"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." – Annie Dillard
It was darkness. Pitch black.
Up ahead, a glimmer of light. A heavy tome, its pages old and yellowed, sandwiched amidst thick gnarled leather.
Then suddenly, the book flies open, and the pages are flipped open in quick succession by an invisible hand. And all around, a raucous laugh, echoing and unremitting. Not laughing at anyone or anything, but delighting in the act of laughing, with just a hint of menace, a steel edge to the tone of rejoicing.
Then I wake up.
Hi, my name is Ziad, and I am a bookaholic.
Like, yeah, addicted to books.
I should be specific, of course. I have been a reader since I first learnt my alphabet, back at the age of 3. (My mother never fails to remind me of the story of how she was told by a pediatrician that Yes, your son is short-sighted, and Yes, you need to teach him his ABCs real quick so that we can get him tested. And that’s why all my toddler photos are of geeky Ziad in too-large glasses.)
So yes, I have been reading for as long as I can remember. And it makes my reading habit even more inevitable that my mother was, for many years, a librarian at a teachers’ training college. My entire childhood has been surrounded by, comforted by, engulfed by, and flooded with books.
But around about the time I had just finished graduating, and started to work, I fell prey to a related, but far more pernicious disease: I became addicted to *buying* books. The constant logic is that Oh, at least I am spending my hard-earned money on Knowledge, rather than frivolous things.
And that is how my books at home kept piling up.
When I moved into my in-laws’, and later on when I moved into our own home, I kept up the habit. Whenever I got depressed, my usual destinations would be McDonald’s, or Kinokuniya. On really bad days, both.
It got to such a ridiculous level that I now have books piled up on bookshelves, by my bedside, on my working desk, and on the floor, flush to the wall near our patio. I have books in the car, books on my working desk. Everywhere. We have started to donate books to charities and non-profit bookstores, but it has hardly made a dent in our ever-growing pile of books.
So, as a New Year’s Resolution for 2023, both Kat and I resolved not to buy any new books for the entire year. The only exception was for books that we could buy if we were travelling overseas. (I have recently discovered a loophole – downloading books on my Kindle! – but I reason to myself that I haven’t broken my resolution since no money is changing hands. Yeah, very Clintonian, I know!)
It helps that I now try to focus my reading via my Kindle, which of course is more portable, and can contain many more books that my bookshelves at home ever could. I miss those moments of “bookbathing” in Kinokuniya, and I still make my way there from time to time, though so far I have been very steadfast with my resolution.
Yes, my name is Ziad, and I am, indeed, a bookaholic.
Aku diajar tentang Fitrah
Tentang naluri teras ciptaan
Yang terukur teratur indah
Jadi batu asas sang Insan
Mereka diajar tentang Fitrah
Kalau lelaki begini jadinya
Kalau perempuan begitu pula
Semuanya lazim mengikut lumrah
Kita diajar tentang Fitrah
Seolah insan wataknya mudah -
Kalau lelaki: ketua keluarga
Kalau perempuan: dapur tempatnya
Kalau lelaki: jadi pemimpin
Kalau wanita: menyalin lampin
Tugas lelaki: mentadbir buana
Tugas wanita: menggoncang dunia
(Nun jauh rantai asbabnya
Kononnya buaian mencerna kuasa)
Ini ajarku perihal Fitrah:
Setiap insan pelbagai lumrah
Maksud Adil penuh ma’rifat
Setiap sesuatu terletak tepat
Kalau Rafidah: jadilah Menteri
Jangan disorok tepi perigi
Kalau Zeti: jadilah Gubenur
Pasti iktisad cantik teratur
Kalau Jemilah: jadilah Doktor
Harum nama negara masyhur
Ini hakikat ertinya Fitrah:
Setiap insan dicipta Allah
Lengkap kamil dengan cirinya
Setiap seorang tiada sama
Tanda hormat sesama insan:
Mengukur kain pada sang badan
Tinggi budi tinggilah maqam
Itulah janji Allah Yang Akram!
One of the most difficult things that I had to get used to, when I first came up to boarding school in Melaka, was the cussing. It was not just that it was casual – friends would greet each other by the side of the road with “Woi, sial! Lama tak nampak!”, faces beaming – but that it was constant and unthinking. Everyday, everywhere, all at once, you could hear a chorus of Babi and Lahanat and Celaka in a hundred parallel conversations at any given moment.
Cussing was a big part of the culture – the price of admission to be part of the tribe.
I remember one afternoon, a couple of us played a stupid parlour game to see who can let out the longest unbroken stream of expletives, like a string of polished pearls of excrement – gleeful wannabe rappers with a bad case of Tourette’s, going babikaulahanatcelakapukimakpantatlancaucibaimakkau! at the utmost top of our voices.
