My desktop wallpaper is a really nice one. Its a painting of a massive desert, perhaps a city in the distance, and a robed figure moving towards that city with his camel. The desert is so unique.

Unlike the ocean, the desert gives you a much greater sense of distance. The ocean seems to repeat its same blue, wavy patterns over and over, and it gets difficult to tell how far you are from the horizon. The desert is much more easy on the eyes .The sand dunes rise and fall, and you can even see distant sand dunes, towering above the others, miles away. In the desert, you truly feel insignificant. The heat is searing, there's no water in sight. If it wasnt for human intelligence, then you would be dead long ago.

There's such a feeling of exlhilaration when you stand on top of a sand dune, looking out at the desert. It makes me feel calm. It gives me peace. Its almost as if, spending a life living around concrete and machinery, around tall buildings and noisy traffic, when you're in the desert, everything disappears. There is only the clear blue sky, contrasting against the stark orange of the sand dunes. The boundless landscape, stretching itself out forever. And the grains of sand, shifting beneath your feet.

Its that feeling that you get in the beach. The feeling that you can suddenly shape the landscape around you. You dig your toes and your hands beneath the sand. You can feel its warmth from the sun. You shift the sand around, watch it roll down the dune. It makes that rattling, shivering sound.

And the nature of the desert is so unique. Tommorrow, the sand dunes wont be the same as they were the day before. The wind will move the sand around, change things around. You can even see the sharp edges and curves that the wind has created out of the sand dunes. Its so unique.

I always remember the time at the desert camp in dubai. It was night time. Everyone was partying. I walked out and sat with the camels. They looked at me lazily and then looked back. Occasionally spitting. I sat on top of a dune, and relaxed. I could feel the sand shifting to make me more comfortable. I could feel the wind through my hair, the warm night on my chest, my feet and hands digging into the sand. I could see all the stars. I sat there, looking up at them all. I wanted to just walk away from the camp so badly. To just walk away somewhere far away for an hour and come back later. I just wanted to be alone with the desert for a while. They call it wanderlust.

I dreamt about the desert last night. I was in a small palace in the middle of the desert. I was dressed in arabian robes, there was the smell of shisha and constant rising smoke. There was fabric draped around the walls, fountains inside the hallway. Large, open windows that bought the wind in, blowing the drapery around, providing a beautiful view of the desert and the moon. I could smell arabian musk strongly from my clothes. I sat on tiny little pouffes and lay back, looking at the high, domed ceiling.

There is something about the arabian imagery and culture that is just so mysterious and exotic. There's always that image that comes in my mind of a bedouin, travelling, robed, with his face covered except his eyes, carrying a round scimitar and walking slowly with his camel, pulling it with a rope. Doesnt this man look like he has a story to tell? Isnt there an exciting poetry, a history, behind this imagery? The arabic landscape continues to inspire me with its richness. No other culture has pushed me in this way.

Getting older has its definite perks. Overall, you feel like your senses are sharper, you're generally wiser, and you can face things with a lot more confidence. That doesnt mean that there isnt room for improvement however. Generally, its important to realise that you can always be better off. There's this sense of growing complexities.

Lets take for example, simple technology. The more advanced technology grows, the more parts it will need, the more heat it will produce and the more power it will consume. Thats why cutting edge technology is so revolved around making things smaller and accessible by reducing power consumption and size. Simple economics tells us that, the average consumer cant afford to be at the top of the technology food chain at all times (or even for the majority of the time) because the rate at which technology accelerates isnt running in parallel to the money we earn in our daily lives. New technology is always expensive; and we defeat that by making it more mainstream and reducing the supply/demand gap and decreasing the value of that "New" technology, once its not new anymore.

So, before my little outburst. Onto my real point :

I truly believe that humans are the same. The more we grow, the more space we grow internally, the more power we take up, the more complication we create - and all of this is in the sake of allowing our quality of life to have the scope and the intensity that we simply dont have in childhood. We like to isolate ourselves in a world of our own desicions and experiences, and the more Life keeps driving the metaphorical nail, in and in, then the more we isolate ourselves in order to deal with the obstacles that everyday life throws at us. Isolation is important, because it removes the complications of including others. How other people would feel about the desicions you make, how that affects their situation, how their reactions would affect you and so on and so forth. 

Within that isolation, we start creating secrets. Little things we dont tell other people. Things we keep to ourselves. Secrets we tell others, or may withhold from others. A secret doesnt even have to be inherently secretive. You just might choose not to share information out of laziness or out of that introverted cocooning.

Incredibly recently, i really strongly believed that a life without secrets is a happy life. There's a satisfaction to be had in knowing that, everything is off your chest. But now, i feel that keeping secrets is essential to life itself. There's only so much you can say without offending someone and upsetting the harmony of everyday life. Of course, i'm all for telling the truth and telling it like how it is - but if thats going to burn bridges, then its rather important to keep the peace. But still, after all - we are human and we do feel. Sometimes, so much of what we feel contradicts common sense and reality. So much of what we feel is absurd because of how unspeakable it is. You might have someone you love, but because of one or two irritable things that drive you crazy, that leads you to keeping your irritation a secret for the sake of picking the lesser evil.

It might not even have to be that. You might have a viewpoint, and someone might say they understand, but in reality they really dont, but in order to avoid a heated discussion or an arguement, you simply compromise - but still noting down in your head secretly that people really do not understand you at all.

Its almost as if by living our own lives, we are writing our own secret code that only we can understand. And try as hard as we might to decipher the mysteries of others lives, our own secret language is something we will always call home.

"You know adnaan, you would've been a lot more different if you actually did have a brother. I dunno, you would've just seemed happier" she finished speaking and looked like she actually had thought properly about what she had just said.

I smiled slightly and looked out of the window. It was grey, congested sky. The clouds looked ready to burst with moisture. My eyes felt the same. But just like the clouds on that day; i held it in.