rom the dark ashes of the past to the tender flow of time, before the river unexpectedly tears its borders and spreads, like a metastatic tumor, across fields and winds, across stories, into houses and by rooftops, the eye travels back and forth in a never-ending quest of the echo.

 

     The river itself is an echo of the first drop of water coming out of life’s crust. The ashes voice the flame. The field echoes the grain. And the wind is the growing effect of nothing but a breath. The first stone stretches into houses and rooftops. And the story is the echo of everything else, a word after a word forming a pathway between reality and imagination.

 

     And we… we are an echo amongst echoes, so alive we’re unstable, sometimes even contradictory, always fleeting yet full of meaning, almost dreamlike. Is it a dream then, tender in its wilderness, so soft when it whispers, so self-assured when it screams, that makes it all so real? Who is it that we really are?

 

 

     The stories we live

 

     Live abroad in the Provence for a few months and cultivate the habit of getting lost in the streets of a sleepless city center, where old and young might be reading the Odyssey out loud and others could be sipping apple cider on cobblestone terraces.

 

     Travel again, and listen to the voices of so many civilizations melted in the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba.

 

     Walk in the Père Lachaise cemetery, ask for La Fontaine’s final resting place and you will find someone to tell you the story of a misspelled letter on Moliere’s grave.

 

     Go on a stroll on the Marina Bay in Kuwait and strike a conversation with the guy who might nearly hit you with his bicycle; he’ll tell you all about the little family business he had started.

 

     Escape the New Year’s celebrations at a fancy restaurant in London for a solitary stride on the somewhat crowded Lambeth Bridge, a wind made of ice brushing your face.

 

     We live in a century knit in stories, from that of countries split and formed, to that of experiences in a dish, from the Instagram selfie to the LinkedIn résumé, from the oppressed Rohingya to the forbidden durian to the refugees on the shores of Lesbos.

 

     Even the slightest whisper crosses our soul and we feel its impact. Information abounds and we are compelled to react, like an echo.

 

     Hunger strikes, envy creeps in when pride is silent, a sense of bewilderment breathes fire into our dreams, joy and sorrow coalesce, and anger rises in indignation. Otherness boils in us, images are created, projections of what is seen and heard and felt, and thoughts abandon their shrine to conquer the image of the world. 

 

     Every story is a mutation of the self. Of its own story. Of its feelings, thoughts and opinions, of its values and behaviors. Without these changes, humans fail to connect to their fellow humans and to the world. Every story works like a sine wave through time. It rolls and pounds and rumbles. It shines with the light of a thousand lives and enlivens space with colors.

 

     And we… we are a pebble in the echo, a story crossed by another, narratives intertwined to create meaning.

 

 

     The stories we are

 

     Look back to who you were. You are not the same anymore. You are caught in the middle of time. You are the changeling of the child you were and the child itself, a mutated echo of your past.

 

     Who is that child sitting on the front row of a classroom of forty pupils, raising a hand that will be ignored? Or that high school student seated in the back row, one hand on the desk and the other holding a pen, writing stories?

 

     Who is that person behind the dreamy face holding her graduation hat in one hand and looking upwards, hopeful and naive?

 

     And that young adult waiting in an airport for the first time, a bit lost in the maze of timetables and processes, struggling with her luggage in the waiting lines, often looking at her plane ticket to make sure she’s at the right gate, at the right time, that the plane is leaving for the right destination, that the passport is with her, that nothing was forgotten?

 

     Where did the anxiety and the doubt go, when she was standing on a green pouf at 11:00 PM at the Beirut Digital District to offer a spontaneous training in public speaking? Where was the fear of another’s gaze in the 3:00 AM team stretching in a co-working space in Singapore?

 

     Who is she in heels? In pajamas? Who is she on the dance floor and behind her desk? Who was she in the past? And who is she now? What will become with her fears and her dreams and her smile?

 

     We reminisce what was, feel what is and think of what will be.

 

     We stand at a point in time and look into the moving self. We are an echo caught in the net of its own consciousness, observing itself through time, listening to its own voice, so real. Yet reality seems so fragile: its present is ever-changing, its past is modified by memory and its future, no matter how predictable, is unknown. 

