balance in cairo

On the way to the airport today I saw a young woman making her way on foot amongst the craziest traffic. She wore rather fetching trousers tightly drawn around her waist, a blouse, long curly hair; a slim attractive woman rather deftly moving between the six lanes of dodging and weaving cars. But there was something not quite right. I looked at the taxi driver and he nodded, “Magnoon”- mad, and as we passed her I saw the look of harassed intent and jerking movements of her head that told me she was mentally disturbed. Who else would be mucking around in the middle of a particularly mad highway in the craziest traffic system in the world you might ask?

The strange thing was, right up until I realized she was mad I’d been thinking how dynamic and ‘western’ she seemed compared to the swaddled and rather impassive women at the roadside…

You can go mad anywhere if you haven’t got an instinct for balance. I was thinking this as I looked at the wealth of excellent self-help material available for free on the web. But on most sites it’s ALL self-help. There’s no let-up. It begins to seem like a kind of greed - a greed for personal growth- which is still greed, in other words something blind, automatic, and capable of blocking what you see. Greedy people make sillier mistakes to put it bluntly.

So even on a site loaded with self-help there needs to be some kind of balancing factor.