MY CYBER WORLD

Life on Earth is still a mystery and is proven to be a very difficult nut to crack. I challenged myself many times to go back to recall or remember the first thing I ever recognized during my childhood without avail.  Events during that time continue to bounce in and out of my mind as if they are playing tricks on me. One event however seems to be vivid in my memory when I went outside in the enclosure in front of my family home.  It was an afternoon in an autumn day where the sky was blue the air was fresh and crisp.  I looked up toward the sky and thought my world is only confined to the small segment of the blue sky visible to my naked eyes.  Anything beyond the limit of my vision was outside my little wee tiny imagination.  As I grew older, the world known to me start to expend until one day another kid from the neighborhood convinced me that there is a big city west of us because he heard it from his parents.  He convinced me that both of us should walk west until we reach this big city (Hebron).  Most likely we were five or six years old at that time.  We walked on a paved road and finally we started to ascend a small mounted until we saw many houses that scared the wits out of us.  We return back home after an everlasting impression of how our world was expanded. It felt like a shroud was removed from my vision and the little patch of sky I saw for the first time extended to infinite space without a horizon or a twilight zone.

As the time passed-by and we get older, each one of us progressed in a different path and the distance between us grew further every day and every minute.  We live in places that we never dreamed of or imagined them during the childhood era. Even the language changed for us and new words were invented, such as cyberspace and facebook.  We create our own world and invented new friends that do not exist so to preserve the sanity.  Talking to one-self while driving a vehicle or walking a street is becoming the norm in many cases. Our celestial attachment to the towns we spent our childhood in them grows stronger the farther we live and the longer we stay away from them. Our yearning and craving to go back to these places of our birth is beyond imagination to the point we start worshiping these places as well as our feelings about them.  These poignant feelings are becoming exaggerated in our state of mind particularly because our land is occupied by foreign forces. Losing this state of mind, full of happy memories and beliefs, is worrisome.  The fear of the circumstances that may obliterate this state of mind is dragging me further away with an enormous force.

We often appreciate any clips of news coming out of our towns and we become attached to those individuals that were left behind.  My hope soars so high every time I make any connection to anybody from that part of the world.  Recent events in the Middle East involuntary aroused my curiosity and I spent some times reading news and chatting with others on facebook.  What I realized from all of this is that I created a world with close friends that I never met in person or even made phone call to them.  They are really true friends, such as Kawthar, Lutfi, Rakan, just to mention a few.  These cyber-friends provide emotional supports and sense the deepest emotions of ours.  We actually laugh and shed a few tears together all on-line.  We are connected as one might say.  My little patch of sky that I recognized for the first time ever stretched to unlimited space of mind, but in reality this patch of sky is larger than the window in my office that I confined myself into it most part of the day. It appears my world is shrinking and yet my cyber-world is getting larger every time the computer announces the arrival of a message from one of those cyber-friends.

Omar Manasreh
31 July 2013