- in the name of Allah -



Why does a person do what they do? What drives their behavior, tendencies, rationale? I suspect that many old friends of mine have always been curious why I'd have times of "hibernation" where I would not talk to people for awhile or really limit social contact to zero. One of the most basic reasons for this occurred to me, and so I think it's important enough to record here.

In life, one can always be seen as being 'above' or 'below' other people. There are social and cultural and societal delineations made along these strata, whether by biological nature (ie family as son/daughter) or structural/hierarchical (ie as boss/employee) or tradition (ie as caste/social class). Along these lines, I regard myself as 'below' my parents, who are 'above' me. This is not something I always understood, but as time passed and I reached a point of manifest equilibrium in my relationship with them, including accepting the past and them for all they are, this was something that became ever more clear.

My parents supported me when I was little and had no conception of dependency or obligation. They supported me as I got older, still fairly clueless as to what I owed them. Then, even now as I trudge through adulthood, they have my back if and when should I ever need them. If I ever needed actual, tangible reasons to justify why they should be 'above' me, I had it in front of me. Of course, that was just by the end-stage. I saw how much they had done, sacrificed, devoted, upheld, expressed, protected, admonished, guided, supported, corrected, pushed, and various other things- all for my sake. How can one possibly reach any other conclusion except that this relationship is entirely deserving of parents being 'above' and me, as the child, being 'below'? It's naturally intuitive. Not only that, but this inclination falls in line with both religious and cultural predispositions, which thankfully my own nature corroborates completely. 

That obviousness said, what does that have to do with my isolationist tendencies? The answer is that in every social relationship, there is an implicit desire or mechanism happening which people automatically use to judge/categorize/place into relative order their relationships with others. I have no desire to be 'below' anyone other than my parents. By even the laws of nature and human progeneration, in the tree existing that maps out the entire species, they came before me and I came after them. According to time itself, there is no other way it can be, except that they are literally and figuratively, 'above' me. But with regards to non-family, there are no such natural laws, only presumptions and biases and prejudices that people build up through years and years of preconditioning and conscious and subconscious choices. 

All of that is to say, when I am dealing with those non-family, when I say or do something, or someone else says or does something which implicitly creates or defines the barrier of 'above' versus 'below', there is nothing I can use from myself to challenge that conception. Not only do my worldly qualifications mean nothing to me, I don't have that many to begin with. To top it all off, I care little for the accumulation of wealth or property or social standing. What matters to me, what has always mattered to me, is all of that which cannot be seen: ideals, character, philosophy, history, knowledge, etc. I have never truly cared about the physical plane in the same way. And honestly I don't really care to challenge those superficial conceptions, except that sometimes it occurs with friends. How does the square fit into a round hole? This is the parable of me and almost everyone I've met in life. There is definitely sadness in that I have had many friendships, since high school onward, that have decayed (some by necessity), because the path I took was so divergent from the typical. There's just no way for me to be comfortable in that kind of setting, the ones that allow people to usually relate to each and find common ground and basis for understanding and friendship. What does a friend mean to me? What would I mean to a friend? The answer to these questions is totally not immune to the general human proclivity to want to categorize and label and ascertain which is 'better' or 'above'. So the effect is that I am labeled, sometimes rightfully so, and I have no response, no explanation to give to my friends that could justify my nature in context of life itself. How does one begin to outline one's existence to another, such that their rougher tendencies make sense? I don't think it's possible. I'm not even sure it should be possible, the need to explain this way about one's self to another.

All of which lead me to seek no one's company other than my family's from time to time. Had I been born into another society, I've often thought I'd be a shepherd keeping his sheep, living not far from his cave. These personal self-conceptions do little to bridge the immense gap between me and life. I have no idea how to explain these things in simple terms, for me to express it required a process and reflection that I don't think people typically have time for. I would imagine for another person to come to a similar point of understanding...either impossible or forever. Of course it's said that friends are those who understand regardless and can appreciate despite the things that don't make sense. Even this I think is an idealistic way of looking at it, but I know exceptions to my jaded thinking do exist. The only caveat is, I need to be able to give them a chance to prove it.