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                       What Does Love Mean?
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When the word ( kids ) is mentioned, there are so many pre-made impressions and concepts start coming to our hearts and minds about those precious and beloved ones. Unfortunately, most of these impressions and concepts are mistaken approaches to understand kids.
This mistake is due to one simple thing : that we usually deal only with the outer surface, not with the actual capacity of a kid.  Furthermore, this outer crust is forming the major part of our assumed knowledge about kids . To really understand a child, we need to study more, analyze more, think more and learn more about this amazing creature.
There are two old barriers to understand kids. Those barriers usually prevent adults from exploring fully the capacity and mentality of children. The first barrier is our buried-inside belief that a child is nothing more than a sweet, fun-loving creature; who comprehends nothing but his/her spontaneous current demands. This looks very true, but it's not. As a matter of fact, a child is like a sponge ; absorbs everything around but responds only to what is interesting to him: toys, activities, new objects etc. This means that the rest of the absorbed experiences are still there inside the child. They are not interesting to him, but it doesn't mean that they don't exist and affect him.
The second barrier is our linguistic behavior. We usually talk to our kids while committing so many mistakes : we confine our conversations and vocabulary to our limited notion that a child understands only superficial matters and thus we discuss them only. We will never know how much our child knows about other matters unless we discuss them. We usually assume our mental superiority and we don't tackle our children's brains to understand how far they do know. We are deprived of such knowledge as long as we make such mistake.
A child usually uses his own language to explain things: his own terms, vocabulary and imagery. We are bound to use the child's diction to converse with him but this doesn't mean to stop teaching him more or expecting him to understand more. A child's diction must be decoded by his family in order to reach full communication with their kid.
Imagine that two grown adults are meeting somewhere for a conversation. They do not speak the same language, so one of them is looking at the situation from the wrong perspective :  that the other person is shallow and lacks the ability to communicate. He's wrong, because the other person can say the same about him. He simply doesn't speak the other's language. We can apply this example to our kids and even our pets : are they really shallow and can't feel deeply or think clearly ? Or, is it just that they can't communicate with us using our same level of language?
The above mentioned points lead us to another question: do we really communicate with our kids?
A group of specialists posed a very complicated question to a group of 4 to 8 year-old kids. The question was  "What does love mean?" The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined. I believe that after reading their answers, we won't need any further comments to explain how sweet, sensitive and smart kids are.
"When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn't bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis, too. That's love."  Rebecca- age 8
"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You just know that your name is safe in their mouth."   Billy - age 4
"Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other."   Karl - age 5
"Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your French fries without making them give you any of theirs." Chrissy - age 6
"Love is what makes you smile when you're tired."  Terri – age 4
"Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK."  Danny - age 7
"Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My Mommy and Daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss"  Emily - age 8
"Love is what's in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen."  Bobby - age 7
"If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate."   Nikka - age 6
"Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it every day." Noelle - age 7
"Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well."  Tommy - age 6
"During my piano recital, I was on a stage and I was scared. I looked at all the people watching me and saw my daddy waving and smiling. He was the only one doing that. I wasn't scared anymore."  Cindy - age 8
"My mommy loves me more than anybody . You don't see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night."  Clare - age 6
"Love is when Mommy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken." Elaine-age 5
"Love is when Mommy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford." Chris - age 7
"Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day."  Mary Ann - age 4
"I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones."  Lauren - age 4
"When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you."   Karen - age 7
"Love is when Mommy sees Daddy on the toilet and she doesn't think it's gross." Mark - age 6
Author and lecturer Leo Buscaglia once talked about a contest he was asked to judge. The purpose of the contest was to find the most caring child. The winner was a four year old child whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman's yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When his Mother asked what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, "Nothing, I just helped him cry"
"You really shouldn't say 'I love you' unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget."  Jessica - age 8
A final word from me, I wish that we all could learn from those little kids what love really means .... don't say it unless you feel it .... you won't feel it unless you learn how to bring love into your heart. Wish you all love, peace and happiness.

