Life is statistics

Here is a claim that will carry me far along the path of being considered crazy…This is not one of cliché phrases decorating pages of highly illuminated volumes of ancient classics. Nor this is a freshly concocted New Age gimmick catch-phrase kitted on a gadget-festooning wall of the apartment of an ardent proponent of globalization.

This is what I came to realize while thinking a bit of how life is carrying along its own flow for me, for us, for everyone. What is life?

This question has been asked so many times by so many people, from incredibly dull to unsurpassably brilliant, because it gives voice to the issue many wonder about at idle times, during stressful moments, and of course, in aftermath of hideously glaring or impossibly happy incidents. However, many times this question is asked not to find an answer but to rather give our imagination a free fly and to try to ply along chaotic twists of our mind. Usually, many responses emerge. For everyone, life has its unopened doors, its hidden angles, its unrevealed glow, and this is where most of our thoughts are directed while we seek answers.

One of my favorite books about this ultimate question – what is life – is written by a Nobel Prize scientist Erwin Schrödinger, who sheds light on many a disciplines and gives his subjective opinion on it. I will not comment on his view.

You are waiting for a taxi. First one passes; you stop it. The fare is too expensive; you let it go; next one; still expensive; third one; no better. You start loosing patience. You think you might never end up taking a taxi for a reasonable price. You are on the verge of giving it all up and paying whatever the next taxi driver will ask you for.

Does this situation sound familiar?

Before you give up, wait and think. Remember the commonly cited and well-known phrase, “Patience is a virtue.” This is not a mere sound. There is a meaning in these words. Before you give up, try to master whatever patience you can and wait. Perhaps not the very next taxi but the one after that, or the third one would surely agree to relieve your anxiety of waiting for a reasonable price.

You are in the market, trying to buy fresh fruits. You ask the price and get back a response that paints a frown upon your face. You go for the next one, and next one, and yet another one. You start despairing. Wait. Don’t. Persevere little bit more and rest assured you will find what you look for for a price you are ready to pay.

You are looking for a good partner of opposite sex for a little romance or adventure. People around you seem too superficial, too uninteresting or plain stupid. Your quest enhances to online reaches of the Internet. People talk the talk and show the show. You meet some of them in real life and are utterly disappointed by an unimaginable gap between reality and virtuality. You decide to go on socializing a bit more than you are used to. You might end up with someone, who, in retrospect, turned out to be looking for something a little too different from what you were looking for or expected to have.

Does this situation sound familiar?

There are countless similar situations in lives of everyone. In fact, I would venture a guess that our lives are consisted of such situations. Every time, however, we complain, we accuse ourselves of naivety or stupidity, we curse whatever philosophical tenants that give praise to patience and perseverance, and we take options not necessarily beneficial for our long-term well-being.

Think about it. Try to relive events of past hour or past day. Would you be better off if you waited a little bit longer before you moved ahead with your choices, if there were a quintessential guarantee that your initial thoughts and preferences would come true? In most cases it is a resounding YES.

Is it better to skim through life in an impatient and superficial way, reassuring our souls that we have one life too short to wait, and that we have to run not to be lagged behind? Or is it better to wait a little longer and live a life, as we conceived it in our mind; a life close to ideal, given the possibility existed? No one of course is asked to wait eternity; nor one has to, however difficult and incredible this idea might seem.

I first started to apply for jobs while I was still studying. At the beginning, there was no success; I wasn’t even trying hard but it annoyed me somewhat to get refusals at best or no answer at usual when applying for jobs. Two years on, about to finish up my studies and I still was applying for jobs and still either getting refusals. Situation was becoming critical. I was about to quit the university and I still had no job. There were excuses, or justifications, if you want, for why I didn’t get in most cases even an opportunity to present myself for an interview. For one, my previous lack of specialized experience in domains in which I was interested in. For two, the non-Europeanness and non-Americanness of my passport. And no matter that I had two degrees backed by Swiss universities and spoke five languages. I was, just like everyone else in similar situations, about to abandon and embark on an adventure somewhere without a grand plan or money. University was done for. I decided to do what I wanted ever since several years. I came to Egypt to learn Arabic and to get more intimate with Egyptian culture and traditions. After two months in Egypt, I was running out of money and hope I would ever find a job. I was ready to take just about any job. I applied everywhere: from Australia to India to Egypt to Switzerland to America. No success. A lucky incident of noticing a familiar company name in the business directory in Cairo brought me what I have been looking for so long: a good job in a well-known company.

