A few weeks ago I hit the Wall. Yes, that proverbial Wall. I can safely say it was the first time in my work life that I got there. And I decided to do the previously unthinkable to me: take off.

It is not that I am a workaholic; having had the life journey that I had, my biggest worry has always been taking my foot off the pedal. The definite roll-back that would follow frightened me. It is not something I wanted to face or deal with.

.. the worst thing about the Wall is the ricochet .. if you don’t grab onto awareness .. you will head straight back, bouncing off The Wall .. losing a piece of who you are with every impact ...

Fear, therefore, has always been a contributor to this keep-going attitude of mine: to work more, longer, harder, every day. But, you drive that fast for that long, what do you come up to? Hello, Wall.

Let me describe the Wall to you. Your body aches, everywhere. You put a hand on where it hurts, and you don’t feel anything wrong there, but the pain intensifies and moves to another body part. You are in a fog; yesterday, today and tomorrow all merge into one. You are running on autopilot, irritable and unpleasant. You lose the compassion you have for all things living. You sleep but you don’t rest. You eat and you can’t stop eating, trying to fill that hole inside you, but it is bottomless. You stop caring, your performance turns south, and you begin to self-loathe.

But the worst thing about the Wall is the ricochet. You hit, you bounce off, and if you don’t grab onto awareness and stop yourself, you will head straight back, bouncing off The Wall like a rubbery ball time and time again, losing a piece of who you are with every impact until you are no longer recognizable, to yourself nor to others.

When faced with the threat of The Wall, awareness is your helmet and life jacket.

Stop. Feel, think, and see how you are and who you are. While work is a part of all of us, it is not the whole. We have a duty to nurture the whole. It is enough that the world is hard on you, don’t be hard on yourself too. Allow yourself the awareness of your situation, and take a break.

I did.

4 days into my “mental health break” I realized that what had been causing my heart to miss beats was the Fear. The Fear of what would happen if I took my foot off the gas pedal and my life began to roll backwards, lose my livelihood, my position? Fairly common feelings, I would imagine.

Ok. Now, compare that to the fear you have of causing damage to your heart, your immune system, or to develop a stress induced non-communicable disease? Fear of losing your health, your friends or your family because you had become intolerable and insufferable?

Today, 15 days after I checked myself out to begin a. mental and physical reset, I am heading back to my life, to find the gas peddle again. On the flight back, I did a body scan to see how i feel.

Guess what? I feel great! I lost that sense of heaviness, the cloud in my head has blown away, and the procrastination streak has been slayed.

I may have even turned magnetic! 😃 To my surprise, I have had two total strangers comment to me on my “glow” this morning. Several people at the airport broke into smiles upon making eye contact with me, and three stopped in the plane aisle to have long and really profound conversations with me, uninvited! And, 2 Emirates cabin crew (usually quite professional and detached) asked for a hug as I was leaving the aircraft!! 😃😃

The healing is visible, it seems.

I have to thank @barberynresorts for helping me reset and going back to neutral. The care from the doctors and staff is exemplary. The therapists are caring and giving without limit. Barberyn is my happy place. I have been going there since 2016 for short breaks. I would not entrust my reset to anyone else.

My last note is, please take a mental health break. Try and find your neutral again. The Wall is ugly. No one should get to the Wall.

It is also a story that proves that good is innate to humans, and that it will always prevail.

Driving Miss Nuha

The way she described it, she said, “and then it is as if the skies opened, and this young man on a moped, out of nowhere, was standing next to me asking, ‘does anyone here need help?’ he asked.”

My 82 year-old mother sat in the backseat of her LR2 Land Rover on the right-hand side. Ramez, her driver of 25 years, was driving her out of Beirut to her summer home in Brummana after a visit to her endocrinologist in the city. Just as the car cleared the ramp leading onto the highway that runs along Beirut Port, mum looked to her left and asked Ramez what he thought was all that white smoke fast approaching them. Before she finished her sentence, and before he could answer her, she said, the entire sky turned a bright pink. She looks at Ramez and finds his face covered in blood, he looks at her and simply says, “what do we do now?”

At that point they did not know what had happened. They felt nothing, they heard nothing. They only saw a white plume then pink skies everywhere .. and now they were negotiating the front and back doors to the right of the car to get out of it and stand on the tarmac. As she looked around, she described a scene of emptiness and quiet. Little did she or Ramez know they were standing — alive! — in the eye of one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in history. She said, there was no one around, no people no cars. Imagine? That highway at 6 o’clock of an August evening! How surreal! “Just one car, in the far distance, with a man standing beside it, waving both his arms up in the air — at nobody!”

