🐢🪄 Issue #4: Fish, Milk & Tamarind

Jan 25

What does fish, milk, and tamarind have in common?

Nothing. That's what people say in Egypt when someone goes off on a tangent, talks with word salad, or simply tells a far-fetched tale. They would say ‘Samak, Laban, Tamarhindi’ which translates to ‘Fish, Milk and Tamarind’.

That saying always stuck with me while growing up there. The idea here is that it doesn’t add up, just like those 3 things. In fact, you would be wise not to ever mix them.

Lately I’ve been saying this to myself a lot. I would get an idea for a business, a creative project or a concept to write about and I would get really excited about it. But then as time goes by, this idea gets so wrapped up and bunched with so many other things, that it becomes so complicated and paralyzes me into inaction. I have found that my fear of failure takes on the form of confusion and obscuring what needs to be done.

What starts as intriguing, becomes overwhelming. And I just don’t know where to start. I have taken an idea that reached out to me to become its host into so many directions that the idea becomes lost in the process.

I have recently come across this concept that made so much sense to me on Shreya Shariharan’s blog ->

“People and ideas move in different frequencies; ideas live in a world of their own. They inhabit us and cause us to do things, just like the microbiomes in our intestines. When we have an idea, we are transformed by it for good. Ideas grow our minds, then assume us, and potentially the world. They can cause us to move continents, marry someone, start movements, or go to war.”

I think that when we get ideas, our instinct is often to be additive. We assume that the idea requires our input which is often clouded by our own baggage and our egotistical need to make the idea “our own''. Also, our ego, in an effort to protect itself from going through failure or rejection, may make the idea so convoluted that it drains us into inaction. Fear lets those ideas along with their possibilities die within us.

There is also something to be said that when an idea becomes too entangled into our own ego without being externalized, it almost becomes pathological. It’s like carrying a child but never giving birth. I think when the energies of creation stay within us for too long with no release they become toxic. Then they transform into inner turmoils or demons and alter their form into something else. This something else can turn into self-destruction I.e. addiction or depression. I would say that a lot of our modern ailments are just lack of self-expression and lack of creative living.

This reminds me of a quote that I have once read in an article which was taken from The Gnostic Gospel Of Thomas:

"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you; if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

With that, I vow no more ‘samak, laban, tamarhindi’. Here’s to untethered creativity, and to becoming a non-judgmental host for ideas that choose to live through me.