The passing days were about pain, relaxing and reading . The greatest gift I received after the injury is the ability to experience pain suddenly, without any ability to predict when it would come, and in varying intensities. There’s pain that comes for a visit and immediately goes on, and pain that throws his bags in your living room, lays himself on the sofa, stretches his legs and smiles, knowing he is going to stay here a few days. Fortunately, many shrapnel swept over my body so that every time it hurts somewhere else and so i’m never bored. Pain has a tendency to lead the mind to places where unwanted evils nests and you should do your best to get out of it as soon as possible. Sometimes I curse the doctors for not amputating my leg, even though it wasn’t necessary to remove. My right foot tends to make me hit something with my fist, just to feel something else. My stomach has a tendency to get me smoking a lot and drinking a lot, ‘till lose of all sense or recognition, whichever comes first. My right hand will make me stop and breathe deeply. And my exhausted soul from all these pains will make me search for adventure that will generate the adrenaline to justify the pains. For what is it worth to experience pain while sitting in a small apartment in Tel Aviv. While in pain, this time it was my blocked gallbladder which triggered uproar, I was drowning in a book by Ophir Touche Gafala, The Day the Music Died, and I was amazed how the universe handed me the right book at the right time. Good books tend to inspire me with deep emotion and it seems that they occurred just to reinforce what I think and feel. “The greatest gift a person has received, is the ability to revolt.” He writes, adding “The majority of humanity ignores it completely bowed to the decrees of life like a flattery rape victim, revolting on themselves, almost by habit, to protect themselves.” Just last week I wrote to you, my few readers, to dream and not give in, and now, this time it’s been written to me.
The story takes place in a town where a mysterious boy told the inhabitants of the city the day of their death, and since then they live knowingly when they’ll die. Stressful isn’t it? The question that arises from the book is, what is better? knowing when you die so that you could be sufficient to achieve as much as possible, or perhaps the lack of knowledge, so you could still get excited and scared. As I was lying in the Irrigation canal, bleeding to death in Lebanon, I was peaceful as I knew it was not my time to go, despite all the evidence showing otherwise. The question that came to me during my days of recovery and still laments to this day is, why? Why had I survived the fatal injury and others, who suffered a slighter injury still lost their lives? I thought arrogantly that maybe I was given a mission in life that must be completed before I depart. But what it was, I did not know and still do not know. Sense of accomplishment began to burn within my bones and I knew I’d never know peace until the final rest. I began with a list of dreams I wrote sometime around the age of 15 and started to implement them. Only children know how to dream big and I decided to remain a child. Death is not relevant in my present, it’ll happen in due time. What is relevant is the pain that paralyzes the human ability to think clearly and keep moving forward, the pain that fogs even the brightest day and punches harder in the dark days. The fog I can handle, the dark days, not so much.
Back to the book, countless bands and songs are mentioned in it, like it has its own soundtrack. The main character lives her life with the soundtrack she chose for herself and all her life events are linked to songs, whether it be to the words or whether to the melody. And here I mentioned two songs of my own soundtrack in the last post, and now I ask myself in hope, will a song of mine get honored like this? since it is the top achievement for a musician. I do not know anything except that I should keep writing and hope that someone would find himself in a verse or in a line in one of the songs, and that I will be part of his life’s soundtrack. Maybe one day my shouts “Wake up” will touch someone and he will rebel on existence, routine and fear, and see me as his brother in arms in this battle, since it is among the hardest and longest battles. In romantic movies and songs you can always find the same phrase “I would die for you”. I hear it and say to myself, cowards. The real challenge is to live for somebody and something. We will all die at some point but most of us aren’t truly living . I want to hear someone say, “I will not surrender to death for you. I would live for you” This is true love and not the sacrifice of life for the concept of love, for love will gradually wear out and fade like the rest of our memories.
I think of the other books I’ve read here, The Centenarian Who Climbed Out Through the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jónsson, Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, and I notice that in their own way they talk about living in the moment and experience it fully because the past has been experienced and the future will be experienced, so there is no point in going out of our way to experience them all at the same moment, this is an unnecessary burden. Unless we are dreaming and then, and allow me to quote again from The Day the Music Died, “When you look into the future you remember your dreams, your desires, all the things that haven’t happened to you, and you cannot not crave for them and reenact them, as if they already happened. If you have a healthy imagination, you can remember the tomorrow “
I leave you with a song
Sweat dreams
The story takes place in a town where a mysterious boy told the inhabitants of the city the day of their death, and since then they live knowingly when they’ll die. Stressful isn’t it? The question that arises from the book is, what is better? knowing when you die so that you could be sufficient to achieve as much as possible, or perhaps the lack of knowledge, so you could still get excited and scared. As I was lying in the Irrigation canal, bleeding to death in Lebanon, I was peaceful as I knew it was not my time to go, despite all the evidence showing otherwise. The question that came to me during my days of recovery and still laments to this day is, why? Why had I survived the fatal injury and others, who suffered a slighter injury still lost their lives? I thought arrogantly that maybe I was given a mission in life that must be completed before I depart. But what it was, I did not know and still do not know. Sense of accomplishment began to burn within my bones and I knew I’d never know peace until the final rest. I began with a list of dreams I wrote sometime around the age of 15 and started to implement them. Only children know how to dream big and I decided to remain a child. Death is not relevant in my present, it’ll happen in due time. What is relevant is the pain that paralyzes the human ability to think clearly and keep moving forward, the pain that fogs even the brightest day and punches harder in the dark days. The fog I can handle, the dark days, not so much.
Back to the book, countless bands and songs are mentioned in it, like it has its own soundtrack. The main character lives her life with the soundtrack she chose for herself and all her life events are linked to songs, whether it be to the words or whether to the melody. And here I mentioned two songs of my own soundtrack in the last post, and now I ask myself in hope, will a song of mine get honored like this? since it is the top achievement for a musician. I do not know anything except that I should keep writing and hope that someone would find himself in a verse or in a line in one of the songs, and that I will be part of his life’s soundtrack. Maybe one day my shouts “Wake up” will touch someone and he will rebel on existence, routine and fear, and see me as his brother in arms in this battle, since it is among the hardest and longest battles. In romantic movies and songs you can always find the same phrase “I would die for you”. I hear it and say to myself, cowards. The real challenge is to live for somebody and something. We will all die at some point but most of us aren’t truly living . I want to hear someone say, “I will not surrender to death for you. I would live for you” This is true love and not the sacrifice of life for the concept of love, for love will gradually wear out and fade like the rest of our memories.
I think of the other books I’ve read here, The Centenarian Who Climbed Out Through the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jónsson, Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut, Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, and I notice that in their own way they talk about living in the moment and experience it fully because the past has been experienced and the future will be experienced, so there is no point in going out of our way to experience them all at the same moment, this is an unnecessary burden. Unless we are dreaming and then, and allow me to quote again from The Day the Music Died, “When you look into the future you remember your dreams, your desires, all the things that haven’t happened to you, and you cannot not crave for them and reenact them, as if they already happened. If you have a healthy imagination, you can remember the tomorrow “
I leave you with a song
Sweat dreams