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             Love or Marriage? Do we have to choose one?
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Throughout our daily lives, as married or singles or in relations, we sometimes ask ourselves that kind of question. We ask it when our relations are going through a hard time, but we should be wise enough to ask it earlier to avoid going through hard time. On the surface, the question itself is kind of stupid: it's just like asking a woman whether she's a female or a woman. In fact, they're not two contradictions that we have to pick one only. Love is the main reason for marriage and marriage is a way to show permanent love. It's a secret formula that needs a lot of dedication, wisdom and experience to mix it right.
When we talk about feelings and emotions it's very hard to have a solid thing to identify or describe. It differs from one person to another in a very unique way; still we have a main frame that contains them in general. Love is just like a growing baby has many phases and each has its special features. We fail to understand our own feelings when we fail to tell the difference between those phases. A starting new love is very passionate with a lot of thinking about the other side, doing your best to please and to appear as a worthy person to be loved. A fully grown love, as between married couples or long term relations, is calm but deep, stable and sincere. They might not do that romantic stuff of beginners anymore such as thinking often about each other or buying roses etc, but they still have that treasured love inside. The most complicated phase of love is the grown one because it's when we start misunderstand the other side or even mistrust that love still exists. It's very normal in relations to have different points of views, to argue or even to yell sometimes. These things happen you know, we should avoid it yes but it still happens. The perfect relation is about how to cope and adjust to fix and fit. It's not about how to mould the other side to fit exactly in your pattern .You're not perfect, so why you expect the other side to be perfect? He or she is a different human, so you can't simply make him or her just like you. You have to accept the other side the way it's as you did at first when your love was in baby love phase. Love is not as that thing in romantic movies and when you fail to understand that, you'll never appreciate the love you have in hand now. So real love is just like a safety lock in our relations and that's why you always find it acceptable to keep loving and living with that person you just have argued with or even shouted at few minutes ago. What you should keep in mind when you start a relation or baby love phase is this: BE YOURSELF because simply marriage or a relation is not a gift or a plus in our lives but a successful one is indeed a gift from heaven. So, you don't have to lie , to deceive or to act like a semi angel creature because when your love or relation moves to the grown phase you might lose the other side simply because he or she loved a different person during baby love phase with all its romance and sweet heart beats.

     When we consider why a man, for example, leaves his woman for another one, a lot of things come into our minds. Maybe he's a bad guy or unfaithful yes, but maybe he's a normal good guy but she failed to provide him with what he needs. There are a lot of things in a woman that might attract and please the man more than her body or the way she lives or behaves.  He might say many reasons why he left her but trust me they're not the main. The main, secret and untold reason why he left her for that woman: It's not about what that new woman has but it's about how she makes him feel. The same reason is true when it comes to why a woman leaves her man for a new one.
The dark, ugly side in every relation is divorce or separation. Unfortunately, sometimes it's the only answer we have. Sometimes, relations go far beyond fixing or refreshing. Simply, it's dead and already decomposing. It hurts yes, but sometimes it's necessary and even urgent. For a woman, it's very shocking and painful but she's willing to do: it's just like removing a breast to get rid of cancer. For a man, it's almost the same but in a different way. He simply feels that his entire world is falling apart.
My final words here are that it's not a shame or a crime to make a mistake or to have a wrong judgment once, but it's very foolish and unacceptable not to learn a new good thing after each mistake or to correct our own mistakes. Wish you all happiness and good life.


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                 A Message to the American Nation
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Dear brothers and sisters, citizens of The United States of America, I salute you with the salutation of the people here in the Middle East: Assallam Alaikum (peace be upon you) As you can see peace is our salutation and our sacred wish. In fact, it's everybody's wish all over the world. I'm writing you this message today as a message of love and peace. I'm a simple man from Egypt and I'm writing you this message not representing any government or organization. I'm representing myself, as a human, and a lot of people here in the Middle East who share me the same feelings and views.

I believe that a lot of bad things are happening in our world today and what made them worse was not talking to each other about them. All the people East or West share the same mistakes: lack of communication and lack of knowledge about the other people sharing them their planet. I believe that when we get closer and get to know each other we can achieve better things than wars and chaos which we're living in right now. Racism and violence have proved failure for both sides. As a matter of fact, in a war no one is a winner. Violence should not be an option in our world because we can't live with it and we can't afford it.

During Hitler's era in Germany, a lot of people were supporting him and his crimes; still we can't simply think that an entire nation was stupid or evil. No, they were simply lacking the knowledge about what is going on around them. They were not evil because they thought that they are doing the right thing in supporting their country and leader. Hitler was their country in their eyes. We can only see a picture more clearly when we take ourselves out of the frame and look at it again as anyone else does. When this happens, most of the American people will know more about their own country. They'll start asking themselves; "Why do a lot of people have problems with the American Foreign Policy?"  "Why do people burn the American Flag repeatedly just like morning cereal in most of the worlds countries? The simple peaceful American Citizen can't walk safely now in most parts of the world, can you?  Do you know why it is so, and how is it so?  When they start searching for true answers for these questions they'll gain more knowledge about their country, but they have to stop listening for what is being offered to them through their media. They have to get the information themselves.

