Consideration
We become little by little, the sum of those who loved us well… “well” is not extra.. it is the point.
Lately, I have been staying awake until eight in the morning.
The sun rises, people begin their day, cafes fill with the familiar clinking of cups, and only then do I make myself breakfast, usually with a cup of coffee. After that, I go to sleep…
Coffee has never woken me up unless I add two or more esps.. It does the opposite…
For years I thought it was one of those odd things about me, another contradiction to carry around… Later, I discovered it wasn’t unusual at all. In many ADHD brains, caffeine doesn’t create energy as much as it restores balance. Where most people feel a rush, mine finds stillness. The noise softens...
It’s summer break, so I sleep when I have to, and I eat when I have to. When I don’t have to sleep, I don’t sleep. When I don’t have to eat, I don’t eat. It’s mostly one dumb, honest question, what do I need right now. I already know this break will end soon and the busyness will come looking for me again. But right now I’m reading these days the way you read a book you don’t want to put down yet, one page at a time, refusing to skip ahead just to find out how the summer ends. That’s a form of love too. Call it self-love…
If you know who said that our bodies have rights over us and it is must to not do anything that hurts it… we can be friends..
Have you relaized that fast is only complete once it is broken??
anayway, back to love…
There’s another kind of love, the love where I remember my fur buddy and remember the family he created with another fur buddy of mine. Isn’t it beautiful? My love for cats, how adorable they are, how kind, gentle. Some are picky eaters, some like to sleep on your chest, a small warm weight that rises and falls with your own breathing until you can’t tell whose heartbeat is whose. And all of them look straight into your eyes. They don’t run when you walk towards them. You let them sniff you, and you kiss them, and you pet them. That’s another kind of love….
Do you know.. a woman was condemned for imprisoning a cat until it starved. Another person was forgiven because they offered water to a thirsty dog??
The creatures themselves never knew what had been written for them in Heaven. Yet mercy shown to them was remembered by God…
That has always comforted me.
Nothing gentle is ever wasted.
Science has begun catching up to what many pet owners have known all along. Researchers have observed oxytocin, the hormone most closely associated with bonding, rising during peaceful moments between people and their cats. The same chemistry that helps bind a mother to her newborn awakens during something as simple as sustained eye contact with an animal that has learned to trust you… It is big.
Perhaps love has always left traces inside the body before it ever found words.
And perhaps that explains why I have never considered caring for my cats a responsibility.
It has always felt like one of life’s simplest privileges..
Love, Remembered
There is another love, quieter than romance and older than memory… very old…
The love of the people who first taught us what it felt like to be cared for.
Sometimes they are our parents. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are simply the people who kept showing up…
The Qur’an speaks of lowering the wing of humility to those who raised you. I have always loved that image. A wing cannot be lowered in haste. It is a movement of tenderness. And perhaps it belongs not only to those who gave us life, but to everyone who helped us learn how to live it.
Blood may open the first door, yet love is what chooses to remain inside the house.
The closest bond we inherit is that of a sibling. Before either of you learns language, before either of you discovers the world beyond your front gate, you already belong to one another. Islam calls this silat al-rahim, the ties of kinship, and treats them as sacred. Perhaps because they exist before choice ever enters the picture. They become the first place where patience, forgiveness, and loyalty learn each other’s names.
When I was little, my foster parent (my blood unc) would take me to school every morning and come back for me every afternoon on his bicycle.
On the way home we always stopped beneath the same tree…
There was an ice cream shop nearby that sold only one flavour….
Vanilla.
Nothing fancy chocolatyy or strawberry. Nothing colourfulon menu inviting children to choose between twenty different flavours. Just vanilla, served in a cone…
We would sit beneath that tree and eat together before riding home.
People often ask children what they remember from those years. They expect stories. Conversations…
I remember the tree.
I remember knowing we would stop there every single day.
Looking back, I think consistency was my first experience of love. Long before I understood affection, I understood being expected. Someone had already decided there was time for me every afternoon…
Perhaps that is why vanilla has never tasted ordinary to me..
It is the only flavor that I get…
It reminds me of shade.
Of bicycle rides…
Of an afternoon that always seemed to have enough time…
I had another uncle too… My beloved old man who left me so soon..
One afternoon I mentioned, almost absentmindedly, that I liked burfi… It is a sweet from Indo-Pak region..
Just once.
I never asked him to buy it for me.
I never reminded him.
Yet whenever he went to the market after that, he came home carrying a box of burfi…
Whether I had gone with him or stayed behind.
Whether I was awake or asleep.
Whether I remembered mentioning it or not.
He remembered… Always..
Children rarely understand consideration while they are living inside it. They simply accept it as the natural order of the world… But why things change when we grow up??