Ramez tells the young man on the food-delivery moped to take my mother, who is also covered in her own blood, to the nearest hospital, and not to worry about him, he will call his son to come for him. My mother reaches back into the car, on the back seat are her bright red handbag and some ‘important’ papers she had collected from lawyers after finishing with the doctor earlier. She grabs both and hops on the moped, side-saddle, and they drive off. But she was not comfortable. She asks him to stop, gets off, hitches her skirt all the way up, and rides behind him holding on to him for dear life.

My mother was lucky that day. Much luckier than, sadly, many many others. One second here or there, one meter ahead or behind, and she may have suffered bigger injuries, if not fatal ones. It was also lucky that she insisted that morning that for her drive into the city, they use the LR2, the heavier chassis of the 2 cars in her household. She is lucky to have Ramez, a true magnanimous Beiruti with a strong sense of loyalty and a sharp moral compass. And she was lucky for Khodor, who miraculously escaped injury from the blast himself, to have been within meters of where her car came to a full halt as a result of the blast.

Khodor kept asking my mum to ease off grabbing him as he drove with her seated behind him over the rubble and glass that completely covered the streets, and past the innumerable bodies of the dead and injured. She was holding on too tight. At 82, it was her first time on a moped :) . Add the scenes they passed and her state of shock, Khodor figured she must be frightened. He abruptly stopped his moped, dismounted, grabbed a helmet he found on the ground, dusted it, and put it on my mother’s head, then continued to drive her to the nearest hospital.

CMC was full. Men standing well out on the street outside the A&E entrance were turning injured away. AUBMC also turned them away. By which point, the grabbing got too uncomfortable for Khodor, so he stopped and got off his moped. He walked the rest of the way alongside the moped pushing it with my mum sitting on it, dazed but now more comfortable, through the streets of Ras Beirut from one hospital to the next, till Najjar took her in and attended to her injuries.

He had given my mother his phone when he first picked her up and told her to call someone. Later on, throughout their ride/ walk, Khodor was answering calls from my sister updating her on where they had gotten to and which hospital they ended up in. Had he not done that, we would not have known whether she was alive or dead, in a morgue or ICU unit, on the ground somewhere or in a hospital.

He stayed with her in the hospital lobby where she was being attended to by a doctor and did not leave her, till my sister Hala finally arrived at Najjar Hospital, and he was sure mum had family with her. Earlier, Mum had reached into her handbag to give him some money as a token of thanks. He categorically refused her money! Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out some banknotes and said to her, “they may ask you for payment at the hospital. This is all I have with me, perhaps you will need it.”

Then he left.

Mama thankfully was spared that day. By the Grace of God, she had only minor bruises and glass injuries. A large piece of metal debris had caved the roof of the car in. The windshield also caved in and shattered but thankfully stayed in place, saving Ramez’s life. The car must have skidded left because it was found stopped right up to the concrete boulders of the central reservation, with the glass of the two windows to the left of the car — the side of the explosion — completely blown out. The next day, we found shrapnel, blood, and glass from the car windows inside mama’s handbag and shoes. She had worn those shoes all the way into the hospital, and on her way home out of hospital later on that night.

He arrived on the scene of my mother’s accident out of nowhere, but when he left, he never went too far. Two days later, Khodor sent a text message to Hala’s phone asking how mum was doing.

I called him a few days later. I wanted to thank him, but I was also very curious. Who is he? Where did he come from? How long after the blast went off did he reach my mother’s car? How come he was not injured?

“We were around .. A couple of minutes only .. Yeah we were knocked back hard; we flew about 5 meters up in the air, then we got up. I checked that I was not injured .. I saw an older woman covered in blood. I got on my moped, and drove over to her.”

Just like that.

— -

PS. Mum is not exactly religious. She smiles when we talk about this young man. She said to me, “shall I tell you something? The only time I ever visited a religious shrine to pray was about 20 years ago when your sister was sick. I prayed that God will spare and heal her to a full recovery. That was the shrine of Seedna El-Khodor*, the only saint I believe in ”

*El-Khodor is a saintly character that appears in Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and Druze narratives.