Just Keep Growing

Change is probably the hardest thing we all have to learn how to deal with. As time goes on, changes come in our lives and we have to learn how to go on with these changes, and when we learn how to do this we begin to grow and learn more about ourselves. This morning I took a walk around my garden in the backyard with my father and it made me realize how much I have changed throughout the years. Things that I used to always tell myself that I “can’t” do I have accomplished. When I was in high school, I really was a lost person, hands down I had no idea what I was doing. For me, life was about either skipping class or doing the least amount of work just to get by when I was in class and going out to ‘lunch’ with friend for who knows how many periods. By the time I figured out that I can actually do something with my life, that I can actually be something if I truly wanted to, it was a bit late. That being sad, I wasn’t a terrible kid, or ‘bad’ kid, I just didn’t have a good sense of judgment or really care. College really was a new chapter in my life, it was a time where I was forced to break away from my normal crowd of friends, I was placed in a new town, and surrounded by a bunch of new people. It was very different, and a new big change that I was forced to go through. At first I did try to resist; I only went to class and I kept in contact with high school friends. But within time, I learned to break away, I realized that as time goes on I need to adapt to the changes around me. I learned to accomplish a good amount in college, well a good amount that made me feel satisfied. When you stop for a moment and reflect back on your life, it really is amazing how much everything changes, but change is a part of life, something that we can’t control, subhanAllah. I guess what helped me the most with going on is learning more about the deen. One thing that has taught me time and time again, if you don’t put your trust in Allah you’re really not going to get anywhere. We need to always put our trust in Allah, and something that should be noted just as importantly is to always have a clean and pure heart to make sure you have the correct niyaah [intention] at all times. Life is hard, I’ll admit, but one thing we need to learn and remember is that we can’t be discouraged when things don’t go our way. When we are given a situation, we need to figure out how to be calm and how to learn from the situation. So I’m sure this isn’t something people usually think of when walking around a garden but I enjoying pondering a little too much. My father loves his gardens and flowers very much, when my brothers and I were younger we used to tell him you love your flowers more than us. But he tells us how all the flowers and plants are like people, they need to be taken care of, they need to be ‘trained’ so they grow properly in the right places. While I was going through the garden I noticed these weeds, they would wrap themselves around the flowers, all around the flower up to the petals eventually killing them. My dad showed me how some of them you can rip out at the beginning and save them and then others you have to hope that it survives otherwise it’ll just die from the weed. That weed reminded me of the nafs, oh that darn nafs. There’s always something that seems to be tying us down, wrapping us so tight to the point where we feel like we have no choice, but there is always a choice. It may be easier to cut off our bad habits from the beginning, but with time, slowly but surely, you can make changes for the better, inshaAllah.

Ramadhan will start tomorrow inshaAllah, the best time to try to make changes, I have some notes from the previous years, click here.

Ramadhaan Kareem! May Allah accept all our fasts and ibadah for the month, and may he help us continue any good habits we have learned to start in the month.

Take care, speak up and be safe.

☮radf