Editor in Chief: Moh. Reza Huwaida Thursday, March 28th, 2024

I Live in My own World

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I Live in My own World

Do we all live in the same world? Are you moved with a casualty in Afghanistan, a child’s death in Philistine or bloodshed in Syria? Are you concerned when a human suffers misery in a corner of the world? Does the sickness of your neighbor’s child shock you as much as its mother? Breathing in the same geography or planet, watching the same stars or being under the same sky do not matter. However, what matters is being affected by an incident or influenced by a change, personality, opinion, etc.

Imagine that you have a horse. Your horse lives in the same geography and environment as you do. But do you live in the same world? If you open a page of a poetry book, you will deduce that the poet lives in the world of dream, love, loneliness, sadness, injustice, etc. Hence, our worlds are based on our feelings, imaginations and thoughts. Even though, we are alive in the same world, nonetheless we live in different worlds. You may know some people whose worlds are their villages. They are only influenced by the events happening in their villages and do not think beyond their geographical borders. Therefore, they cannot claim to live in others’ world.

Sometimes, it happens when a person is present somewhere physically however absent there mentally. For example, you travel mentally in the world of your childhood. The sweet memories force smile on your lips and the bitter ones make you grimace painfully. You are deep in the bitter-sweet memories paying no attention going on around you. So, you are in the world of your childhood.

Our world is where we play active role in and the changes and events affect our daily life. When one watches the events and incidents passively as watching TV, which have no impacts or results in his/her life, it is not one’s world.

So, it should be noted that we live in different worlds. Perhaps, one’s world will never go beyond the border of one’s village or country, but another’s world will be unimaginably large. If we consider the insects’ world, the whole world of a caterpillar will be its cocoon – as one’s whole world is his/her birthplace.

It is commonly known that Renaissance changed the medieval ages. The literal meaning of renaissance is revival or rebirth. There were no movement and motives in our world in the medieval ages. We were shrouded in the darkness of our cemetery-like world unable to breathe. We were not dead or given a rebirth physically, but we changed our world and given a mental rebirth in the new world we made. The new world was not a new planet or geography but the changes took place in the same geography.

Hope it has been clear that everyone has his/her own world. Ill-fatedly, nowadays we are alienated not only from our world but also from our egos. We make idols in our world and in ourselves and sacrifice our faith and creed for them. In other words, our real egos are replaced with the idols of property, lust, luxury, etc. and our only claim to fame is to satisfy our physical needs. Why we are afraid of being alone? Whenever we stay alone just for few moments, we make ourselves busy in one way or another such as making a call to our friends, listening to radio, watching TV, playing game, etc. It is because we are frightened of ourselves. We are estranged from our humanity. We are so immersed in mundane pleasures that we daren’t ask ourselves about the moral values. A deep vacuum of human dignity and moral norms is felt in our social and individual life.

Karl Marx considers self-estrangement to be the end result and thus the heart of social alienation. Self-estrangement can be defined as “the psychological state of denying one’s own interests – of seeking out extrinsically satisfying, rather than intrinsically satisfying, activities...” It could be characterized as a feeling of having become a stranger to oneself, or to some parts of oneself.

One day I opened a page of a book not to read but to glance and get rid of monotony. A line attracted my attention and I stared at it and read it again. It was written, “God is not the author of fear. You are.” This very simple statement hit me like a ton of bricks. In fact, I was highly stunned and pondered upon. I read it again and again and I knew. I just knew that what it was saying was true. I didn’t have to think about it, contemplate it, mull it over, I just knew. This simple sentence was teaching me a great lesson.

I realized that I had made God in my image, or at least accepted the image others made of God and then considered God responsible because of it.

I realized that God was not the author of all of this insanity. God was not the author of hate, anger, separation, nationalism, racism, classism, etc. We are.

The world religions introduce to us is God-centered. We are supposed to practice upon the religious instructions which are intended to moralize and humanize us. We have to polish our egos from the pollution of superstitious idols. Let us stop being alienated from our humanity and live in the world of virtue and moral values.

Hujjatullah Zia is the newly emerging writer of the Daily Outlook Afghanistan. He can be reached at outlookafghanistan@gmail.com

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