It amazes me how a single person can change the taste of your life. People in love feel it the most. Doing the same activity with the person you love is not the same as doing it without him. It is more like a light pulb that you switch on/off based on the existance – or feeling of existance – of such person in your life. When he is around, everything shine, and when he is away, everything dim.

Why does that happen?

How can a single person moves your entire universe from being a dark – hell like – one into a beautiful shiny bright – heaven like – one?

It is absurd to believe that the universe actually changes.

But it does for me! Which make me wonder of how good do I really know the world around me? Is it all regulated by the types of hormones my body produces? and thus my own reality changes by the current state of my mood?

And then I ask myself, why does it all revolve around the heart?

It doesn’t, right? but I feel love in my heart. Or is that just a fake perception? They tell me that my heart is just a muscle, and I take it. They tell me, it is my brain who translates my emotions, and I take it. But some other people don’t. My office friend believes that it is all in the heart! He even quotes the Quran, taking some versus literally!

I want it all to be in the heart either. Maybe it is all in the heart for my soul. An illusion of a soul with a heart. A heart that looks like the one we draw, not the one we see in surgical operations. An illusion of a spiritual life with the soul of God, the soul of us and the colors of love all moving in harmony and sanity.

That is all can be easier to be imagined lived by the presence of your loved one beside you.

This is the limited social definition of a man and a woman that you would see in human societies these days and in which is more prominant in less development societies.

The definition is constructed with a bundled set of attributes. I listed the primary one in the above table, but there are many other secondary attributes that one would attach to men or women depending of how can they be classified and connected to the primary attributes.

One would expect social constructs to be in line with the natural process of production, but that is not the case, for humans knowledge of nature have progressed over time and some social definitions which were built at a time of less scientific knowledge had a strong grip on people’s awareness, and made it hard for new – more correct – definitions to emerge.

The catch of natural production process is that it doesn’t work in a binary matter. In other words, it doesn’t only produce black and white. Every human organ comes in different shades. Look at the eyes of people for instance, you can find a whole range of colors, shapes and sizes. Look at people’s height, there is a wide range of heights as well. The same is applicable on people’s sexual organs. Nature doesn’t only produce a complete male procreation system vs a complete female procreation one, it does produce organs for both systems that varies in size, shape and task allocated. And in which it can be a system hybrid between the two.

Unfortunatly societies need to assign sex to new born in order to assign social roles later on. Babies who come with unclear sexual organs have to be worked on in order to fit in a *defined* sex even if it means that doctors may do a mistake and cut some sexual organs that came below the standard size.

The same applies on the genetic sexual chromosomes. They teach us at school that people come only with two types of sexual chromosomes: XY defines a man and XX define a woman. They never told us that some men do carry XX, or some women may carry XY, or even other sets like having someone with 3 chromosomes attached to each other like in XXY or XXX people. Maybe it would have been too complicated to be taught at schools, especially the part explaining how those chromosomes translates into a full defined sexual organs.

If that is not enough puzzling enough, then add the gender identity in the mix: the awareness of a person of his own gender. Like for instance someone of a male organs identifying himself to be either a man or a woman! They classical social definition has it one to one relationship for people with male organs to be identified as men, but nature says otherwise, and some people with male organs fail to identify themselves as men, some may identify themselves to be a woman, some would identify themselves to be in-between, and others don’t even identify with either.

The issue of gender is even more interesting because it doesn’t deal with some clear seen organs, instead it has to do with the psychology of a person and his self awareness of his own gender. It makes me wonder of how applicable gender issues to animals and how much people’s awareness and the constructs of human societies came up with such problems. I know that there are gender roles in the more complicated species of the animal kingdom, but who else, besides of humans, are aware of their gender and its role?

And then comes the attitude attached with being a man or a woman. For men in general having a clear physical advantage (which comes in a range as well) over women, one would assume that physical strength is translated into domination and superiority, and thus at a time where strength was essential for human societies, men dominated women. But that is not always the case, as size and physical strength don’t always translate into domination.