It is only years later do they realise how extraordinary it was.
He passed away in 2013…
After he was gone, I found myself buying burfi from one sweet shop after another, convinced that somewhere I would discover the taste I remembered.
Eight different shops… Eight different recipes…None of them came close.
Eventually I understood why…. It had never been the burfi.
It was the remembering.
The sweetness had never lived in the sugar or the milk.
It lived inside a man who heard a little girl mention something she loved and decided that she should never have to ask for it twice…
That was the day I learned that consideration is the language love speaks most fluently.
Another aunt used to make ice cream from little more than milk and sugar… By every modern standard, it should have been painfully ordinary… Instead, we waited for it with the excitement children reserve for miracles… No dessert I have tasted since has managed to return me to that kitchen.
Memory has a strange way of seasoning food.
There was another aunt who braided my hair before school and told me I would grow up to become a barrister.
I never knew whether she believed it because she saw something in me or because every child deserves to borrow an adult’s certainty until they can build their own…
Then there was the aunt who gave away all her life.. to us…
No speeches or celebrations.
Only years of herself, divided among everyone she loved until very little remained for her…
One by one, they all left this world.
Watching people die teaches you something peculiar about love.
It does not disappear with them… It changes address where it now stays…
It begins living inside habits, recipes, favourite sweets, bicycle rides, old trees, and cups of vanilla coffee.
Sometimes grief is simply love searching for somewhere new to exist…
Love, Chosen
Then there are the people who enter your life with no obligation to stay…
There is no shared surname or childhood photographs. neither a history stretching back to the beginning rather a moment that could have passed unnoticed, yet somehow became the beginning of a lifelong story…
One random Thursday, a girl with dark kajol around her eyes walked up to me and decided she wanted to be my friend. Never had friends truly until she offered a handshake.. I wonder why???
I have never found friendships easily. Even now, I couldn’t tell you why.. Perhaps some people move through the world collecting companions as naturally as breathing, while others spend years wondering why belonging seems to happen so effortlessly for everyone else.
She made the wondering unnecessary.
Years slipped by before either of us noticed…
Aristotle wrote that most friendships are built upon usefulness or pleasure and fade when either disappears. The rarest friendships are built upon virtue, upon the person themselves rather than what they provide. Perhaps that is why some friendships survive changing cities, changing beliefs, changing versions of ourselves. They were never built on circumstance to begin with.
Then there is another friend.
She has known me since second grade and became a friend-friend when the kajal girl got me…
She knows disappearing is one of my oldest habits…
Every now and then I vanish into another country, another phone number, another chapter of life. Most people greet my return with questions…
“Where have you been?”
“Why didn’t you answer?”
She never has.
Every time my name appears on her phone again, she simply asks,
“Tell me sup.”
As though the missing months are less important than the person who has finally come back.
The last time we spoke, the biggest update wasn’t mine.
She told me she had a daughter.
Some friendships don’t keep score…you noticed???
They simply keep making room.
Another friend found me during a gap year… This one deserve a book on her name… some day..
Neither of us had much of a plan. She didn’t know anyone on a small corner of the internet where I happened to know a few people, so I reached out one morning after her twee saying “well no one talks here”. It was the sort of conversation most people would forget by the following week.
We never did.
Years later, she was caring for my mother while I was in another country.
She was feeding my cats when I couldn’t.
She became family so quietly that I cannot remember the exact day the word friend stopped feeling large enough.
My Lord has never insisted that family ends where blood does.
Sometimes the people who carry your family’s burdens become family themselves.
Love revealed through inconvenience has always carried more weight than love that exists only when life is easy…
Then there are the friendships shaped by grief.
Someone you love loses someone they cannot imagine living without, and before long you discover that sorrow has no respect for ownership.
Their grief settles inside you too.
It keeps you awake.
It sits beside you in prayer.
It changes the way you hear their voice.
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The Prophet ﷺ described the believers as one body: when one part suffers, the rest cannot sleep peacefully.
For a long time I thought that was only a beautiful metaphor.
Then I watched the people I loved lose the people they loved.
Now I understand it as observation.
And then there is the love between siblings.
Marriage borrowed the words “in sickness and in health,” but siblings often live them long before anyone stands before an imam or at an altar.
You witness one another’s awkward years.
You survive each other’s tempers.
You celebrate victories that feel partly your own.
You stand beside each other in hospital corridors and at graduation ceremonies.
You learn, slowly and imperfectly, that loyalty is less about agreeing and more about remaining.
Perhaps that is why siblinghood asks for so little ceremony.
It has already spent a lifetime proving itself.
And sometimes love crosses oceans.
