By 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 8: What Is the Shortest Path to Happiness?

• If necessity is the mother of invention, boredom is the father of fashion.

• Life: The art of fulfilling the temporary matters.

• Success: Your ability to move beyond frustrating facts to achieve delusions that are said to be important.

• Anxiety: Wondering when you will finish the next task while you are still busy completing the one at hand.

• Your faults, not your name, are what belong to you and are spoken by others more than you.

• Confidence: Not being shy about declaring your hesitation.

• Familiarity: A present power that motivates serenity versus absent alternatives that may be better off.

• Politics: The art of passing your noble thoughts on to those who do not share the same feeling.

• The ugliest sound is of a small alarm clock groaning on in the morning, after a long night full of sleeplessness.

• “It has no color, no taste, and no smell.” Many things in this world are competing with water for this definition.

• The dictionary provides a fine example of self-sufficiency, when words come together to explain one another.

• Doctor: Someone who fails to earn our trust when wishing everyone to be healthy.

• Life is those problems that we live through between each happiness nap and another.

• The shortest path to happiness is to know that you cannot be happy all the time.

• The direct opposite of happiness is boredom, not melancholy.