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WHY WE STARE AT THE STARS

 

September 17, 1989

 

 

 

Ayad Izzet Gharbawi

 

 

 

The people are tired, the people are weary; bored in their life styles; bored with their relationships with other people, including members of their own family.

The people are yearning for fulfilment that is somehow completely lacking, yet these issues are simply not addressed by our culture and its outlets – such as the TV, film, music, fashion industries.

People are tired of these lives we are leading, strangely boring and utterly unexotic lacking in all that one feels and needs.

And so, our dreams expand in direct proportion with our distressing boredom within our dysfunctional lives.

Our deepest desires, our fanciest dreams explode within us – and all are unfulfilled precisely because of the restraints imposed upon us, by our society, our culture, our educational system and so on.

The consequences to this bleak situation are simple: escapism. Thus, we drink to liberate ourselves from the boredom and the failures and the daily frustrations we encounter on an hourly basis. We socialise anywhere, and carry on having the silliest conversations with the most tedious person because all we want to is to escape from the realities of our lives on this revolving planet, the realities that are so motionless, frigid, lifeless = and ultimately so dead.

That is the sad truth of our lives; we all look at the stars for the exact same reasons the ancient poets starred at the beautiful gems in the skies: escapism; for, we stare at the stars because those distances awe us, while at the same time, unfortunately, so much of the bland and the dead is so near to us.

We stare at those eternal stars, because of our fanciful imaginations of what paradises distant could be and could look like, and it is our heartfelt desire, hope and passionate wishes to see and be in a world that can claim to have serenity, beauty and having a life full of meaningfulness, as opposed to our lives here, that are filled with so much meaninglessness.

The stars represent vivid reminders to us sad mortals here of the seemingly closeness of the Heavens, of the seemingly closeness of Paradise. The essence of escapism is an escape from our mediocre routines of our daily lives; from our dull conversations; from our empty relationships with each other and with our own selves.

 

 

Ayad Izzet Gharbawi