Khor Fakkan

 

Khor Fakkan

A Place of Perspective and Peace

2 min read·Just now

Iam in the middle of a desert, in the middle of nowhere, and it is helping. I feel a strange sense of relief. How crazy and frantic we otherwise are. We work from Saturday to Thursday, six days a week. We live competitively hectic lives. We constantly compare ourselves to those who are more intelligent, wealthier, and better. We compare ourselves to those who have beautiful partners and powerful cars.

How many reasons there are to panic, to rush, to worry? But how much more important it is to make time for someone we often forget in our daily frenzy, a more profound, quieter part of ourselves. We catch glimpses of it at night, on the road in a cab or in the silence of early mornings. And I feel it strongly now, here in the desert land on the edge of Fujairah and the high seas of the Gulf of Oman.

Everything we do counts for so much. Still, here I hear a different, more sobering message: that everything we do and are, in fact, insignificant — when seen from a far enough distance, from the viewpoint of the ancient rocks in Khor Fakkan amid the endless landscapes, desert sand and limitless blue skies.

To stop myself from making things bigger and scarier than they are, I need to think about how small and unimportant I am when I compare myself to time and space.

It is blazing hot here. The air is thick. This place does not care about my life. In this desert, I do not matter; I can see clearly — in a quiet, reasonable way — that my life is tiny. Khor Fakkan helps me to see things differently.

Past the towering mountains of stone, the barren, unforgiving plain stretches into eternity without any trace of humans. There are no clouds in sight. The sun’s rays illuminate everything. My ego is dissolved, and I can lose myself.

Denzil against the famous limestone rock back in the day in 1977 in Khor Fakkan

The desert teaches me in a majestic way what ordinary life often shows me cruelly; that the universe is more potent than I am, that I am weak and brief. I have no choice but to accept the limits on my power. The lesson carved into the rock and desert sands submits to needs and nature larger than myself. But so nobly it is carved here that I can leave the Khor Fakkan desert, not defeated, but refreshed. I am moved by what is beyond us and honoured to be part of such great forces. I have seen a place and listened to the whispers across a vast emptiness and a pearl of wisdom. I am wiser now.

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Images belong to the original owners.

Dubai
Sharjah
United Arab Emirates
Desert

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