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 1: What Is Life?

• Life: That which pulls out from under your feet while you are busy pushing it forward.

• Democracy: The people’s choice of which dictatorship they want to rule them.

• Trust: The most appropriate to be compared to a matchstick that is lit once.

• Hunger: That confederate friend of the failing chef.

• If: A magical tool that gives us legitimacy to await hope in the past.

• Miracles: The name we give to what we do not want to believe could happen.

• Your reputation: What others want from you.

• Good and evil: At times, they confuse me to the point that I think they are interchangeable.

• The impossible: Not what we cannot do in the future but what we could not do in the past.

• The key: Although its first action is to close, it is connected in the mind with opening.

• Infinity: Your tiredness of continuing to count.

• The woman is the man, if most of those who wrote were women.

• Plagiarism: A weak shot that reaches your colleague or opponent so that they make it for themselves and score it in your goal.

• Life: What we distract ourselves with to escape from death, even by passing time thinking about it.