I wanna make one point clear: the people of the Middle East are not against America, in fact we do love this country with all what it offers and represents. I myself think that the world would be missing something very important without having that great nation on the map. I even believe in a strange theory, I keep telling it to the people here in the Middle East, that we are protected from the mistakes of America by America. It means that the civil power of the American society and all the good people of the United States are the only reason that prevented their administration from causing more troubles in the Middle East. It's the power of the tax payers. America is a great nation with a very long history of fatal mistakes in foreign policy.

We can disagree in opinions and that's ok but we don't have to label the other side or categorize them just because they don't believe in what we believe. We can't force our own cultures and ways of life on each other. We should learn about them and respect them the way they are. The variety of values and cultures is what makes our world so colorful and unique. We should learn to accept our different values and cultures as long as they don't affect our own way of life.

As we all may know, after Sept. 11 we all over the world were victimized by the brutality of the event and were deeply shocked. I'm talking of course about the feelings of simple, kind, healthy minded people who are living in any country east or west. On the other hand, the event gave a green light for the extremists and racists to move and activate their sick words and thoughts all over the world. Here in the Middle East, the Arab extremists spread the concept that the  Americans got what they deserve but they forgot to read between the lines and to separate between two kinds of Americans: the simple American citizens who are humans like them, going to work in the morning, working hard to make their life better for them and their families , have nothing in their hearts against other people and even marched along the streets asking and shouting for a better understanding and methods about handling the situation in the Middle East,  and the other kind: the American administration which reacts and behaves according to the political agenda, just like any other government all over the world. So those extremists mixed the cards to plant those intellectual viruses into their countries.

Back in the United States , the situation wasn't much better: a similar kind of American extremists and racists  spread the idea that all the Arabs are terrorists:  the Arabs hate us, they kill for sport and they have nothing in their minds except their wish to kill the Americans as if they were enemies. They simply forgot to separate between two kinds of people here in the Middle East: the ordinary people in the streets and the extremists who are working according to their own agenda. The dark side of my story is this: most of the simple ordinary people on both sides bought those lies. They were deceived by the media which sometimes serves as a horn for some people for specific reasons. Many simple innocent people on both sides believe the lies given to them through their media about how horrible, evil, malicious and even real enemy the other side is. We trust our media too much but we use our own judgment less. We are in a  deep swamp when we start believing in this theory and react accordingly because if we do so, we will start taking sides and get ready to pick a fight with the other camp whether there's a good reason for it or not.

What I'm trying to explain here is that every bad individual is representing himself and his thoughts only and nothing more. He's not representing his religion or his nation. For me at least, I think that those who have something personal in their hearts against a specific country or race are representing their ill logic and dark nature only. They are not representing all the decent and good people I know all over the world. They can't convince us as Arabs that the people of America are waging a war against Islam and the Arabs because it's their own war not the people's war. The same thing goes here; every Arab person doing a bad thing is representing himself not Arabs or Islam. When Bin laden killed thousands of civilians in the name of Islam and Jihad he was representing himself not Muhammad's rules. To make it clear here are some lines said by Muhammad. These lines are historically authenticated so you can find them in any history book about Muhammad. They were battle field orders to his soldiers :( Go and fight in the name of God and for the sake of God. Do not kill old men or young kids or women. Do not steal. When you're there you'll find people in churches and temples. They had forsaken the whole world for their God's sake so leave them alone in peace.)  If these were Muhammad's words to his soldiers so do you think when a Muslim start killing civilians he is representing Islam or Muhammad?

As a Muslim, my religion was distorted by the wrong things done to civilians by terrorists and the idea that Islam is the cause of the whole mess became stable in American minds by the effect of lies on media. Again, same here: eastern media planted this…America is the main cause of evil in the whole world (and that includes of course the simple innocent civilians). Can you see how horribly our minds are manipulated? As a finishing note I wanna state this: Islam and all the good people here in the Middle East has nothing against the Americans or any one else and I do believe the same about the Americans that they have nothing against anyone else. I assure you that Islam has nothing to do with all the wrong things done by some people who think that they are real Muslims or even better Muslims than us.

I hope that one day we'll all be able to learn more and love more. I wish that all the nations could live without mistaken policies and ideas leading the fate of this planet- which is something hard to happen but it worth trying – but I think the world would be a wonderful place to live in when we learn to share and communicate more, as humans not only as countries and races. Peace to you all.


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