I have forgotten how to tell time. Days pass and I neither mourn their passage nor care where they go. Hours have become arbitrary and the only indication that the world continues to spin is the transition from light to darkness or the darkness to light. Beirut does this to you, Lebanon does this to you; so warm its welcome, so fervent its embrace that the past and future collapse into the present rendering any notion of past or future unnecessary.
This is not to say that the past and the future have no place here for reminders of near and distant pasts are found in partly excavated Roman forums and building riddled with bullet holes near collapse that have been abandoned since the war and the future springs forth in the building and rebuilding of a city that has stood for as many millennia as my feet has toes. And so to walk in the midst of this is to have no choice but to live only in the present; the space in which life happens, a life I had only wished to live until now.
Here is where jasmine so profusely permeates the air that you have to stop and beg for spring to stay forever if only just for this and the purple petals or the jacaranda brighten the very same streets that for fifteen years only knew war. This same sweet welcome is mirrored in the disposition of those who call this place home and also those who have no home to call their own and their kindness after kindness extends like the coast of the Mediterranean the length of this small country with only the biggest of hearts.
But I will not remain ignorant and paint a picture of Lebanon filled with only sunshine and rainbows. Like all nations it is host to a myriad of problems that is only exacerbated by the war in Syria and the continued conflict with the state to the south, but it is its resilience in the face of all of this, its adamant refusal to be hindered by its history and its inability to hold the future in certainty that makes it so easy to fall in love with Lebanon and in love I will stay and Lebanon will be the standard to which I will hold all other countries on this pilgrimage for it is in Lebanon that I have learned not to live in the shadow of the past or in fear of the future, but to stay present, always present, because that is where the beauty is.