Once, I was obsessed by an idea to establish a NGO, which would serve as an umbrella for many youth organizations. The objective was to bring many brilliant and motivated young people together. This youth would then envision a future they would like to live in and would go about making it happen. I started off without any knowledge of how to create a NGO. I talked about it to a lot of people, most of whom dismissed the idea as utopia or thought I am crazy. I talked perhaps a year before I started doing anything. By then, I was already wondering if it made any sense to do anything in the absence of any positive feedback. But I persevered. I got a template of a business plan (I heard I needed one to create an organization). I took a look at it. This gave me an idea of what a business plan might contain. I again went on talking to people about my idea but this time armed with something I thought was a good sketch of a business plan drafted by my own hand. At least fifteen serious and competent people, upon seeing what I wrote, gave me their feedback, implicitly implying the unrealistic nature of my undertaking. Even after my business plan looked decent enough, many thought I belonged to the realm of C.S. Lewis’ fantasy world. I had so scarce encouraging feedback and support that I can’t even now understand how I persevered. All along, of course, my idea got more refined; more details emerged; many dull angles disappeared; many new views appeared. Eventually, I ended up creating the NGO I wanted, although it looked quite different from my original idea.

There were countless other lesser-scale occasions in my life, and I am sure in lives of others.

Our world is illusionary. The illusion consists of the fact that things and events are taken to have singular or rare occasions, occurrences, and opportunities of our preference. That is why we are usually impatient and exhibiting excessive hurriedness in taking options and making choices. We think we will miss opportunities and we just take whatever that comes our way. Later on, we complain how life was unfair to us, whereas it is us who are unfair to ourselves.

Those who realize the existence and extent of this illusion are the ones who live their lives to their fullest.

Life is statistics: bigger number of occurrences and events bring higher probability of realizing our preferred choices. All that remains is to wait little bit for statistics to accumulate. And usually it IS a little bit.

P.S. I still get somewhat bothered when, on my way home, I have to wait ten minutes and let go ten taxis at 3am in some lost part of Cairo. But deep inside myself I always know that the 11^th taxi will be the lucky strike. In retrospect, I am right, although in might be the 12^th :)

Egypt in the eyes of a foreigner: (Part 4) Traffic and taxis of Cairo

Hardly an hour in the territory of Cairo airport, I already had a few snippets of what was to be seen afterwards. Alexandra turned out to be from our school and accidentally was to stay in the same hostel for several nights as I was. We waited a little bit longer and our guide decided that we should go. We left the airport and started looking for his car. At the beginning I started looking up for a parking, to give up several minutes later, realizing there was no real designated place to park a car. I mean there was but cars were parked all over that place and its surroundings and the only place, which was kept free and controlled on subject of illegal parking was the immediate proximity of the main exit gate of the airport and the adjacent route, serving up a main venue for buses, minibuses and other four-wheeled vehicles.

His car – I however have doubts whether that might be called a car in any of Western countries – was situated amidst a patch of an admixture of asphalt and freshly wet mud in a place, which would be hard to find, considering no landmarks or any other orientation that one could relay to. The car itself was a Fiat, if I remember correctly, dating perhaps from late 50s or 60s. Yes, it was that old. twenty meters away from the car we came across another person, an Egyptian, who happened to be also with our guide. Thus four of us incrusted – for a lack of a better word describing our action – ourselves into the car with our luggage and were on our way to the city.

I and Alexandra engaged in a mundane conversation of sorts one has in such a situation; where are your from, what did you study, first time in Egypt, why do you want to learn Arabic, etc. We also had eventual interruptions of our Egyptian guides who were trying hard to figure out where we came from. Their scarce English knowledge turned out to be hardly sufficient to understand names of countries such as Armenia and Belgium pronounced in English. Luckily, Alexandra had already taken some classes of Modern Standard Arabic and could utter some phrases in Arabic, much to the delight of our guides, who never ceased to grin at her at any possible opportunity through the front and side mirrors of the car.

Another conclusion crept up: Egyptian men are very fond of European women, all the more when the latter show signs of caring about Egyptian culture or being able to speak some, however unsubstantial it might be, Arabic.

Alexandra spoke quite well Arabic. But then and there she didn’t revise much her Arabic and had problems expressing herself. Also, it turned out to be evident that her high Arabic – I call Modern Standard Arabic high Arabic, reminiscent of hoch Deutsch, high German – was badly understood by our guides, and this wasn’t because of her accent in Arabic or lack of vocabulary. As we were to find later on, majority of Egyptians either have hard time understanding high Arabic or are totally at lose. Only a few select, educated elite are able to read, write and even to speak in high Arabic, despite the large amount of newspapers circulated daily and available to everyone and despite the fact that all media emissions were conducted in high Arabic.

I have seen many bizarre things in my life and there was very little that I expected would truly amaze me. I thought I have seen it all. But I was up for a surprise. The traffic in Cairo streets.

