.بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

Who are you? What sort of life do you want to live, actually? What does success look like, to you?

We naturally want to do well with things; we want for others to approve, and to agree. But, surely, there needs to be a balance with this: we live among others. We ought to consider them, too. We’ve also got these selves of ours, whom we don’t quite want to lose, in the process.

What sort of life do you want to live?

It’s a big question, and an important question at that.

Are you doing, mostly, what you ‘should’, by others’ standards, by, perhaps heavy, cultural expectations, be doing? And if we brush the sands covering these hearts of ours away:

What does it say?

Is this a life you are content with; is your heart (as much as it can be, here) happy with it all? Or are you lying to yourself; hiding, somewhere, beneath it all?

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What needs to change?

What things, ways of doing things, living, do you know you like?

And what feels stifling, and misery-inducing, and fundamentally ‘wrong’ to that heart of yours, actually?

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Here, amid the struggles and mundanity of Dunya, we find there are ways: to actually honour whom we, and of course Allah, know ourselves to be, deeply. Within the parameters of Halāl, and in seeking to live a life that is Tayyib…

[Hours do indeed become days, which do become weeks, months, years, and, ‘suddenly’: decades. Time. What are we actually doing with what of it we’ve been allocated, gifted?]

Who are you, and are you living your life in a way that honours this holistic and Divinely-designed, created, you?

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وَٱلْعَصْرِ

إِنَّ ٱلْإِنسَـٰنَ لَفِى خُسْرٍ

إِلَّا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ وَعَمِلُوا۟ ٱلصَّـٰلِحَـٰتِ وَتَوَاصَوْا۟ بِٱلْحَقِّ وَتَوَاصَوْا۟ بِٱلصَّبْرِ

“By Time,

Indeed, mankind is surely in loss.

Except for those who have (adherently) believed and done righteous deeds, and enjoined one another to Truth and enjoined one another to Patience.”

— Qur’an, Surah ‘Asr.