Swearing as an art form: we were incorrigible.
Not long after boarding school, when I went overseas for A-Levels, I became the unfortunate existential trial that God inflicted on my pious, budak-sekolah-agama housemate. He would wince at every profanity that came out of my foul mouth. Certainly he was too polite to tell me off, so I had to find out from someone else that he was seriously considering moving to another house to get away from my baleful influence. Of course, I found this mortifying – I thought of myself as a good boy, and my housemate was such a gentle soul that the very thought of him moving out, because of my cussing, was a painful thought.
I cleaned up my act, and my potty mouth, pretty quickly.
This classic book by Carl Rogers, first published in 1961, will likely be the most important book I read this year.
Useful and enlightening, Carl Rogers’ approach to psychotherapy resonates with what I believe to be my own take on life: that humans are deeply unique, and that one of our most primary tasks in Life is to give full expression and flowering to the most singular and delightful aspects of our human existence.
Unlike other luminaries of psychotherapy such as Freud and Jung, Rogers believed in a far more grounded and almost ridiculously basic approach to therapy: that the primary responsibility of the therapist is to provide a safe and confidential space for persons to learn to listen to themselves, and to fully experience the entire spectrum of their emotions. His belief was that when patients rediscover what it means to become and be themselves, they will learn that they already have the resources within themselves to recover their own dignity and self-worth.
Most importantly: Rogers walks the talk. Through his flowing and honest prose, the reader gets a sense of who he is – humble, curious, empowering, democratic, authentic, sincere, perhaps even a touch naive.
Rogers also brought two novel approaches to psychotherapy. The first was his conviction that the efficacy and usefulness of what he called “client-centred therapy” or “person-centred approach” could be proven scientifically, through rigorous experiments which were carefully documented and published in the leading psychology journals of his day. His other innovation, which was to grow to become a leading preoccupation for him in his later years, was that the basic principles of his approach to psychotherapy had real and vital applications in fields far beyond the therapist’s room: in the classroom, amongst married couples, and even in the drawing rooms and conference halls of high diplomacy. He was certain that the greatest problems of his age could be solved by an appeal to the fundamentals of human creativity and decency.
Most importantly, from my point of view, his perspective on human communications suggests that we already have the tools we need to form a better life for ourselves:
Some books come along at the moment when you most need them. Reading this book gave me further validation that the way I see the world is a way that could work well, and I finished the book with the hope that here was a roadmap that I could walk in my every day to become a better person.
In other words, this was a 5-star read that I would highly highly recommend to anyone interested in an engaging and coherent approach towards living a Good Life.
Aku selalu bingung.
Aku diajar untuk patuh taat. Ikut perintah ayah. Ikut perintah mak. Ikut perintah guru. Patuh arahan loceng sekolah, patuh pengawas, patuh peraturan sekolah.
Aku ikut. Patuh. Belajar rajin-rajin. Masuk universiti. Dapat degree. Kerja keras. Beli kereta. Beli rumah. Kawin. Dapat anak. Dapat kenaikan pangkat. Kalau untung, dapat gelar Datuk, gelar Tan Sri.
Patuh arahan lampu isyarat, patuh undang-undang, patuh saranan Kerajaan.
Semuanya aku ikut. Jadi kenapa aku masih rasa bingung? Kenapa aku selalu rasa ada benda yang memulas dalam perut, memulas dalam kepala, katanya kenapakausiniapakaunaksiapaengkauapamaksudsemuaini?
We were walking through the throngs of shopping mall patrons, side-stepping wayward jaywalkers like a crazed penguin computer game, trying not to bump into daydreaming children and their dazed parents.
From behind us, a toddler was bawling her brains out, desperate screams piercing through the mall muzak. Seconds later, we noticed the mother walking briskly past us, her right hand firmly clasped around her child. The kid must have been around three years old, thrashing around in her mother’s arms as she was being carried like an unruly roll of carpet, limbs a-flailing in time with her wailing.
“Parenting is hard,” Kat noted as we saw the mother rush through the crowd. The mother was struggling to keep her game face on, grimly marching forward as onlookers stared at her carrying her banshee child through the mall.
“Humaning is hard,” I said.
“Amen.”
I sleep very well at night, these days. I make my ablutions, I commit to my prayers. I seek His guidance and His mercy. I take a bath – I slough off the detritus of the day’s struggles. Into bed, and into a book – the words and pages and chapters are a benediction. My evening meditation against the defeats and disappointments of a human existence. Then the words lull me into a welcome embrace – it’s alright. Everything is alright.