Love is a verb

In his remarkable book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey, writes:

During a seminar, a man came up and said to him –

'Stephen, I like what you are preaching about relationships. But every situation is different. Look at my marriage. I am really worried. My wife and I just don't have the same feeling for each other that we used to have. I guess I just don't love her anymore, and she doesn't love me".
"The feeling is not there anymore?" Stephen enquired.
"That is right", the man affirmed. "And we have three children and we are really concerned about it. What do you suggest"?
"Love her", Stephen Covey advised him.
"I told you the feeling just isn't there"
"Then love her. If the feeling is not there, that is all the more reason to love her.
"But how do you love when you don't love?"
My friend, Covey told him – "Love is a verb. Love – the feeling – is the fruit of love the verb or our loving actions. So love her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her."

I think that I can't add anything more, as Covey made it clear, that we always oversee the "verb" side of things, and we just see the noun, the result of the verbs, as if we expecting the result without trying the verb to get it.

The End of Blogging Age

This is the way everything goes, the birth (the beginning), living itself, then at last comes the death (the end), and blogging is not an exception. I will try to explain why I think that the end of blogging will be soon, or at least people will get less interested in blogging.

Blogging is both reading, and writing, people either read blogs, or write and post to their blogs, and some do both reading and posting, but what makes blogs attractive is the ease of creating a blog, writing and leaving comments, even publishing a blog is now much easier through blog aggregators, such as Jordan Planet (JP), or other websites that offer other services such as blogger, and jeeran, which give all-in-one solution for bloggers, all that convinced people (bloggers) to create and maintain their own blogs, and become bloggers, they do that because there is what I call the personal experience of blogging, they see themselves in their blogs.

I have recently visited many blog websites, or aggregators, and noticed that there are a big number of blogs, than the number of bloggers themselves, then I tried to find out the number of visitors of those blogs and what I found was that less than 10% of the blogs have 85-90% of the number of traffic (number of visitors), and the remaining 90% of the blogs only lives on a little number of visitors, that was shocking.

Bloggers write because they want others to read what they write about, not just for having fun, and if they believe that no one or very few visitors read their posts, many of them will stop writing (blogging) sooner or later, and by time blogs number will shrink, and there will only be those 10% blogs that most of people read, and blogging will be like newspapers, very few number of newspapers, compared to blogs, will leave people with only limited choices to choose from, many bloggers will find soon that they can't keep their blogs running, as nobody is interested in their blogs, they will lose what I called the personal experience of their blogs, and because people in general are not patient, they will give up blogging.

That is why bloggers use tools to know the number of people who visit their blogs, and lately bloggers began posting surveys, to get a real feedback, and in my opinion, some of them want to improve their blogs, that’s why feedback is very important for everyone, and some others want to check if they will stay in business (I mean blogging).

Blogging itself will not end, people will continue reading blogs, and see it as an alternative of typical newspapers or media, but interest in blogging will die and end soon, as blogging will be to them as a source of information not participation, or contribution, people will become readers of blogs, and they might leave their comments on others' blogs, but not bloggers any more, and that is what I mean by the end of blogging, I think blogging bubble will stop get bigger than what its now.

To Immigrate or Not to Immigrate

I always wanted to write about this topic, and I haven't really given it a serious thinking until now. Recently, I have met many who dream to leave the country for another western country, which includes the US, Canada and Australia, some of them took the first step, and the others don't find alternatives but to do the same.

Leaving ones country for another with the intent to stay in the later permanently, or for a long time, whether seeking a better life, or forced to leave his home country because of wars, bad economy, or political reasons, is a kind of immigration.

Faced by this question myself, I find myself looking for an answer for what they call the brain drain, meaning qualified people immigrants leaving their home countries. It became obvious to me that this turns to be a very dangerous phenomenon.

Let me now begin by asking these questions, what if most of the qualified people in Jordan immigrate? Is it the responsibility of those qualified people to stay and make the required change to make our country a better place? Do they have the right just to leave and seek a better life somewhere else, as they are humans, and want to live? Or will they leave for sometime and return back after years? This way they can achieve their dreams, and come back to do what they had to do, I'm not going to answer these questions; they are here to make us think. I even don't know if I can say that immigration is wrong or right, because there are many individuals who have their own reasons for leaving, some of them definitely are convincing which make them right, but when it becomes on the country level, like when most of the youth in this country want to leave, we can be sure that the immigration is absolutely wrong, and bad, and should do something to stop.

One common thing which I found is what made those who want to leave think of immigration as a solution to their problems, they all believe its easier to begin somewhere else in another country than here, most of them think its heaven there ,but not in this country, neither in any other Arab country, opportunities are abundant, and life is easier, some of them even think that they can find money on the streets, and finally I found that most of those people are lazy, and they don't believe that they are part of our communities problems, they just keep complaining, as their problems are their governments' responsibility, even if its their stupidity, or laziness, and see that they has nothing to do with what is going wrong around, they are only victims, the only hope is leaving for heaven, which is any developed country.

What about forgetting a little about living a better life somewhere else, and thinking of living a simpler life here in the meanwhile in order to be able to build a better place here, and sacrifice a little of our lives for the next generations, what makes me say this is that I see that all who immigrate never return back, or at least few of them do, and the remaining will be lost for ever there, and immigration becomes a benefit for the immigrant, but not for his/her home country.

Will it make us proud if we tell our children that we lift our home country to make a better life for them? Or to tell them that we preferred to stick here, and dig our roots deep in our beloved country and live a simpler life, instead of leaving and living much better?

I'm sure that many will get angry at me, and some others will agree, but at the end, I'm just thinking, asking questions, and trying to answer them, one think that I'm sure of is that I love my country, and I want to serve it the best way, even if it means I have to sacrifice some of my precious life, I'm proud of being someone who tries to build something out of nothing, better than harvesting others efforts, and running away from taking responsibility to make our home countries a better place, even if it will cost us our lives.