Ayoub Semaan

Spoken in English. Their words, as they said them.

Experiencing this moment as a, you know, being at an edge, between being here and being in another place, another time.

It's like a pull of the sound of the birds, the wind in the trees outside, sound of the road.

And in my mind, I have all these images of other people a long time ago in Lebanon.

The sense of, like, living these two lives.

One is relived with fondness and a lot of love and one is lived with curiosity and a bit of apprehension.

You can even feel my body like teetering on the edge between those two worlds.

Lucky and very grateful to be here and the life that I have and the life that I've had.

The twin or Siamese sibling of luck and gratitude is guilt and survivor's guilt in some way. I could have not been here.

Could have not made it through multiple wars.

Could have not made it through, you know, bureaucratic hoops and economic woes and missed opportunities.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like to have those things not always joined by the head, those experiences.

Maybe the not teetering is more groundedness, which feels so alien.

I'm also thinking about borrowing groundedness. You know, when I can't find it from myself, I borrow it. I'm lucky to have a lot of family and friends who have who seem to be more grounded or have found ground than that I can borrow from.

I wonder what they borrow from me.

I was thinking yesterday about our meeting today and I'm thinking that I was curious about when the war would show up because it shows up, you know, it always shows up for me. And, you know, in those In the past few years, I've had this experience that anthropologists talk about of familiar being strange and the strange becoming familiar and realizing that what we've always taken for granted this experience of war, being in war, being surrounded by war. And now this very familiar thing has become a bit strange.

And I know it comes up all the time for me and for others.

It's a little bit of a, you know, ever present companion.

Sometimes cumbersome.

I feel somehow impertinent or shameful. In French, it would be impudic to talk about that because I'm not alone. This is an experience that millions of others have been in in the same wars that I grew around but also in others.

And my experience of it was in many ways very tame. I didn?t have to fight.

I didn't have to, you know, ferry family away, you know, young children from one place to the other. And here it is.

Funny thing for me about remembering what we call the war, but also the multiple wars. Our warlike situations I've been in is the most striking experience is one of silence and quietude.

It almost feels good also to get it out of the way in this in this self conversation because at least I know, okay, you know, it's here, we're good.

Silence, I'm just realizing that, silence is often, for me, I find it it difficult to hold or to be in only because it's so closely associated with violence. Yeah, I never made this connection before maybe what that's what attracted me to be here. It's like, you know, what does it look like to be in silence or with silence?

Sometimes I long for silence and I'm maybe I'm afraid also because, longing for silence might also be longing for violence.

When I was 12 years old in school, every beginning of the year, they would give us these, notebooks, agendas with a calendar to write write down our homework assignments. And every Sunday on the page of every Sunday, there used to be a text or a poem or something and I remember one of them it was attributed to Albert Camus that I kept I still have it. It says that for us to be fully human, our task on Earth is to do everything in our power to combat, fight violence for others, for the benefit of others, combat violence. That text has been a bit of a guiding light for me.

Over time, you know, getting to know Camus a little bit better for someone who took for granted the absurdity of life or the arbitrariness of human experiences.

The call to fight for humanity as all that we've got has become more potent.

I think that over time also the I can start feeling the edges being broken, a little bit, smoothened over. Maybe me settling a little bit or feeling okay with this idea of my fighting for my fellow human enough.

I could be doing this somewhere else rather than, you know, coaching or holding spaces to make human experiences better or to enable personal growth and development or being a nice husband, father, cousin, son.

Could do more and how can I be okay with what I'm doing?

The other teetering, they see myself in and the burden of the fighting. Someone who used to be my mentor, who was a priest and spiritual guide at my school, whom I saw years after school. I quoted this sentence from the prayer, our father, who art in heaven, is on earth as it is in heaven.

And working on earth is just, you know, the idea of heaven and the ideal of heaven is so attractive.

It's also, you know, heaven. We're not there yet. There's no need to be there. Holding that aspiration on Earth is, yeah, the work of many lifetimes.

I was saying earlier that I feel gratitude.

It's mostly for the gift that I've I have found life for the most part to be exhilarating.

Sometimes too exhilarating to handle. I remember just before I left Lebanon the first time, I used to study in this school that was on top of a hill and the class that I used to sit in has these wide windows. Outside the window you could see the Mediterranean and ships coming to dock into the port and there was the blue sky, the dark blue of the sea. And it was an area where you could see a lot of green still in the hills.

Bright yellow sun.

And all I wanted was to bottle this up and then keep it in. That is exhilarating. I feel the exhilaration even now, twenty years later.

My work is in, you know, in coaching and facilitation and I I remember, I remember also to still live. I mean, there are always these moments of intense and deep connection.

I don't even know what intense and deep mean but it just there's a feeling and an experience of relationship that feels special. Just feels infinite. And I visited a few friends in California and I remember, you know, sitting with with them on a bench in a park in San Francisco.

And I felt infinite.

Having a loud meal with visitors and parents and cousins and in laws is exhilarating.

There's always a space for exhilaration. It's also, I'm also seeing popping in my head those other words, which is exaltation or exhaustion, which are probably close, close relatives.

I lost a friend when I was 14. It was bubbly and funny and clever, playful.

And just, you know, in the month before he died, I, he and I had some kind of a falling out.

And then a few weeks before he died, we had a rekindling of our friendship. And boisterous laugh. And for the lesson that he gave me, it's a deal like things are not a big deal and a lot of things are not worth it.

I kind of wish we didn't have that falling out because it would have given me more time in friendship. And also that falling out allowed me to cherish the friendship that we had and the rekindling even more.

There's a place where all these things come together also. I realize that my, my work in facilitating groups individual development has a lot to do with, you know, uncovering violence, discovering violence, making making it okay to be with it, but also transcend it with a smile and with labor and with friendship, connection.

Love.