While it may be easier for us to bundle those set of attributes into a simple definition of a man and a woman, in reality, those set of attributes rarely come bundled all together. Each one comes in a spectrum of degrees. Different attributes that if we pay a closer look into it, we would all realize that the majority of us fall indeed under the last column in the table above – which is a question mark!

I had recently the chance to meet someone from Arab 48 (Arab Israel) and had an interesting conversation about both mine and his national identity. For him, he clearly identifies himself to be a Palestinian although he had been born under the Israeli state, lived, studied, grew over there and has always been carrying the Israeli passport. For me, I identify my self to be a Jordanian even though that I am aware of my Palestinian heritage and the whole story of my grandparents seeking refuge in Jordan in 1948.

My self Jordanian identification didn’t please my Palestinian friend. In reality, we both belong to the descendents of the Palestinian people who had to deal with the disaster of 1948 and the creation of the Israeli state. My grandparents seek refuge in Jordan, while his didn’t leave their homes and endured the continuous discrimination against them living in a Jewish racist state that treats its Arab citizens as a second class.

The Palestinians issue is so complicated, the same people who were living under the same area that we define today as Palestine in the Arabic notion have been divided into several sects, and after 3 generations of the disaster, the scattered nation descendents are building different national identities that are based on their current special individual situation. The main biggest 3 groups are the ones living in Jordan, the ones living in Israel and the ones living in the West Bank and Gaza.

The issue of national identity is a real dilemma in the Middle East for most of today countries are recent construct of the British and French colonization at the beginning of last century. It has been less than 100 year when the colonial powers divided the Othmanian empire and drew the lines of the recent states that forms the Middle Eastern countries. For the area of Jordan and Israel/Palestine the dilemma is even more severe because there is not only an entire nation that has been divided into 3 areas, but also an entire race of Israelis who came from all over the world and settled down in Palestine taking control over its own people.

In Jordan, this has been a real issue for ages, the identity of origins have been standing on the way of building a national identity for the country which essential in merging people together and helping in advancing this country in all ways. That is why King Abdulla II had this brilliant idea a couple of years ago and a came up with the motto of ‘Jordan First’, because you can’t have this division of loyalty and mutual discrimination while trying to build for the future of this country. For me, I have always hated the family name question and the expression of relief/dis-relief on people’s faces when they conclude my origin through my family name. Palestine has always been in my heart because it was the place where my grandparents were born and lived, but it has never been my country and never would be. I have a total loyalty for Jordan and a 100% national identity for this country, and as a Jordanian citizen, I do back up every movement that helps to demolish any kind of discrimination between the citizens of this country.

While my stand would be applauded from a Jordanian point of view, I do understand my Palestinian friend disappointment, for him, and other Palestinians fighting to maintain their Palestinian identity my stand sounds like a betrayal for their cause. In the other hand, and while it does please me knowing that Palestinians in Israel are still holding to their Palestinian identity, I find it very unfair from my part or any other Arab to blame those Palestinians who decided to pick up on the Israeli identity for them being born and lived under the Israeli state and who do face discrimination against them – discrimination is everywhere – they do enjoy the benefits of a democratic state that allows them to speak up loud their identity and even engage in the Israeli political quarrel.

The question that I have in my mind is how much it is legitimate for the citizens of a certain state to work against the basic structure of that state? Like for instance Israeli Arab citizens working to turn the Israel from a Jewish state into an Arabic one and even changing the name of the state from Israel to Palestine. How legitimate it would be if any Jordanian raises a flag that he is working on changing the name of Jordan to something else? Is having an agenda of changing the identity of a certain country tolerated and accepted under the umbrella of democracy or is it something the regime of each country has to decide for itself?

The issue of national identities is very complicated. I wonder what has more credibility: The country identity defined by the identity of its people, or defining the identity of the people based on their country identity.