The Key Ingredient
We argue and fight. Nothing has changed for thirty years now, the same nation split into two over disagreements and misunderstandings, as a result, a turmoil of horror always hanging over our heads. We barely get enough sleep to open our saddened weary eyes.
We live in constant fear of gunfire.
War then becomes a profitable commodity of loss. It is such a seductive and explosive chemistry; once it’s stared, it ignites like wildfire, and it doesn’t just stop at one place, but only when everything is simmered to shards of ashes.
Someone once said that if you’re willing to pay attention and listen before talking or killing, you can save yourself from the guilts of losing your soul. You can avoid time-consuming and disastrous debates, meetings, and maybe even come out on top winning, of course, if that’s your main goal. Yet, most people still don’t have a clue how to go about doing either of those actions, controlling their fuming rages during arguments. It always ends with burning the same bridge twice, opening a window for darkness to creep in and start eradicating whatever comes defying it.
The same is happening today. We’re still arguing and fighting, even during a vital national security conference, in which the two groups are unable to bend the curves, lending ears, and letting hearts do the talking instead of their logical minds. An argument without a change of perspectives at the end is just a war between body and soul.
It’s hot on a cold January day. Just like any other day throughout the year, it’s raining outside today, pouring down like Babylon fire. We got used to the cold, blistering weather here. We only get a few months to salvage the beauty of nature to go outside and chase the dandelions. I guess when you stop searching for the lights, you can find comfort in odd places, even in the trenches of darkness. Sometimes, acceptance brings peace out of the wreckages of desolation, if you settle down with the soft outcries that dance in your head.
People need to listen to those soft voices behind the hidden chanting clatters that burn the house.
We walk into the building with absent minds and cold hearts.
Once the elevator reached the 23 floors, we’re led to the same conference room that we’ve gathered many times before. We know our sides, and where we should be sitting down by heart separately. We walk into the bright room and assume our positions, our tiger eyes blazing like gunfire at each other.
The moderators watch as we shake our stained hands in disdain. We bring ourselves to sit. Suddenly, everything stops, time freezes, so quiet we can hear a pin drop. Nobody’s breathing air or saying a thing.
An infrangible silence is swirling and suffocating the room, burning it like acid, peeling the parched flesh off, almost turning the occupying living things in it into pieces. If the outsider moderators are not staying put as guardians and peacekeepers, we, the enemies who are sitting on the opposite sides of the big table seem anxious to reach to the other aisle and tear each other apart like wild animals, until each is left with nothing but decayed and broken bones. We’re all been here before, screaming at each other to uphold our own truth about the border conflict, yet each meeting has ended disastrously, further plunging our regions into more chaos and turmoil.
We both lack cohesive communication skills, ears that listen and retain the music of the soundwave of the crying souls who are living or lying dead painfully. We never set aside our differences to see anyone’s points but charged making the opposite side an agitator or presumed enemy by default; that’s how we’ve been missing to see the bigger picture of the problem in producing an everlasting and stable solution.
For all these bleak and wasteful years, the key ingredient missing from all these is listening, openness, and tolerance; a communication without one of them is meaningless like blowing a breath of fire away into the wild wind.