Memory
You’re just forgetful.
There is one attribute that almost all the people around me seem to know about, because I keep talking about it a lot: I find it difficult to remember both people and places, I forget things very easily.
I remember coming back to Sudan from Saudi Arabia when Abd Alwahab told me he had secured a scholarship in India and might travel to pursue it. After a lifelong friendship, growing up in the same district our entire lives, the time had finally come for him to leave for his undergraduate degree. I don’t recall thinking deeply about it at first, because it seemed that he hadn’t fully made up his mind yet. When I returned to Sudan, I got busy with university, and suddenly things became real on his side.
Last selife
I was waiting so badly to join university, high school had not been kind to me. It was not catastrophic, but it was deeply unpleasing. I did not feel at home there. I felt like I was passing through something I had to endure rather than something I could grow inside. I didn’t like it at all.
And I remember telling one of my closest friends, hey just out of the blue it hit me I turned to him and I said: you now, you are one of those friends if I was really in the shit I Would call you, and his reaction, is he didn’t say thank you, he said, I’d be mad if you didn’t, when you don’t call me and say I’m in the mud, you deny me the opportunity, the honor of setting in mud with you. - Simon Sinek
Today I folded the first twenty one years of my life, years I can’t repeat or replay. I thank Allah for blessing me to live this long. Those first 21 years were upheavals.
I call this problem floating information. It is a literal translation of the Arabic word “طائفة”, which means floating in space without connection. I first noticed that there is information that is not linked to anything. it has no context, it solves no problem, and this kind of information is the hardest to keep in my mind. I forget it very easily.