When I was 17 years old, I had a dream. I dreamt
that I was sitting inside a masjid and a little girl walked up to ask me a
question. She asked me: “Why do people have to leave each other?” The question
was a personal one, but it seemed clear to me why the question was chosen for
me.
I was one to get attached.
Ever since I was a child, this temperament was
clear. While other children in preschool could easily recover once their
parents left, I could not. My tears, once set in motion, did not stop easily.
As I grew up, I learned to become attached to everything around me. From the
time I was in first grade, I needed a best friend. As I got older, any fall-out
with a friend shattered me. I couldn’t let go of anything. People, places,
events, photographs, moments—even outcomes became objects of strong attachment.
If things didn’t work out the way I wanted or imagined they should, I was
devastated. And disappointment for me wasn’t an ordinary emotion. It was catastrophic.
Once let down, I never fully recovered. I could never forget, and the break
never mended. Like a glass vase that you place on the edge of a table, once
broken, the pieces never quite fit again.
But the problem wasn’t with the vase. Or even that the
vases kept breaking. The problem was that I kept putting them on the edge of
tables. Through my attachments, I was dependent on my relationships to fulfill
my needs. I allowed those relationships to define my happiness or my sadness,
my fulfillment or my emptiness, my security, and even my self-worth. And so,
like the vase placed where it will inevitably fall, through those dependencies
I set myself up for disappointment. I set myself up to be broken. And that’s
exactly what I found: one disappointment, one break after another.
But the people who broke me were not to blame any
more than gravity can be blamed for breaking the vase. We can’t blame the laws
of physics when a twig snaps because we leaned on it for support. The twig was
never created to carry us.
Our weight was only meant to be carried by God. We
are told in the Quran: “…whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped
the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And God hears and knows all
things.” (Qur’an 2: 256)
There is a crucial lesson in this verse: that there
is only one handhold that never breaks. There is only one place where we can
lay our dependencies. There is only one relationship that should define our
self-worth and only one source from which to seek our ultimate happiness,
fulfillment, and security. That place is God.
But this world is all about seeking those things
everywhere else. Some of us seek it in our careers, some seek it in wealth,
some in status. Some, like me, seek it in our relationships. In her book, Eat,
Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert describes her own quest for happiness. She
describes moving in and out of relationships, and even traveling the globe in
search of this fulfillment. She seeks that fulfillment—unsuccessfully—in her
relationships, in meditation, even in food.
And that’s exactly where I spent much of my own
life: seeking a way to fill my inner void. So it was no wonder that the little
girl in my dream asked me this question. It was a question about loss, about
disappointment. It was a question about being let down. A question about
seeking something and coming back empty handed. It was about what happens when
you try to dig in concrete with your bare hands: not only do you come back with
nothing—you break your fingers in the process. And I learned this not by
reading it, not by hearing it from a wise sage. I learned it by trying it
again, and again, and again.
And so, the little girl’s question was essentially
my own question…being asked to myself.
Ultimately, the question was about the nature of
the dunya as a place of fleeting moments and temporary attachments. As a place
where people are with you today, and leave or die tomorrow. But this reality
hurts our very being because it goes against our nature. We, as humans, are
made to seek, love, and strive for what is perfect and what is permanent. We
are made to seek what’s eternal. We seek this because we were not made for this
life. Our first and true home was Paradise: a land that is both perfect and
eternal. So the yearning for that type of life is a part of our being. The
problem is that we try to find that here. And so we create ageless creams and
cosmetic surgery in a desperate attempt to hold on—in an attempt to mold this
world into what it is not, and will never be.
And that’s why if we live in dunya with our hearts,
it breaks us. That’s why this dunya hurts. It is because the definition of
dunya, as something temporary and imperfect, goes against everything we are
made to yearn for. Allah put a yearning in us that can only be fulfilled by
what is eternal and perfect. By trying to find fulfillment in what is fleeting,
we are running after a hologram…a mirage. We are digging into concrete with our
bare hands. Seeking to turn what is by its very nature temporary into something
eternal is like trying to extract from fire, water. You just get burned. Only
when we stop putting our hopes in dunya, only when we stop trying to make the
dunya into what it is not—and was never meant to be (jannah)—will this life
finally stop breaking our hearts.
We must also realize that nothing happens without a
purpose. Nothing. Not even broken hearts. Not even pain. That broken heart and
that pain are lessons and signs for us. They are warnings that something is
wrong. They are warnings that we need to make a change. Just like the pain of
being burned is what warns us to remove our hand from the fire, emotional pain
warns us that we need to make an internal change. That we need to detach. Pain
is a form of forced detachment. Like the loved one who hurts you again and
again and again, the more dunya hurts us, the more we inevitably detach from
it. The more we inevitably stop loving it.
