Be the World You Want to Live In

At this juncture of your life, you have two choices to make: to live life out of fear or live life out of love.

We have been taught to live life out of fear for a long time now. To fear ourselves, to fear revealing our full self, to speaking our truth, to living our truth fully, to show the beauty inside us, to show our wings. We have rather been told to calculate every step out of fear of not having… not being loved… not being accepted….not succeeding… fear of our own self.

You have a choice to make today, and the choice is fully yours.

You can live your life hiding your dreams, or you can live your dreams now.

You can live your life being afraid of love, showing it or receiving it, or you can dance in love, expressing it to all around you and to yourself.

You can live your life escaping from your truth, keeping your secrets buried, keeping your silence, keeping yourself busy with this thought or that doubt and this job and that shirt or you can live your life with the courage to face your truth, live it, speak it, and be it.

It is your choice to make. In the process you will always come to the same conclusion… to live out of fear is to live out of your smallness…. and to live out of love is to live out of your bigness. To live out of fear is to live out of scarcity… to live out of love is to live out of fullness. And mostly, you will come to know that you cannot live in the world you want to live in if you do not be that world yourself.

There is no better teacher than mother earth herself.

You see a tulip does not question its right to come out, it just comes.

A water spring does not ask can I come here or there, would it be ok if this is the corner I give my water to or do you prefer this corner, it just comes out…

A bee does not ask for permission to sting when it feels in danger. It just stings.

A volcano never worries about its eruption, it just erupts.

So what if you allow yourself the same clarity a tree has when it blossoms in the spring?

What if you allow yourself the same peace a waterfall has in its strength?

What if you spread your wings in their fullness without hesitation or fear?

Yet we spend too many years depriving ourselves of what our mother has always given us: the clarity of the tulip,

What if on this graduation day you are fully clear

With an open, full, strong, vulnerable, and beautiful heart.

What would life be if you let it be.

At this point, you have studied much and learned much about what is working and what is not working in this world. I have no doubt you have enough understanding of the problems the world faces and what women in particular face in today’s world. We still live in a world where a mother dies every 90 seconds in child birth. We still live in a world where one out of 5 women faces violence in some form and where hundreds of thousands of women are raped as we speak. We live in a world where trafficking of women and girls is among the top 3 illegal trades. We live in a world where only 2.2% of all peace agreements are signed by women, where women control only 3% of decision-making positions in the media, and where women have only 18% of political participation.

It is not whether we are going to change these problems or not. We have no choice. We must change this world if we are to survive as people. The consistent marginalization and the disrespect of women cannot be sustained not for us, not for men, not for this humanity. The question is how to change… how to make the world a better place?

To be that person who will have the guts to speak truth to power, to change policies and outdated abusive structures, you must first have the guts to do it in your own life and act it within yourself. You can’t criticize a politician for not speaking truth to power if you don’t speak truth to your own self and to the powers around you, your friends or your enemies.

Much in the world can make us really upset, I lived and worked in war all my life. I have seen bombs destroying homes and families. I have seen loved ones cry and die and get displaced. I have seen my own home pillaged and destroyed. I have seen a mother’s leg chopped into pieces in front of her children. I have seen mothers raped in front of their boys. I have been angry. I have been very angry at the injustice in the world and every part of me says ENOUGH IS ENOUGH for a line has been long crossed when even the children are violated. I decided to walk the walk of change through beauty and compassion for I no longer could sustain the anger and resentment. The darkness I was working so hard to change exhausted me, broke me to tears often, and tried to destroy my spirit over and over again.

And finally I arrived to the conclusion that in order to create the peaceful and just world we envision and talk about, we need to make the change out of love and beauty and not out of anger. You see, I came to realize that a strong heart is a happy heart. A strong heart is not the warrior heart as we see it in movies, the one that goes to battle fields and with anger kills the enemy. A strong heart is a happy heart. That heart can go to darkness, to brothels where women are forced to sleep with 15 men a day, to refugee camps where any type of humane living ceases to exist, to a basement factory, to shelters of abused women, to prisons, and still see the love in the other and reach out for change out of love and not out of anger.

That journey is not an easy journey. Your heart may be broken several times. But let not the broken heart take you to fear. Sufis say, “O break my heart, o break my heart again so I can love even more.” I say, “build a bridge, they will destroy it. Build a bridge again, they will destroy it again. Build a bridge until so many people are part of building a bridge, it cannot be destroyed.” Never give up on this beautiful world and never give up on doing the work with love.

As I walked the journey of my truth and decided to dedicate my life to service, I have been filled with inspiration and at times I have been insulted and hurt. I had many choices to stop the work and get myself a job and make money and live in a nice home with a nice garden. But I can’t. I would rather die than not live my truth. So there goes my journey starting with Women for Women International when I was only 23 years old and moving from helping 33 women to more than 315,000 women and 100,000 million dollars later. And that is only one chapter of my life. My journey has only started as I move to focus on young Arab women, to acknowledge what they have done and to show the possibilities of change using personal cultural narratives.

As you embark upon your journey, I ask you to service the world in a new way. Do not think it can only be done through civil society and non-profit organizations. The separations between for-profit and non-profit sectors may have worked for a while but the segregations and separations of the do good for people and do good for yourself can no longer be sustainable. Change the world through the government. Change the world through the corporations. Change the world through religious institutions. Change the world through art. Change the world by emerging into the for-benefit sector that is the future.

And as you do that, never ever forget the people–the very essence that led you to where you are today and where you will be tomorrow. In the baker, the taxi driver, the tailor, in the mother, in the father, in the rickshaw pusher, in the beggar, we anchor ourselves. We are them. They are us. I am you. You are me. Never forget our inner connections and never lose yourself in the process of living your life.

Spread your wings and fly. Spread your wings fully and fly and breathe and laugh and go home to yourself inside your heart. It is in that we are all anchored.