Sun Tzu - the art of war and trial

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A couple of days ago I was in a meeting with a person who said he has been reading my blog for "damn, the last ten years", which of course is a flattery but also an exaggeration, but the blog's 8th anniversary which coincided with its 2000th post, happened last January. Still, I felt flattered, but those who do follow the blog might have noticed I lost traction a bit, the reasons were many. Between 2010 and 2014 I experienced many personal events which frankly would have wiped me from the map had it not been for my tenacity and perseverance. Crisis came separate, in tandem, concurrently, you name the shape, they came in  it. The cumulative effect left me gasping for air once the milestone of 2000 post had been attained. The reasons were multiple, first I needed to take a step back (in late 2014, I wrote to a friend saying "things seem to have calmed down" and 2 days later another full crisis broke), the second is that with the economic downturn very little was going on in the market (thankfully) so there were few ads worth reporting on, there was also an emotional reason - I truly felt that we as bloggers had failed our mission (the people I called #sharmoutAD - the whores of the ad agencies - were taking the airwaves with a megaphone and formerly credible bloggers had joined their ranks so it was discouraging to see the state of the blogosphere was in).
Then one day my mother craved pizza, something unusual for her, so as I went back from town, I went to PHD in Adonis, and a phone call came, the cybercrime bureau wanted me to show up to give my evidence on the now infamous trial that I denigrated my plaintiff by calling him a thief. The rest you now know - cybercrime, and now stage two (trial), etc... Yet, what happened is that the paradoxical effect of the whole thing was that it brought me clarity. My Arabic teacher at school used to call me "sbay3i" (seventh-month baby due to my restlessness) and people who know me simply know how passionate I am, I jump to things and projects whole-heartedly (foolishly is a better word), and I want things done here and now. Make no mistake, I am still working at warp-speed by everyone's standards, but this trial gave me focus, dare I say tranquility?
Whereas for the many reasons mentioned above I was drifting at the beginning of this year, suddenly a razor-sharp vision descended on me. As if I now know that I was in the right all along. Does anyone remember that fateful day when I got 22 hate mails on this blog courtesy of a major advertising agency? Sure I got bugged but when I opened facebook that night to post something, there was an email waiting for me from someone I never encountered before. It was a young student from a university telling me to disregard the naysayers and go on with what I am doing "because if (I) was not doing something right, they would not be attacking (me)".
I am - to paraphrase Sun Tzu from "The Art of War" - a victorious warrior who won and then went to war.
And that, on this day and time, makes me feel good.
No scratch that, it makes me feel at peace.