Reclaim your heart

We must realize that nothing happens without a purpose. Nothing. Not even broken hearts. Not even pain. Emotional pain warns us that we need to make an internal change. We need to detach. Pain is a form of forced detachment. The more dunya hurts us, the more we inevitable detach from it. The more we inevitably stop loving it.

Allah tells us in a very profound verse: ' Verily with hardship comes ease ' [94:5]

Growing up I used to think after hardship comes ease. In other words, I thought life was made up of good times and bad times. But that is not what the verse is saying. The verse is saying WITH hardship comes ease. The ease is the same time as the hardship. This means that nothing in this life is ever all bad/good. In every bad situation we're in, there is always something to be grateful for. The question is which do we choose to focus on? I think the trap we fall is into rooted in this false belief that this life can be perfectly good/bad. However that's not the nature of dunya. That's the nature of hereafter either Jannah perfectly good or Jahannam perfectly bad (may Allah protect us).

By not truly understand the reality, I myself would become consumed by the momentary circumstances of my life (whether good or bad). I experienced in its full intensity as if it was ultimate or would never end. The way I was feeling at the moment transformed the whole world and everything in it. If I was happy in that moment, past and present, near and far, the entire universe was good for that moment. As if perfection could exist here. And same thing happened with bad things. I could see nothing outside of it. Nothing else existed for that moment. If you wrong me today, it was because you no longer cared about me not because this was one moment string of infinite moments which happened to be tinted that way.

Perhaps this is the reason we can fall prey to the " I've never seen good from you " phenomenon which Prophet s.a.w referred to in his hadith. Perhaps some of us say or feel this way because at that moment, experientially we really haven't seen good because our feeling at that instant replaces, defines and becomes everything. Past and present becomes rolled up into one experiential moment.

Reclaim your heart, Yasmen Mogahed.