Beliefs: What do I care about?
By: Ramadhan Reflections
Tags: Ramadan, Reflections, Prophet, Muslim, Islam

Chapter 2 of 3, Part 1 of 5

One of my favorite stories about the Holy Prophet (pbuh) goes as follows: A lady once came to the Prophet with her son, and asked him to advice her son not to eat too many sweets. The Prophet asked the pair to return to him in a week — which they did, and then the Prophet comfortably advised the young boy to listen to his mother and not eat too many sweets. The mother then asked the Prophet why he had them return in a week, to which the Prophet replied that he himself enjoyed eating sweets and wanted to use that week to reduce his own consumption of sweets before he could tell the boy to do so.

Honestly, this story blows my mind. The Prophet! The Holy Prophet of God considered his own tastes and preferences to be less important than being able to help someone with sincerity. As if what he likes isn’t that important, and if by changing it he can serve a greater purpose or help someone, then it can easily be changed, no big deal. How dare I call myself flexible when I know of a man who was like this? Compared to him, I’m about as flexible as a rock. If someone was to come to me like that, I’d just be like, “I’d love to help, I really would, but I’m sorry sister, I just can’t…” And secretly I’d be thinking… Ain’t no way I’m giving up my love for sweets to teach some dumb kid.

But it wasn’t about the sweets for the Prophet. It was about the love. If the love could be redirected to something that will serve a greater purpose, then he redirects it. The object of the love beyond God’s love doesn’t matter — things are viewed as either taking him away from that Love or towards. That’s it. If I love, let’s say, sleep, and I love serving God, and my love for serving God in a certain situation negates my love for sleep, then God’s love should outweigh the other love and the other love should just get dropped. Like math. Like there are no feelings, no deep attachments involved, no importance of the human self that chases pleasure. Just run the math, look at the numbers, and execute. It was that easy for him… because his goal was so certain. He knew where he wanted to direct his love and his determination made it easier for him to steer through the fluff. It goes to show the value of the chase for pleasure is next to zero.

I care about passing this test, and while my servitude, or attempt at it, pales (and runs off in a corner and hides and cries) in comparison to the Prophet’s, I want to be able to understand what he is trying to tell me with every move he makes. Every narration of everything he ever did is a message to me, is a hint at how to address life. I want to learn. I care about getting stronger, and being of the people who live in the accordance with the will of God. Because this Will represents, to me, a life of patience, honor, peace, satisfaction, class, kindness, love, dignity, honesty, discipline, togetherness, loyalty, respect. And I want it all.

Sheikh Shomali explains something really interesting in his Islamic Belief Systems lecture series about this; he says that God has no emotions and does not experience “change” in any way. When we “please Him”, we have not changed His state from that of unhappiness to that of happiness, or if we sin we have not changed Him from being happy to unhappy. Because God is unchanging, God is timeless — the concepts of time and space and change do not apply to Him at all in the way they apply to us. And so the Sheikh likens God’s will to the sun, in the sense that the sun will always be there, it will always be shining, and whether you experience the sunshine is either up to you, or any external factors in life. For example, if you go into your home on a sunny day and as a result you do not feel sunshine, that is you choosing not to experience the sunshine, and your not experiencing the sunshine does not change the fact that the sun is still shining. It being night time or it being a cloudy day still does not change the fact that the sun is shining, and it is these finite, temporary, changeable and changing situations that influence our relationship with the sun. The sun, through it all, will remain shining.

So God’s mercy, God’s love, His forgiveness; that is always there, always being showered, and it’s up to us whether we choose to open up to it or reject it. The focus is then on me. The ball is in my court. It’s not so much about what He can do, but what I can do and what I am doing. I care about opening up to His light. I want it. And I want it to want me. What do I need to do to make sure I am always standing under His mercy?

I think I need to let go of the idea of control. From bigger situations like, “I will pursue this career and I will get this job and I will get no less than a six-figure salary and then I will buy this house and if something gets in the way of that I will be very unhappy”, to smaller situations, as small as, “this is my house and I like my kitchen to be organized in this way and this is how I arrange the dishes in the dishwasher and if you do it any other way I will be upset with you or I will eventually change it to the way I like it.” The grip. The grip I have on things in my life. Like Agha Panahiyan says, plan!! Don’t not plan. I should definitely make my life plan, and map out my future, I should just have faith in God alongside it. I just shouldn’t hold on so tightly. So that if things don’t necessarily go my way, I am not dismayed, I do not despair, instead I am so trusting of God and His plans for me that I am ready to jump to the back up plan without being hung up on why my dream plan didn’t work in the first place and then potentially miss out on what was meant to happen for me all along.

I think back to my habits and I am preparing myself for the work that I need to do. I get irritated so easily if something doesn’t go the way I want it to go, for the silliest things. An example that comes to mind is when I’ve just cleaned the sink and done the dishes and five minutes later someone pours out the remains of their coffee into the sink and sets the mug into it and leaves. And I am then greeted by, instead of a shiny sink that I just cleaned, a sink covered in dried coffee stains that I have to scrub off. That irritates me. But who am I to be irritated? Do I hold myself so highly? So worthy of being irritated? Like I have done anything great in my life for me to get irritated. What if, like in Agha Panahiyan’s video, it was a prank, and that they splashed the coffee into the sink on purpose and wanted to see my reaction?

What about all those times I wasted feeling so, so sad over plans that didn’t go my way whereas I could have been preparing for what will happen instead and how I will gracefully accept it? Why do I sulk? Why do I hold grudges? Why do I seek apologies from people who upset me? Who am I to deserve an apology? Who am I to be holding my ego so strongly that I feel I deserve to be unhappy because something wasn’t the way I wanted it to be? What have I accomplished to deserve that right? Nothing. I have accomplished nothing.

Somehow I always convince myself that I am the victim of my circumstance. Out of the three options in the Drama Triangle, I’m definitely the one that plays the victim. I get sad, and I feel wronged. My ego convinces me that life or people are being unfair or harsh towards me, and not understanding me, and so I am innocent and they are at fault. I assure myself of their injustice, so I shift the focus from myself and place the burden of improvement onto that someone else. I reassure myself that it isn’t me who is wrong, and it certainly isn’t me that needs to reflect and change. Because the reality of recognizing everything in me that needs to change is a thousand times more difficult than neatly nudging away the problem.

So I care about letting go. Letting go of control, of the chase for perfection, of the need for validation, of the “i” in happiness. Instead, I want to stand under the sunshine and soak it up. I want to grow like a flower that is desperate to touch the sky — tall, determined, and strong.

When I die, I do not want to be scared. When I’m beneath the ground watching people attending my funeral, I don’t want to beg them to stay. I don’t want to be terrified of being left alone with my deeds, of seeing the ugliness of my actions in life. Instead, I want to die fighting. Fighting my ego, fighting the ultimate war. I want to meet Him with battle scars on my soul, I want to be falling to my knees from the exhaustion, every exclamation of “I” completely shattered, my soul completely surrendered, so that when the angels greet me with the most anticipated salaam, the most peaceful peace, I return myself to them as pure as I was sent off.

And I want their embrace to feel like home.

I can’t do that without pain. So I must befriend pain. I must welcome it, and love it, and thank it… and use it. There’s a reason they’re called growing pains… You just can’t grow without ‘em.