When I meet me!
Memory safe keeping is both deliberate and indeterminate. Love notes, cards, dried flowers, baby books, photographs, baby’s first outfit, empty bottles, pieces of jewelry etc. Tangibles are easy to keep and part with. The ones floating or stationary in our hearts and mind are the difficult ones. Some are neatly laid out, boxed and gift wrapped, whilst some sit there like a garbage can with a stink that weighs the telomeres down a ton.
Leaving places and spaces with indulgent, happy, peaceful memories is a task and a half, however, that is a story for another time. However, for all those who have moved houses a number of times, would know how we go around, room by room, cupboard by cupboard, cabinet by cabinet, sifting. Decisions on most physical items are almost instantaneous. A rustic photograph, an unused gift, a certificate from academic years are the ‘stop-in-your-track’ items. All lending to a trailer, a reel or a movie in the head and sometimes the movie credits!
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Verbal, physical or even silence oriented exchanges with people and places around us turn into innocuous or adjunctive memories. Whilst we carry the weight of others, we forget to realise that we have weighed others down too. Entirely dependent on their gravity, our words and actions, are sitting in other peoples’ memory compartments either as petals or pistons and somewhere in between.
Ibn Al-Jawzee (ra)said:
“I wonder how you reflect on others yet you forget reflecting on yourself!” [Kitaab Al-Lataa’if Fil-Waa’iz]
A man asked, “O Messenger of Allah, what is Islam?” The Prophet, ﷺ said:
أَنْ يُسْلِمَ قَلْبُكَ لِلَّهِ عَزَّ وَجَلَّ وَأَنْ يَسْلَمَ الْمُسْلِمُونَ مِنْ لِسَانِكَ وَيَدِكَ
That you surrender your heart to Allah and that Muslims are safe from your tongue and hand.[Musnad Aḥmad]
Ramadan is certainly the month of Stop-in-your-tracks. Whilst there is an outward abstinence from food, drink and sexual activity, it also gives us the opportunity to check the pulse, to size up our inner cabinets and compartments, and to sift the gifts and blessings from the garbage and the blows. Staying away from the basic human needs also serve as detergents, bleach, sponges and varnishes for our inner scrub and shine.
The Messenger of Allah, ﷺ said:
لَا يَجْتَمِعُ الشُّحُّ وَالْإِيمَانُ فِي قَلْبِ عَبْدٍ أَبَدًا
Greed and faith can never be combined in the heart. [Sunan al-Nasā’ī]
Thirty days of inner cleansing, to make room for a stronger hold of faith and weeding out greed and envy. Thirty days to mend our relationship with the Almighty. Thirty days to reform our utterances and appearances so that we are perched delicately in this world. Thirty days of severing ties with the unnecessary. Thirty days and beyond of cabinets of repentance and cupboards full of gratitude.
May Allah enable us to observe our fasts with utmost sincerity and may He accept!
