Sunday, March 2, 2014

On the theory of loss and hope

Do you ever just sit back and marvel at all the things in your life that got you where you are today? The lucky breaks. The miserable mistakes. The pleasant accidents. The uncountable little blessings and trials that paved your way and made you who you are? The mind boggles.

When I was in my early 20s, I thought I had an idea of my story. Who I was. Where I came from. And where I was headed. As if I had read my stars and could plot my course. I was such an idiot. A few years later, life would get so utterly and jarringly turned upside down that I no longer had any idea what it was all about. The only thing I had left was hope, as terribly cliched as that sounds. Hope that, though I apparently had gotten much of my life wrong, that it wasn't all for nothing and it'd come round.

And you know, it did. In ways I could never have guessed at. I'd grown up believing that God takes things away sometimes to give you something better in its place. You know, like, I didn't get into the fancy school but I did develop a lot of street smarts in the one I went to instead. Or, like when I'm trying reconcile my shallow wants, God didn't give me great beauty because He knew it would put too many temptations in front of me. But it was nearly always theoretical. I never had anything bloodily wrenched from me, and out of me. I never had to experience the death of a loved one, or the loss of my savings, or the apostasy of a family member. For all my life's roughness, it was without tragedy.

But then it happened, and I lost something so massive it took with it my sense of worth, my strength, my compass, my confidence and my entire narrative of who I was, and left only that hope that it would make sense one day. And I lived on that hope for a while as I slowly sifted through the wreckage and put myself back together from the few sound pieces of me left.

And today I can say with as much certainty as someone who's self-inflicted scars are still pink, I think I know why it happened. It was one of the many pieces of pavement on my path. A path that just a few years later lea me to where I am today, with a life so much better than the one I'd lost years before.

Subhanallah. I can't thank God enough.

2 comments:

  1. Alhamdulillah! :)
    I would also like my excess weight to leave me and internal serenity to replace it :D

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  2. Inshallah you will. Be patient, trust Allah, and try and move forward to do/be whatever you know is better.

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