And pain is a pointer to our attachments. That
which makes us cry, that which causes us most pain is where our false attachments
lie. And it is those things which we are attached to as we should only be
attached to Allah which become barriers on our path to God. But the pain itself
is what makes the false attachment evident. The pain creates a condition in our
life that we seek to change, and if there is anything about our condition that
we don’t like, there is a divine formula to change it. God says: “Verily never
will God change the condition of a people until they change what is within
themselves.” (Qur’an, 13:11)
After years of falling into the same pattern of
disappointments and heartbreak, I finally began to realize something profound.
I had always thought that love of dunya meant being attached to material
things. And I was not attached to material things. I was attached to people. I
was attached to moments. I was attached to emotions. So I thought that the love
of dunya just did not apply to me. What I didn’t realize was that people,
moments, emotions are all a part of dunya. What I didn’t realize is that all
the pain I had experienced in life was due to one thing, and one thing only:
love of dunya.
As soon as I began to have that realization, a veil
was lifted from my eyes. I started to see what my problem was. I was expecting
this life to be what it is not, and was never meant to be: perfect. And being
the idealist that I am, I was struggling with every cell in my body to make it
so. It had to be perfect. And I would not stop until it was. I gave my blood,
sweat, and tears to this endeavor: making the dunya into jannah. This meant
expecting people around me to be perfect. Expecting my relationships to be
perfect. Expecting so much from those around me and from this life.
Expectations. Expectations. Expectations. And if there is one recipe for
unhappiness it is that: expectations. But herein lay my fatal mistake. My
mistake was not in having expectations; as humans, we should never lose hope.
The problem was in *where* I was placing those expectations and that hope. At
the end of the day, my hope and expectations were not being placed in God. My
hope and expectations were in people, relationships, means. Ultimately, my hope
was in this dunya rather than Allah.
And so I came to realize a very deep Truth. An ayah
began to cross my mind. It was an ayah I had heard before, but for the first
time I realized that it was actually describing me: “Those who rest not their
hope on their meeting with Us, but are pleased and satisfied with the life of
the present, and those who heed not Our Signs.” (Qur’an, 10:7)
By thinking that I can have everything here, my
hope was not in my meeting with God. My hope was in dunya. But what does it
mean to place your hope in dunya? How can this be avoided? It means when you
have friends, don’t expect your friends to fill your emptiness. When you get married,
don’t expect your spouse to fulfill your every need. When you’re an activist,
don’t put your hope in the results. When you’re in trouble don’t depend on
yourself. Don’t depend on people. Depend on God.
Seek the help of people—but realize that it is not
the people (or even your own self) that can save you. Only Allah can do these
things. The people are only tools, a means used by God. But they are not the
source of help, aid, or salvation of any kind. Only God is. The people cannot
even create the wing of a fly (22:73). And so, even while you interact with
people externally, turn your heart towards God. Face Him alone, as Prophet
Ibrahim (as) said so beautifully: “For me, I have set my face, firmly and
truly, towards Him Who created the heavens and the earth, and never shall I
give partners to Allah.” (Qur’an, 6:79)
But how does Prophet Ibrahim (as) describe his
journey to that point? He studies the moon, the sun and the stars and realizes
that they are not perfect. They set.
They let us down.
So Prophet Ibrahim (as) was thereby led to face
Allah alone. Like him, we need to put our full hope, trust, and dependency on
God. And God alone. And if we do that, we will learn what it means to finally
find peace and stability of heart. Only then will the roller coaster that once
defined our lives finally come to an end. That is because if our inner state is
dependent on something that is by definition inconstant, that inner state will
also be inconstant. If our inner state is dependent on something changing and temporary,
that inner state will be in a constant state of instability, agitation, and
unrest. This means that one moment we’re happy, but as soon as that which our
happiness depended upon changes, our happiness also changes. And we become sad.
We remain always swinging from one extreme to another and not realizing why.
We experience this emotional roller coaster because
we can never find stability and lasting peace until our attachment and
dependency is on what is stable and lasting. How can we hope to find constancy
if what we hold on to is inconstant and perishing? In the statement of Abu Bakr
is a deep illustration of this truth. After the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ died, the people went into shock and could not
handle the news. But although no one loved the Prophet ﷺ like Abu Bakr, Abu Bakr understood well the only
place where one’s dependency should lie. He said: “If you worshipped Muhammad,
know that Muhammad is dead. But if you worshipped Allah, know that Allah never
dies.”
To attain that state, don’t let your source of
fulfillment be anything other than your relationship with God. Don’t let your
definition of success, failure, or self-worth be anything other than your
position with Him (Qur’an, 49:13). And if you do this, you become unbreakable,
because your handhold is unbreakable. You become unconquerable, because your
supporter can never be conquered. And you will never become empty, because your
source of fulfillment is unending and never diminishes.
Looking back at the dream I had when I was 17, I
wonder if that little girl was me. I wonder this because the answer I gave her
was a lesson I would need to spend the next painful years of my life learning.
My answer to her question of why people have to leave each other was: “because
this life isn’t perfect; for if it was, what would the next to be called?”
P/s: Forget the Grammatical Error..just read..dari seorang insan bernama..Nurjeehan
