Monday

I’m sitting at my desk after walking through the streets we wandered less than 24 hours ago. There couldn’t be more of a difference. The calm, polished and abandoned alleys from yesterday are now frantic rivers of black umbrellas and raincoats, with the sound of heels echoing against the stone facades. I swam in the midst of this river feeling acutely aware of your absence. You’ve brought so much joy and warmth to my life, thank you for making this bleak Monday morning shimmer with the memory of your eyes.

Self-acceptance

Where do you draw the line between forgiving yourself for who you are and seeking change? At which point does one recognise that forgiving oneself is not bringing about the desired effect? Those of us with self-awareness are constantly finding the faults – some bigger than others – yet we are constantly bombarded with two schools of thought, two diametrically opposite antidotes that promise a cure. ON one hand we are told you are in perpetual sin, and that change is necessary for salvation. On the other you are told that imperfection is perfection, and that your faults define your experience and growth,

A lot of rehabilitation programs (for drugs, alcohol, etc) do not believe in a conscious effort to change yourself. The harder you try, the harder you will fall it seems. From experience these seems accurate. What they do preach is accepting who you are and that mistakes are inevitable – the idea being that through that acceptance you build self esteem that by nature rejects any kind of self harm. You trick yourself, in a sense.

But what if you’re aware of the trick? Is it possible that in some cases you accept and refuse to build form there?

A New Dawn

I don’t usually write posts about my professional life but I thought I’d make an exception, seeing as I have been utterly uninspired to post pedantic psychobabble in a while.


Yesterday was the first day of my new job in the City. Somehow I managed to pull myself out of the quicksand that was my Magic Circle legal profession in Canary Wharf and throw myself into the unfamiliar and niche world of private equity investment on Throgmorton Avenue. It was both a difficult and easy decision. Difficult, because I deliberately left behind any semblance of a comfort zone I had every known over the past 4 years of working as a lawyer. Easy, because in those 4 years I developed a hatred for my job that I think few can match in magnitude.

I needed a fresh start, and by some stroke of unimaginable luck I managed to get it in the world’s largest asset management company.

I slept well the night before the big day (Monday), probably as a result of the bedroom acrobatics I exercised between 5am and noon on Sunday (thanks, Mike). I got up with a healthy amount of anxiety, bordering on first-day-of-school-what-will-the-kids-think-of-me syndrome. True to habit with all new endeavours or experiences, I had decided to get up a little earlier than I should just to walk around the City and feel more centred around the new space. You could call it marking territory – but instead of urine I identified points of interest: the nearest sushi restaurant, the nearest taxi rank, the nearest Ladurée etc. As I was walking around just before 8.30am I ran into Ian from Standard Chartered Bank, the Cedric from Kirkland & Ellis. That’s when I realised I needn’t really mark this territory further – it was already mine.

I can’t really sing, but if I could I would have bastardised Frank Sinatra with a rendition of “What a difference, a job makes”. There is almost nothing in common between my old and new job, and it seems that everything (with the exception of the facilities of my new building) is a stellar improvement. Without going into much detail as to how, friendly reader, here’s what’s in this story for you: sometimes you need to hit rock bottom to ricochet into space. Sometimes you have to insist on your success even when you see dead ends and technicalities. Knowing you deserve better and observing the mechanics of your life closely affects such mechanics and alters them by default.

In the gleam of the night fantastic

Are you anything like me? If you are, you are night creature.
What is it about the fading sun and the twinkling lights of London that inspires an almost mandatory sense of invincibility. Is it escapism (from the bland weather, from the propriety of an imperial capital or from the harshness of the Europe’s most urbanised city) at its best? Or are we a city a of indulgent hedonists that know no limits?
I am but one of the wayfarers. We can all describe each other pretty accurately – novelty is not part of the formula. We are addicted to the social orgy that is this city. We use this city and it uses us, but to this day I cannot quite ascertain who is winning. Between the clinking glasses in every den of inequity to every eruption of laughter from every player (or marionette?) in this game the plot continues to thicken, but the denouement is déjà vu. 

Mr Right

Desperation. It's unseemly, so much we all know. So when Svetlana sat me down next to her on the burgundy velvet sofa of a her opulent 18 century hotel room in Roland Gardens (pupils dilated, somewhat unsteady and voice deliberate with exhaustion) and told me never to despair after men, I knew exactly what she meant. Or, at least, I thought I did.

Youth can be the most powerful of opiates. Though absolute freedom and immortality are intelligibly impossible postulates, one still behaves with the carelessness of a free immortal. Time is cheap, so wasting it is less of a concern. This is no less true when it comes to pursuing romantic relationships. One gets more attached to a feeling, and high, than whether or not the partner in question is a long-term likelihood. One wastes a shocking amount of time with horrible matches, all to be labelled in retrospect as "learning experiences".

But most of us grow older, and realise how much time we've wasted on these lamentable "learning experiences". We hope they've equipped us with the knowledge of what it is we are looking for. We hope that the ship has not yet sailed and that there is room for two more passengers on board. Some of us keep hoping for a long, long time.

I've gotten a bit older. And with my 26^th birthday I suddenly feel an unusual push towards finding a long-term, stable relationship. Not necessarily one that lasts forever, but one that I can benefit from and whose wide, protective leaves I can grow under for at least a few years to come. Haven't you heard? It is no longer about finding the right man – rather, in reality it tends to be when a man finds you during the right time.

Enter Ronald (circa 2 weeks ago), a handsome 30 year-old English corporate lawyer from London. Sophistication drips from the very consonants he enunciates with his received pronunciation. And, despite his Downton Abbey-esque exclamations in the boudoir ("genuinely extraordinary!"), coitus has proved to be a forte. In a lot of ways, he's perfect.

