Bird Flu, Cool Doors and Misunderstandings

Well I think most people know by now that the Bird Flu has reached Egypt. I guess we found out about a week ago. A few days after the news hit, my son was sitting next to me on the bed and all of a sudden blurted out: “Bird flu! Bird flu! What’s all this talk about Bird Flu?? Who cares that the bird flew anyway?” Yah, I just raised my eyebrow to that one, too. I found the kids the next day playing with a long ostrich feather extracted from my feather duster, throwing it at each other and yelling “you’ve got the bird flu, you’ve got the bird flu”… it’s become the newest version of Cooties. Cooties 4.0

We have a brand new stove as well this week, thanks to the renovations we managed to get done while Mahmoud was here this year. The sticker on the front of our oven reads “Cool Door System”, describing the fact that when the oven is lit, the outside of the oven door stays cool. My daughter was reading this phrase the other night as I washed dishes and then asked me “so, I don’t get it… what’s so cool about that door?”

My friend and I took our kids to the park today, seeing as the weather was so unseasonably beautiful. Her son, Mo, promptly took off his shoes when we reached the sandy playground area and we lost track of where he had left them. We sent the three older children to go on a mission to search for Mo’s Shoes. My son jumped up alongside his sister, ready to be at my service, and then asked “but what are moshooes?”

Children have amazing imaginations and such sweet innocence. They don’t even know how much they don’t know. Their minds automatically fill in the blanks and give them their own way of understanding the language or experience set before them. Creativity is part of what makes us human. Unfortunately it can also backfire. All of us experience the world through our own personally fashioned filter, based on our attitudes that we choose to adopt. Some of us see the world through those proverbial rose colored glasses, and we give each other the benefit of the doubt without it even occurring to us that they might have ill-intent. On the other hand, there truly are people who choose to view the world through a dusky shadowy lens. Any comment and every remark is somehow a personal attack against them. Why? Why does this happen to people? Is it an extreme form of self-consciousness or insecurity? And how do you deal with it? What can you do to help a person through that? How much responsibility do we have to reassure those around us that we are indeed innocent and have kind intentions? These are rhetorical questions I suppose. It is really hard to love someone when the things you say are twisted by a foreign mind to mean something you didn‘t intend or ever think. Forgiveness after an incident is a wonderful ability but there is always going to be the fear of being bitten again. It hurts when someone treats you as though you are mean, when you aren’t. Note to self: Believe in the good intentions of all those around you.

God give me the ability to see the innocence in all people, of all ages, at all times. Spare me from the illness of a soured mind and fill me with lightness and love for the rest of my days here. Ameen.