 

     With every experience, something changes. We learn. We grow. We adapt. And swing after swing, we discover a new tempo, a rhythm we never knew. The dance changes, yet we feel like the same orchestra of atoms. Maybe we are, but the atoms are playing new sonatas, new instruments might have joined the squad, and the interaction between the particles evolved into new playful expressions of the self.

 

     We are a scream at birth that stretched into an echo and the echo became a voice. Ours. That of the changing self, traveling across time, leaving something of itself behind and replacing it with some other things.

 

 

     The story of our stories

 

     If self-concept was a book, it would never be published or would be continuously republished, with never-ending changes and additions. Because each systematic perception of one’s self is a deformed echo of the previous one. It’s less than what it was but also more: for every time we come back to the perception we have of ourselves, we pull out and cast in. And this moving equation makes self-concept inherently connected to the process of self-creation (or recreation).

 

     We do that through the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Our narratives echo the world and we reflect the sound. That’s how our previous self communicates with its future self, by mirroring the voices of life. That’s also how we remain consistent, through the continuous dialogue of the atoms of our psyche.

 

     Mathematically, the more we are exposed to experiences, the more narratives we will create and the more opportunities we have to change.

 

     That’s why the 21st century is a wave interference.

 

     We travel and meet people from different cultural backgrounds, we shift jobs, we learn more, we have more books to read and more websites to explore, and we are members of multiple communities… 

 

     Every time we allow ourselves to interact with the circumstances, we take something out of the context and incorporate it into us. Sometimes, we leave something of ourselves behind, closing the doors to the past. And as the interaction creates a new self at the edge of the previous one, echoing our identity with a twist, it becomes a catalyst for growth.

 

     It is ultimately a game of echo between the stories we are and the stories we live: sound bites of changes through time and an internal dialogue between the multiple facets of our ever-changing singularity. This richness brought by the echo gives meaning to time and hones a unity of singularities.

 

 

     When echo turns to silence

 

     However, the 21st century can also be soundproof.

 

     We visit a part of the web that only shows us what is relevant to us, similar to our beliefs, an echo that is not an echo, a facsimile of our own thoughts and words. And when we find a different viewpoint, we mute it away, simply and bluntly. No apologies needed.

 

     We lose a friend, compartmentalize a memory. Emotions disintegrate until only the idea remains, and then, with the palm of our hand, we squeeze it and throw it away, like a bothersome silly fly.

 

     We pick a major for studies. We are convinced that it is what we ought to do. And we are so preoccupied with our version of the story that we shut others and ourselves away. We forget about the reality we live and the truth we are. Instead of remaining faithful to the core of the self, we are enslaved by our own superficial inventions.

 

     We market ourselves with degrees and experiences, job title and statements. Experiences become a mere mean to an end, and the end is an added value to the curriculum vitae of our existence, the royal pathway for living.

 

     The active exploration and recreation of the self stops when our experiences and identities are no longer in motion, when they are out of tune. We stop singing, we dance no more. Our atoms are silent and disconnected.

 

     And so, self-concept transforms into self-packaging.

 

     When we mold ourselves to fit a label, we imprison our voice and prevent the echo of the world from reaching us.

 

     A label breaks a story. The former is a slogan, almost like a propaganda featuring broad half-truths we tell about ourselves. But the latter is the novel; it is real and raw, emotional, intimate and vulnerable. The novel follows the ups and downs of a rollercoaster ride across motions. The slogan is ideological and therefore rigid and obtuse.

 

     By labeling ourselves and isolating our voice, we also alienate others when we fit them into molds. We place rounded people in squares and confine energies to patches. We put experiences in brackets and let dust cover the shelves of a past that is unread and a future that is undreamt.

 

     Labels are like the dark anechoic chambers of the Stasi prisons. These chamber walls are uneven black columns of rubber. The softness of the material sounds comforting but the walls are built to prevent inmates from hurting themselves, for them to stay longer in the desolation of a soundless void. It’s disorienting. An echoless self-concept is self-annihilating, because it sounds like it doesn’t even exist. 

 

     Life is wrenched when deprived from its meaningful echoes. Dialogues turn into empty palavers and unheard monologues. Sometimes, they decay and turn to utter silence. Blocking the voice of the stories we live and the stories we are makes us feel disconnected from the world and ourselves.

 

 

     We shape our stories and our stories shape us. A world of echoes lives in us. And only when we tune in, when we allow ourselves to listen to our stories and to those of the world, can we carry our own voice to the universe.