“My youth was gone before I realized it; young manhood carried me away; but a mature age brought me to my sense and taught me by experience the truth I had read in books long before: that youth and pleasure are vain- the lesson of that Author of all times and ages, Who permits wretched mortals, puffed with emptiness, to wander for a time until at last, becoming mindful of their sins, they learn to know themselves.” (Francesca Petrarca, Letter to Posterity)
Youth
What can be said of young age that we will understand while we’re still young? Not very much. There really are some things that only time can teach us, and, in the words of a great man (my dad, actually) every generation has to touch the stove themselves to see if it’s hot. But while all that is true, Allah Ta’ala does us endless favours in the Glorious Qur’an. Parables upon parables reveal the trips and traps of people passed so we can, if we reflect, save ourselves from falling into those same mistakes. The trick to it all is to do it while we’re young. We shouldn’t wait for time to teach us, we should get up and do some preventative learning ourselves.
Time
There are hours of which human beings can have no knowledge, namely the hour of death for each individual and the Final Hour for all of creation. The result of this is that really, we have no knowledge of any hour to come at all. So limited is our perception that we can plot and plan for days, months and even years, but it is only by Allah’s will that anything actually happens. He can bring death upon us whenever He wills. It is Allah, the Eternal, who has control of time. So what does it mean to be late? Or early? If you are anywhere at anytime, that is a part of Divine Decree and therefore, isn’t everything “on time”? Everything is exactly as He willed it to be. (That doesn’t mean we should purposely delay things or be late, though!)
Death
Live this life as a wayfarer journeying, like a stranger on his way back home. This is the wisdom taught by our Beloved Prophet, salAllahu ‘alayhi wasalam. In one interpretation of this hadith, it is said that this leaves two options for the believer, to live either as a wayfarer or as a stranger, the former being superior to the latter. The wayfarer, he travels around, finding homes here and there but never quite until he reaches his final home in the akhirah. The superiority of the stranger is that he has no home! Everywhere he goes and everything he does, then, is tied only to the abode of the akhirah. SubhanAllah!
Youth
What can be said of young age that we will understand while we’re still young? Not very much. There really are some things that only time can teach us, and, in the words of a great man (my dad, actually) every generation has to touch the stove themselves to see if it’s hot. But while all that is true, Allah Ta’ala does us endless favours in the Glorious Qur’an. Parables upon parables reveal the trips and traps of people passed so we can, if we reflect, save ourselves from falling into those same mistakes. The trick to it all is to do it while we’re young. We shouldn’t wait for time to teach us, we should get up and do some preventative learning ourselves.
Time
There are hours of which human beings can have no knowledge, namely the hour of death for each individual and the Final Hour for all of creation. The result of this is that really, we have no knowledge of any hour to come at all. So limited is our perception that we can plot and plan for days, months and even years, but it is only by Allah’s will that anything actually happens. He can bring death upon us whenever He wills. It is Allah, the Eternal, who has control of time. So what does it mean to be late? Or early? If you are anywhere at anytime, that is a part of Divine Decree and therefore, isn’t everything “on time”? Everything is exactly as He willed it to be. (That doesn’t mean we should purposely delay things or be late, though!)
Death
Live this life as a wayfarer journeying, like a stranger on his way back home. This is the wisdom taught by our Beloved Prophet, salAllahu ‘alayhi wasalam. In one interpretation of this hadith, it is said that this leaves two options for the believer, to live either as a wayfarer or as a stranger, the former being superior to the latter. The wayfarer, he travels around, finding homes here and there but never quite until he reaches his final home in the akhirah. The superiority of the stranger is that he has no home! Everywhere he goes and everything he does, then, is tied only to the abode of the akhirah. SubhanAllah!
RSS Feed
