The Absurd Cause For The Faili Kurds Holocausts

This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series Faili Kurds Holocausts

Dr. Ala Musa Hasan | Exclusive to iKurd.net

Eternal Legacy

Legacy is a bequest that is conveyed from one human being to another. It is something meaningful, teachable, inheritable, and descendible that can be transmitted, inherited, taught, or received from an ancestor.

The purpose of people carrying on with their legacy is to allow something that was experienced or originated from an ancestral source to be shared, taught, and spread between people or nations.

Often when people talk about their legacy, they tend to think that it’s something that is left behind after a person has passed. But legacy is more than that, it is about sharing what we have learned and experienced, not just what we have earned as material wealth.

A true and meaningful Legacy is when people make a significant and energizing contribution to humanity by serving a cause greater than their own. A legacy is when people tend to embrace their uniqueness, existence, resistance, etc, so that their bequest would be shared with all humanity and their new generation would take the responsibility to ensure that it would have a life beyond them and it would survive its time on earth.

Although, the legacy of the Faili Kurds Holocaust could be a burden or a gift for some of our new generation, and those youngsters who have accepted this ponderous legacy must know that they have the responsibility to keep it alive, and to share their experiences and feelings with others.

This is especially important for the third generation of the Faili Kurds Holocaust survivors. The Faili Kurds people must work diligently to make sure that their children do not forget the tragedies of their Holocaust, and to understand and to figure out the origins of their struggles and demons.

However, some of our people must understand both views, it is surely unreasonable to expect our children not to delve into their parents past, especially when it was declared by their parents as something is unthinkable, But our post-holocaust generations came across to justified that their parents’ history and experience also belongs to them.

The legacy of the Faili Kurds Holocaust surely will evolve our concord consciousness, which is an ongoing activity and it is what we do with it between now and eternity. The lens of legacy gives our new generation the view of their life, where they become aware of the desire to live beyond them, focused on making a difference in the lives of others and giving back to their community.

The legacy that our older generation leave is the life that our new generation should lead and therefore, a legacy is the residue of an experience, memories, practices, traditions, or a life that was well lived and managed. That everything we experienced, say, and do will be deposited into our eternal legacy.

Creating our legacy is a pathway resulting in a deep sense of significance, where true meaning is found somewhere beyond the pursuit of our challenges or successes, which results in a ripple effect that negatively or positively could impacts our community and society.

The Faili Kurds people need to remind themselves not to focus on their dreadful past and what they endured during the bloody Saddam’s time, instead, they should just keep looking at the world positively in order to move on in life and the strength will come.

For example, looking at what I have taken in from others and also what I have learned from my own life experiences has been a powerful exploration of who I am now and what I hope to leave behind. And I realized that in order to be that example, in order to pass on these beliefs and values to our new generations, I have to live them consciously and talk about them all the time in order to remind myself with my achievement.

My goal is to leave others with a belief in themselves and the goodness within their hart and the magic of the world outside their door. Because I know that there is beauty everywhere, you just need to open your eyes and take it in. We should remind ourselves to keep going when things get hard. If I learned anything through my own hardships and challenges, it’s that I became stronger than I ever thought.

Knowing the legacy that we want to leave behind helps us to stay focused on what we are doing in the present so that our goals are in line with that legacy. It offers a concrete sense of purpose in choosing what we are giving our energy to. The whole concept of legacy can be a deeply powerful way of connecting with others. Looking at your roots, ancestral, blood family, cultural, spiritual, or whatever avenue you choose to explore, connects you to those who have gone before you.

Planning the legacy that we are leaving behind connects us to those whose lives that we touch, and that they touch, and so on, potentially for generations to come. For us (Faili Kurds) staying silent about our past should not be an option. As a confident extrovert people, we should thrive on storytelling about our past and challenges. During our story telling, the focus should be on our Adventure, danger, feelings, and the strong personalities that our new generation came up with.

For example, my two sisters, my four brothers, and I start to realize that our parents’ history, experiences, and identity belong to us, And we need to talk about it. We should not be stillness about our past, because when we choose to be silence, we are detaching ourselves from obligations, yet, we need to put on a show for the world to see. The truth is, throughout our life, there were many times when the world was really quiet about our suffering and the only thing that was left for us was to listen to the beat of our own heart.

We have to be determined to remain positive. We have to understand that the greater part of our misery or unhappiness will be determined not by our circumstances, but by our attitude. A happy person is not a person who always lives in a good situation, but rather a person who always has a good attitude in every situation.

So we need to smile at those who often try to begrudge or hurt us; we need to show them what’s missing in their life and what they can’t take away from us. Doing so doesn’t mean forgetting or giving in; it means we choose happiness over hurt.

We cannot find peace and happiness by merely avoiding life. We all know that life spins with unexpected changes; so instead of avoiding it, we should take every change and experience as a challenge for personal growth. Either it will give us what we want, or it might teach us what the next step should be. And always remember, finding peace in life does not mean to be in a place where there is no pain, no noise, no challenges, and no hard work. It means to be in the midst of those things while remaining calm in your heart.

Not until we have endured soreness in this world, we will begin to find ourselves. Realizing that we were hart was the first step to live the life that we want. Making a big life change is pretty scary. I can tell you from my own life experience that I’ve found peace and love, but I lost it for a while, and then I found it once again. But each time what I found was more incredible than the last.

So we need to remember that everyone suffers in life at some point, and everyone feels lost sometimes too. But, the key for our happiness is using our experiences to grow. When we apply what we have learned from our legacy to our future choices and actions, we will move forward not backward, and we will be stronger and wiser.

Dr. Ala Musa Hasan, a Canada-based Faili Kurd, PHD Candidates in Clinical Psychology.

The opinions are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent the views of iKurd.net or its editors.