I was going to write a long post about Friday, the way it opened light-heartedly, before ripening to slightly giddy gregariousness and finally ending with an unexpected and surprisingly sober, yet passionate discussion on self and community.
But. I didn’t.

A friend and I crashed UofT St. George’s MSA Frosh BBQ, after first visiting the booksale at Wordsworth College and enamouring ourselves of at least one frosh and various upper years (not including at least one blogger, who I think I unnerved).
It was an exhilarating mix of people and the type of day that comes by only once in a while.

And I could go on about the fun of cheap books, and free food, and crashing BBQs, and being mistaken for a UofTer and bumping into people you genuinely like, but that’s the usual stuff.

It was the unexpectedly passionate discussion on community that I got into by accident that still resonates with me. What is perhaps most surprising is that the passion didn’t come from me. In taking on the role of ad hoc mediator, I was forced to realise not only that I have changed since I began my undergraduate career, but exactly how.
In particular, I found myself saying, “I, personally, cannot accept that it’s ok to kill Lebanese children in response to Hezbolla, but when discussing this with Israelis I need to realise that they don’t see it that way.”
We’d been having a discussion on human rights abuses within the international Muslim community, but it seemed to me, though perhaps not to the person who’d initiated the discussion, that our conversation was really about how to best engage in dialogue. A few years I would not have seen this. I would have felt that the message is enough and that my shoving it down your throat is fine, because It’s Obvious (And If It’s Not - You’re A Hypocrite/Fool/Sadly Misguided).
I’ve come to realise that our perception of the obvious is coloured by our biases, and often these biases are so ingrained we’re not aware of them. (It sounds painfully obvious, doesn’t it?)
So yes, to me it is morally reprehensible that anyone could justify the deaths of children. Yet when speaking to someone to whom those deaths are justifiable, I need to see it from their point of view. It’s not that I want to, or that I enjoy doing so, or that I’m being hypocritical to my own cause. It is that I need to speak to them in their own language. I need to address their fears – and it is fear that stops us from seeing the humanity in others, fear that makes us draw in the cloaks of our limited life-experiences tight around, fear that ultimately degrades us all. Having been degraded, having been isolated, having been silenced by fear, anything seems to us justifiable. Language then narrows down to merely those words that justify the horrific, because words allow room for a broadening of perspective and a lessening of interpersonal space, until any child’s death becomes ours, until the borders between public deceptions and private truths blur.

At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,
Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
- Khalil Gibran

So if language is instrumental in recognising and realising change, and if language is defined by personal experiences and personal biases, then I need to be able to speak in multiple languages. And I don’t mean that I need to be multilingual, but that my knowledge and my empathy need to be multifaceted.

Anyway. The discussion in question actually had very little to do with the Middle East, but tangents come easily.

It was a fulfilling day: books, food, people, politics, arguments, sunlight. By the end of I was laden with pamphlets and words, people and food. Good things all.
As my friend and I later decided – and said simultaneously – “this is what university was supposed to be like.”

(We also decided that “the world is our gym,” but that’s beside the point.)

As for life, life goes on. And we survive the mundane by simultaneously forgetting and remembering, but particularly the first.