ummmaryam:

When the dunya was the punishment for Adam AS

Sometimes you experience a moment of complete contentment. You’re doing what you love surrounded by the people who matter. There’s comfort, there’s laughter and there’s heart-warming acceptance that only those who have loved, fought and grown together can experience. And for an instant, you take a mental step back and wonder how on earth you got to be so lucky to deserve something as perfect as this.

I’ve always wanted to be really good at doing something with my hands - like building something, sculpting, drawing or painting. The only slightly ‘artsy’ thing I can do fairly well is make birthday cards and collages (which is basically just cutting and pasting).

I was talking about this to one of friends (who is the very definition of artsy), and she said that my handwriting was pretty unique and impossibly neat. And that handwriting itself is a form of art that not everyone can do well.

Lol. Alhamdulillah for the friends who make you feel better about the smallest of issues. 

There is a part in Saint Augustine’s Confessions where he talks about the death of his closest friend. He describes their relationship as if they were the manifestation of the same soul in two different bodies. And when his friend passes away, he doesn’t understand how life can demand that he goes on living when a part of him has already died.

I had loved [him] as if he would live forever.*

This sentence has always stuck with me. Each time I think about it, I can’t help but be in awe of how hauntingly accurate it is. It doesn’t just apply to the way we become attached to people, but to anything and everything that the dunya has to offer. 

It’s incredibly easy to be enchanted by people, places, our circumstances and even with ourselves. We fall in love with the way things are without thinking about the future at all. We pour our hearts and souls into our present relationships and surroundings, thinking that that this is it. This is life. And when we’re in that state, we never think about what would happen if things changed and we forget that the world is only temporary. We live our lives as if the individuals who are a part of it and the opportunities at our disposal are meant to last forever.

That is precisely why separation of any sort is so difficult. We let things seep into spaces in our hearts and we let them define us so much so that when they are taken away, it is as if a part of us is being ripped away as well. It leaves us a little emptier, a little less complete and a little more broken. And the prospect of not being able to get that piece back is almost too much to bear.

Sometimes, it’s so difficult to keep the dunya at a distance.

*Other translations read: “I had loved [him] as if he would never die.”

I read an entire book today. From start to finish. The power was out and my laptop wasn’t charged, so I walked over to the bookshelf outside my room and picked something out. Once I started reading, I found that I couldn’t stop, and continued long after the power eventually returned. And it was amazing. I’d almost forgotten how it feels to hold a book in my hand and turn the pages, how it feels to sit in one place and be so completely absorbed in a world of my own, and the sense of accomplishment that comes with putting the book down after finishing the very last page. This past year has been about research work and writing. I’ve spent hours and hours hunched over my laptop thinking that reading soft-copies of everything from journal articles to newspapers, to theses to fiction is the way to go. But today I read for pleasure and actually had the book in my hands. And it was incredible.