Did you watch sci-fi movies such as 5^th element or I,Robot. You have scenes of futuristic streets riven with ground and spatial alleys, pathways, and streets and in which traffic is going in all direction without any collision nonstop, with speeds considered normal in car racing. I wouldn’t exaggerate telling that what I witnessed resembled so much these fictional scenes that I felt somewhat in awe at the beginning. There was however a slight difference between those movie scenes and Cairo streets. It was that in movies some cars and vehicles also circulate in the air; this apparently wasn’t yet the case in Cairo. Traffic circulation happens only on the ground.

There are no first, second or third lines even on largest of streets (take Gamat El Dowal or Ahmad Orabi streets for example). Cars intermingle, change lines, stop and start, double and wink at each other at any possible moment in any possibly imaginable and sometimes unimaginable way.

There is no traffic lights, or to be precise, they don’t usually work. Instead you have police officers or dismissed military sergeants standing on major crossings and pathways and manually regulating the traffic. Needless to say that it doesn’t work efficiently, nor work at all sometimes. The policemen raises his hand to stop one line of cars, but it takes usually several cars to bypass his hand and continue their way before the line comes to a final stop, giving way for the other line of cars.

There is no regulated place of bus or taxi stops on streets. There are some bus stop places but you can stop a bus anywhere on a street by raising your hand. The bus however doesn’t grind to a total stop, in expectation of you to climb it up. It merely decelerates and it is up to you to jog along it and to jump on it. Oh, a mere detail. These busses, almost always and all of them, are jammed to an impossible level. There are always people hanging from open doors. One of these people is the hailer. He hails people to take the bus. He announces an approximate route, itself subject to changes if passengers so wish, and calls loudly and emphatically for pedestrians to take the bus. So taking a bus in Cairo amounts to spotting one, hearing carefully and trying to discern from a usually broken colloquial Egyptian the approximate route, then jogging along the bus for up to ten meters, during which others hanging from the door will make space for a footstep, and putting your foot and trying to hold on to something or someone at the same time. And this ride costs almost nothing - 0.5 pounds.

Taxi ride is also quite unorthodox, compared to what a Westerner used to lower standards (even) might expect. Let’s start by description of how almost 90% of Cairo taxes look like. It is a car, usually old and technically unsupported and abject-looking. It might date from late 50s – I had several of those, where the driver would come and open and close my door by hinging and unhinging it and where there were no mirrors, no lights, no panels of indication, but an old steering wheel, three pedals and a gear – up to late 70s the newest. In most cases you have a 70% chance that you will not be able to open or close the door; 80% chance that the front seat where you usually sit (only if you are a male) is dirty, shabby, and looks otherwise adamantly unwelcoming. And not to forget the driver himself. The taxi driver looks usually as if he were freshly released from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or such and has no real knowledge or awareness of anything but his steering wheel. He usually looks worn, unshaved, wearing crumpled and dirty clothes, sports a look, which is usually varying from outmost hostile to totally indifferent to sometimes bizarre sympathy. For this latter however you have to speak some Arabic or be a nice Western girl, preferably blond with all physical attributes present and evident.

Since recently, there are also so-called yellow-cabs, a flotilla of rather new Western cars, Skodas or Passats usually, but this is for privileged or insistent few.

Once you stop a taxi, which on busy streets might be a challenge, the game starts. You lean to the window of the taxi and tell in Arabic, most recommended, your destination address and preferably also the area name in Cairo where your destination lies. At this point the taxi driver, if he understood where you want to go, usually asks how much you want to pay. It is needless to say that this is subject to negotiation. If you are a good negotiator you might end up having a fair price; if you aren’t good at negotiating and you have to take many taxis, you will notice how quickly you spend lot of money on taxis.

The rule is that taxi drivers try to rip off foreigners. The better-dressed you appear the higher the initial price you are told. On average they ask, for example, 10 Egyptian pounds instead of three-to-five pounds. In the evening, the prices go even higher. You might be asked to pay 20 pounds for the route you paid 5 pounds during the afternoon. The key is to negotiate and to please. An alternative to it is what is suggested in majority of mainstream popular guidebooks on Egypt such as Lonely Planet or Rough Guide: have the amount you think is fair and jump into taxi once you think the taxi driver understood your destination. Go out of the car, throw the money into the open window and walk away as fast as you can. That is what is recommended. Apparently, those guides didn’t warn that some members of your family might be involved in next phrases and sentences that the taxi driver will not hesitate to shout after you if thinks he didn't rip you off. But that’s the European way. Throw and run, and no matter the humiliation.

Next, I will describe my first days in school.