By Sudanese-born prolific author Amr Muneer Dahab

nasdahab@gmail.com

In “Wisdom Highway,” translated into English from the Arabic origin by the author himself, Sudanese-born poet and essayist Amr Muneer Dahab questions ideas that people accept as standard rules for living, aiming to make individual life paths easier to navigate rather than providing rigid success formulas; he uses short, witty statements to prompt deep thought ins. In this series of posts, the prolific author shares excerpts from the book.

Week 3: Who Is an Unlucky Person?

• An unlucky person: A person whose strengths may outweigh their weaknesses, but life decided to choose the latter.

• The biggest problem: Being busy solving a complex problem and knowing that another, more complex one, is waiting for you after it.

• Leadership: The art of managing every talent that you lack.

• To live your life is to choose how you would rather waste it.

• Your most dangerous enemy: The one you do not hate.

• Infinity: The limits of the finite mind.

• Life: Those times when a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points.

• What has no solution? Everything but the exceptions imposed by the tradition of naïve optimism.

• We call it experience when life takes advantage of us.

• Waking up: The most beautiful thing about a disturbing dream.

• Life: A short story.

• Experience: The de facto policy that we proudly comply with, when time defeats us.

• Life: Much of a muchness.

• The generous person takes from you with confidence and is not afraid to return the favor, and so do the miserly.

• The law is a play whose problem is still far from the ingenuity of the actors in performing their roles.

• Life is a show whose problem is still in the ingenuity of the actors in the performance of their roles.