The dilemma in Cairo seems so much to resemble the dilemma inside of me that I feel myself jump when the people in Tahrir Square jump, surge when the people surge, and retreat when they retreat.
The people in the square have, for the last 30 years, lived in an atmosphere of such repression that they seem to be finding difficulty taking each new step on the road to independence.
No one seems to hit upon the idea of calling various people together and beginning the process of forming a new government or a police force or any other kind of public service.
Instead people seem to be showing up in the square without any real idea of what comes next. It’s as if everyone is waiting for someone to miraculously appear and arrange things for them. They have left the old but that haven’t entered the new and seem to have no sense of how to do it or what the new may be.
And in my own personal life I’m acting in the very same fashion. I’ve lived an an atmosphere that I’ve considered “normal” for perhaps as many years. But only in 2007 did I begin to awaken to how repressed my life was. Saul calls it “illusion” but to me it was just “normal.” I’ve listened to our sources and have imbibed the notion that a new way of life is coming, emerging.
But still I seem to be just showing up each day without any real idea of what comes next. I know I’m waiting for something miraculous to appear and arrange things for me. I’ve left the old and entered the new but with no real sense of how to do it or what the new may be.
It’s even worse. What Saul calls “illusion” and I call “normal” is safe and comfortable for me. What he calls “full consciousness” I, in the deepest recesses of my mind, consider “delusion” and the more steps I take towards it, the more I doubt myself and feel uncomfortable.
“Full consciousness”? Is it full consciousness to take a stand or is it simply bravado and display? Who am I to take a stand? What do I really mean by it? Self-doubt arises and carries my clarity away just as opposition arises for the people in the square and carries their clarity away.
Both I and the people of Cairo are in a “no man’s land.” The idea has not yet arisen in either of us to take ourselves in hand and create the new. We both waffle and waver and stand on the verge, afraid to go forward and unable to go back.
This is an acutely uncomfortable time for me, as surely as it is for the people of Cairo as well. I almost need something to confront, something to come up against to galvanize me into action, to assume command of myself and take the next step.
And so it appears for the people of Cairo as well. Perhaps the pro-Mubarak forces for them are the galvanizing agent that will transform them from lost souls, like me, who have emerged from a form of civil slavery but don’t yet know how to fend for themselves, just as I don’t either.
Are the people of Cairo doing my work for me? Am I doing their work for them?
Who will find their way first ? Or will we find our way together?
Nothing is as it was and yet nothing ahead of me is clear.
Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps it isn’t a case of what went before and what comes after.
Perhaps it’s a question of what is found inside of me. Perhaps I’m looking in the wrong place. Perhaps the answer lies in the very center, deep down in the very heart of me. Deep down. Deep, deep down.