MOTIVATED BY ROASTED ONIONS

Long time ago, when a family sits on a dinner table, the parents would always look at their children and ask the question “When are you going to graduate from high school?” As if graduating from High School is the ultimate educational goal.  I lived in a time and a place where some of my teachers attained only High School Diplomas. I even recall my first grade teacher was graduated only from middle school.  I had a Math teacher in High school whose qualification was only High School diploma.  He was so good that I believe he would be a college professor.  In addition to his ability to teach arithmetic and classical mechanics, he was an expert on the history of Math and Science.  I learned from him who was the inventor of logarithms, the invention of the Arabic numerals, the zero’s story, and the origin of chemistry.

Not long ago, when the family sits on the dinner table, the conventional question to the children was “which college are you going to attend and when do you plan to graduate?”  The evolution of education and job market has no place for High School graduates. One has to earn a bachelor degree to qualify for a half-decent job to form a family and rear children. The current question we lay down on the dinner table to our children is “when are you going to get your PhD?”  The evolution of these educational questions is because the education is not good enough to secure a good career.  As a matter of fact, experience may be very much needed to apply for a job.  Without experience, companies may never look at the biographical sketches of the applicants and may not even send a thank you note for applying to the open position.

Many companies and organizations demand for more than education and experience to hire someone.  They want to see talent in addition to education and experience.  Talented people are those who bring profits to the company and the human race loves profits and money as being the source of power and prestige.  The blood of employees is squeezed out for profits and fortune.  We human evolved and created very complex societies that no other animals on this Earth had or will come close to match.

So far, we have the knowledge that education, experience, and talent are all needed to secure a career and retired from it.  However, these three requirements form only a small fraction of what we are made of.  There is another factor that plays even a greater role in making us successful and satisfied in our lives. I call this factor “motivation.”  One has to be motivated to wake up in the morning get out of our beds or caves to do something.  The motivation provides us with the energy needed to put up with the harsh reality. Each one of us creates the motivation needed to move on and thrive in life.  Many students are motivated to earn a college degree because their dying mothers or fathers told them to do so.  Runners go through marathons or half marathons to support a cause, such as curing a cancer. The examples of motivation are unlimited.

In my case, I have a set of motivations that help me live a productive life.  When one becomes less effective, I move on to another one.  I grew up in a time and a place where electricity and running water did not exist.   The poverty was the norm at that time.  I recall a summer of a drought year that my family did not have enough resources and we had to live on drinking tea and eating bread, three meals a day, for the entire summer.  The winter was quite frigid and harsh on us.  I recall I had to wear sandals without socks during a whole winter.  During that particular winter the poverty hit us very hard.  The only way we kept worm is by burning branches of trees in a home-made rectangular container we called it “canoon.” We invented our own lunches.  I roasted onions over the embers in the canoon.  At the beginning I enjoyed pealing the roasted onions and eat one layer at a time. After the second month of winter, I became sick of onionss and the sight of it.  At some point, I thought onions would start sprouting inside my stomach.  I reached the point, even at that young age, where I truly hated onions and I promised not to eat anion for the rest of my life.

Roasted onions was in many ways was a motivational factor for me. I thought in order to avoid eating roasted anion I must excel in my school work and classes.  Every time I had a grade “A” in a class, my outlook on the future look very bright and the distance between the roasted onions and me grew even farther.  I knew at that time by going to college and earn a degree was my salvation from the miserable time I spent eating roasted onions. I never thought of a roasted onions to be a great motivation to excel in anything or to anybody for that matter. Perhaps I was the only one in the whole world motivated by the roasted anion.  The thought of chimpanzees being motivated by onions had crossed my mind in many occasions. I imagined an alpha male chimp standing tall in front of his subjects holding an anion in his hand and pointing it toward the sky. He would say in his chimps language “for those of you who will follow me will have a bite of this anion.  My fellow chimps, let us go and defeat the other group of chimps to expand our patch of forest and our territory.”

The roasted onion bulb was my motivation to wake up in the morning, face the world, and continue to run my own marathon.  This was the case until I read a report on the medical benefits of onions to the health of the heart.  Then a new motivation grew stronger with time to eat cooked onions and keep a healthy heart.  I also learned the onions had been used in drama movies and plays where the actors and actresses rub onion bulbs on their noses to stimulate the tears in their eyes to further dramatize their acting skills.

Those of us who are equipped with education, experience, talent, and motivation can create their own game plans and succeed in whatever their hearts desire. There is even a class of professionals who made the motivation their career; we call them motivational speakers. A single motivation however is not good enough. A set of motivations may be needed to continue the battle of life.  In my case where I was born as a Palestinian, I feel quite lucky in finding motivations. Most of these motivations spur from the catastrophe endured by the people of Palestine for the last sixty four years.  The image of a grandmother standing in front of a refugees’ camp continues to haunt me since a very young age.  Her image sums out the Palestinian plight. Whoever she was, her image motivates me to continue running instead of walking.  This image will continue to be with me until I finish the marathon of life.
Recently, I learned that several tens of martyrs returned in wooden coffins to their villages and towns in Palestine.  They run faster in their death than me alive.  They had arrived to their hometowns ahead of me.  As for me, I am still trotting and trailing behind them motivated by the image of that grandmother and by the roasted onions.

Omar Manasreh
01 June 2012