that far behind!!

It’s funny that when everyone in the capital city jumped at their desks when London was announced as the city for the 2012 Olympics but the first thought after the joy of defeating the French was that: how the hell will we handle the extra couple of million people that will flood the city with venues for different events spread from Stratford in the east to Richmond in the west some 70miles across the capital, ouch! But what the hell, it’s all worth it for beating Paris …

For me, the daily trip is a time to think of the day ahead, what new things will find their way to my desk over the next 9 hours? Feeling intrigued and weary at the same time I just allow a warm voice to tell me that all will be ok and that for every long day, there will be a trip back the same evening and I’ll be one day older, one pile of work over and a different to-do list for the following day.

That warm voice keeps me going day after day, week after week, guiding me through the complex composite of the modern life in this city.

London is a cold place, compared to the natural warmth of Damascus but I’m lucky to have my voice, for the walk is not that lonely in its company….

Hidden beauty

“There is so much hidden beauty in the world”, I’m not sure if this is a line I heard once in a film or read in a book but today while having a conversation over the MSN with a friend it came to me how 99% of people fail to see that beauty around them.

We were talking about enjoying the feast of the senses that some situations offer, a nice meal with wine and a soft blues music in the background, listening to a classical piece or enjoying a wonderful sunset. What I realised is that most people think of the grander gestures and magical moments when looking for this world beauty failing to realise that it’s not the surroundings that make the difference but the allowing your mind and senses to see what runs under the surface in your day to day life.

While he was describing his ideal “feast for the senses” settings, the dinner scenario, I thought of an evening a couple of days before when I was returning from work, and had to wait at a nearly deserted bus stop in a sleepy small town outside London trying to stay warm with the chilly autumn wind. Most evenings, I would try to pass the time reading my book or playing Brickbreaker on my BlackBerry, the latter being highly addictive, but that night I had finished one book on the way to work in the morning and my mobile was on the last bit of battery power in it so I had to settle for my ipod and wait half cold, half board for the bus when the angelical voice of Katherine Jenkins’s “House of No Regrets” flowed in and suddenly the night was filled with magic, the scent of falling leaves, the paled moonlight trimming high clouds moving slowly across the heavens under the spell of the night breath. For 15 minutes, the world exploded with beauty and the senses that were buried deep under the day’s work flexed outwards to embrace that magic.

One of my favourite writers once said, in not so many words, sense and conscience are like a Japanese paper fan, most people live with this fan opened to one fifth of the full circle, but sometimes, something (or someone) happen and your conscience and senses open up to that full beautiful circle and you see that hidden beauty running just under the face of the world, undetectable by the majority but available for all who seek it.

A couple of nights before, waiting for the R2 bus to my house in the sleepy country, that fan opened up. A moment that washed over my tiered mind, a memory that is so dear and precious.

Thank you Katherine…