I'm not wildly in love with Ronald. I think he's very attractive and I enjoy the time we spend together. I want more, but I am not obsessing about it or aching for it. That worried me at first, but then I realised, in all my "learning experiences" where I have been insanely head-over-heels and pining for someone it has always come to a crashing end. This is an opportunity to take things slow and see where they go as a mature adult. Maybe in time I will fall in love with him. But that time is not now, and not for a while.

Besides, dating another lawyer already seem a little polygamous. We both fall asleep hugging each other and our blackberries.

New | Beginnings

The new year is around the corner. And never has there been a time when a new year was this needed. I have never been the superstitious type – attaching patterns of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to artificial measurements of time (after all, the new year used to start in March, which is why October comes with the greek prefix “octo” or “eight” and December with the greek prefix “deca” or “ten”). That said, I cannot ignore the fact that the past 15 months or so have been the most challenging in my lifetime.


There are two ways to come out of calamity and tragedy. One is to let it eat you up and become a former shadow of who you were. The other is to grab fate by the balls and command it, imposing your own will to live happily and confidently, a phoenix of sorts, more glorious than its previous incarnation.

But where is the fork in the road? What are the qualities that you need to adopt to ensure you fall on the right side of the history that is your life? Does one pursue small, incremental changes or does one dare to jump outside the box altogether and bear the brunt of it all?

I don’t have answers to any of these questions. But I think I need to believe that I will have the ability to make the right choices, even if up until now I have failed so many times. Life may be a box of chocolates, and you may never truly know what you’re going to get, but you can always ensure you go at each piece with hope and faith that milk chocolate praline is only a taste away.

So what of this new year. Quit drinking? Quit drugs? Rather than imposing changes by forcing subtractions from one’s life, maybe it is best to add a new passion to life, one that will drown out the negativity and bad habits. One that will salvage your soul and keep you afloat in the ceaseless storm of survival.

A new passion. A new hobby. A new man. A new job. A new life.

Grains of sand

Think of yourself on a beach...


Take your time. Imagine yourself sitting on the warm crunchy sand, a light breeze gently whistling into your ear.

Close your eyes if you need to.

Smell the salt, feel the sun’s rays lighting up your eyelids as they stay closed.

Feel your body free.

On that beach, dig your hands into the soft white sand and extract a handful. Watch as it gently flows through your fingers back to its source. Slowly let go of all of the sand in your hand.

Now open your hand and look at it. I am certain you will find that one grain, one small grain, didn’t make it down with the exodus. Possibly, it is trapped between the gentle ridges that run across your palm. Or beneath a nail. Find it. Concentrate on it.

How many grains of sand do you think you picked up when you dug your hands into the ground? Can you think of a number? How many grains of sand exist on the very beach you are now enjoying? How many grains of sand exist on all the beaches of this planet?

Like that lone rider you discovered on the palm of your hand, a human life is miniscule and irrelevant in a vast incomprehensible ocean of matter and existence. We exist in a body of around 2 meters for what, 80 or 90 rotations of the Earth around the sun? How many rotations do you think the Earth has gone through or will go through? How many rotations has the Sun done its star cluster? The star cluster in the galaxy? The galaxy amongst the estimated 500 billion galaxies?

Yet like that lone rider we are trapped in the lines of an invisible hand. We believe we and our problems are special, different, unique. Our perspective is so limited, we aspire to leave a legacy on this Earth and a mark on those around us. To be remembered.

It is insanely ironic.

Yet on the other hand, perhaps the perceived infiniteness of the universe around us is meant to discourage us from concentrating on it and to see it as the microcosm instead. If the world, as you perceive it, is merely just perception interpreted by your own senses, then perhaps it should not be the focal point of your life, of truth or of gain.

In more direct terms, life is too short and insignificant to be wasted on negativity, worry and ugliness. Place your problems in the perspective of the universe and you will have none. See your life as temporary and fragile and you will truly live it. You will never take yourself seriously again.

It just so happened

It just so happened that, four weeks ago to the day at 7.00pm, I realised I had misread the invitation to the Ivy Club and, even though the party was bound to end at 8.00pm, something possessed me to catch a cab and head straight there to enjoy one drink with everyone. It just so happened that, ten minutes later when Trafalgar Square was in gridlock, I jumped out of the cab and decided to walk up St Martin’s Lane anyway, instead of giving up and heading to Soho. When I arrived, you sat right across from me. The world paused. We sat and exchanged puzzled glances and QR codes.


It just so happened that my 9.00am flight to Oslo the next morning was never to be. I showed up at check-in and Expedia had failed to make the booking on my behalf, even though they sent me a confirmation number. I have never heard of this happening to anyone. The flight was overbooked and the ticket counter lady was baffled at the error. It was a beautiful autumn day in London, and I took the express back to the city. We had a weekend of getting to know each other that may have never been.

It just so happened that the one night we could escape the eyes of our friends and consummate the brimming attraction was the night before mass demonstrations in London. I didn’t need to go to work next day. We spent the day walking around, having brunch, afternoon tea and dinner. It was your last day in London. Your parents were waiting for you in Paris.

It just so happened that, a few heart-wrenching days later, work sent me to Paris on a Friday to spend the weekend. Away from the eyes of London we built a cocoon out of pure bliss. It just so happened that your childhood friends from Paris were some of the most wonderful people I’d met in a long time, who went out of their way to make sure I was included in every event.

But it also just so happens that you live in Beirut.

I feel like I have beaten all the odds, except the most important one. One error in the perfect timing all of this plot followed could have meant an altogether different outcome. And yet, it doesn't even matter in the end.

Love is a frightful thing.