Someone decides that seeing you matters enough to board a plane, leave behind familiar streets, postpone other plans, and spend a few precious days simply sharing your company…
Erich Fromm wrote that love is a decision before it is a feeling…
I have often thought about that.
Feelings may begin a journey…
Choosing someone again and again, across distance, inconvenience, expense, and time… perhaps that is where love reveals its truest shape…
Love has never promised a life untouched by heartbreak.. It can avoid it.. sure.. but
every meaningful relationship carries the possibility of loss folded quietly inside it.
The Sufis spoke of hijr, separation, and wasl, reunion, not as opposites but as companions. To love deeply is to accept that one day you may have to carry absence with the same tenderness as presence…
Some reunions happen in this life…
Others wait for the next…
Either way, love leaves its mark…
And perhaps that is enough…
The devine love..
All loves above are a form of devine mercy.. Lord’s blessing but sometimes, after things get so overwhelming… you meet someone…
There is a love that enters your life long after childhood has packed its bags and quietly slipped away.
It does not meet you when your knees are still bruised from climbing trees or when your world is small enough to fit inside a single neighbourhood. It waits until your twenties, after life has introduced itself in all its complexity. By then, you have mistaken survival for living often enough to forget there could have been another way.
I was twenty-four when it met me…
Sometimes I wonder what would have become of the little girl I once was had she known him instead???
Children do not ask for much. One steady hand. One familiar voice. One person who looks at them and sees more than another child in a crowded room…
Perhaps she would have grown into someone different??
Perhaps the fears would have found less room to settle??
There is no use rewriting a life that has already been lived, but the mind has always had a fondness for impossible questions.
By twenty-four, I had already become several different people.
Some versions of me had survived…
Others had quietly disappeared…
There were still three years before neuroscience would declare my frontal lobe fully developed, yet something much older than reason made its decision within moments of meeting him.
Recognition is a strange thing.
Sometimes it asks for evidence.
Sometimes it simply knows…
Our conversation ended, yet I could not persuade myself to go home… I remember explicitely..
Instead, I walked… Street after street… Without direction… Without purpose.
I kept hoping that if I walked long enough, whatever had settled inside me would explain itself…
It never did.
There are encounters that refuse to become logical…
I had to leave country in threee days so I did…
Life continued, as it always does. New streets. New people... New responsibilities. The ordinary work of beginning again…
Only distance allowed me to understand what that meeting had quietly placed inside my life… I was connected tho..
I had earned me someone precious…
It was not soneone who watched me take my first steps.
Not the one who knew the child I had been.
A different one…
One who entered the story halfway through and somehow learned the chapters that came before he ever got here…
He became my teacher before I realised I was learning…
My mentor before I realised I was searching for one…
My godfather before either of us ever called it that…
One day, almost without thinking, I called him Baba…
The word left my mouth as though it had always belonged there..
Afterwards, I questioned myself?? many times…
Was I trying to fill an absence?
Was I borrowing a name from an old wound that had never completely healed?
For a while I believed that explanation…
It sounded sensible…
Psychology often teaches us that we search for familiar patterns, that we recreate unfinished relationships, that childhood quietly negotiates with adulthood behind the scenes…
But every explanation eventually reached the same dead end…
None of them were true.
I did not call him Baba because something was missing.
I called him Baba because that was who he had become.
Some people possess a steadiness that changes the atmosphere around them.
They do not scream showing their wisdom or perform kindness loudly enough for others to applaud it…
They simply live in such a way that everyone nearby finds themselves breathing a little easier….
He is one of those men.
The sort of man young boys should spend time around before the world teaches them that masculinity has anything to do with hardness.
A man whose strength has never required noise…
Whose authority has never depended upon fear…
Whose compassion has never weakened his convictions…
The older I grow, the more convinced I become that character is contagious…
Sit beside someone honourable long enough and parts of them begin to shape parts of you…
Perhaps that is why apprentices have existed for centuries…
Knowledge is taught…
By a mercy I never earned, I became his apprentice.
People often imagine that God’s gifts always resemble answered prayers.
Sometimes they resemble people.
Sometimes He sends you someone who was absent from your beginning yet indispensable to your becoming…
Looking back now, I no longer wonder why our paths crossed when they did.
Love has its own sense of timing….
It rarely consults ours…
And perhaps divine love is found precisely there..
In discovering that even after an imperfect childhood, even after years of believing certain things had simply passed you by, God still writes new people into your story.
and it is never to erase the pages already written.
But to remind you that no chapter is ever the last one He intends to tell.
Love has always fascinated me.
It is not because it is rare, but because it refuses to remain one thing for very long…
Sometimes it looks like sacrifice. Sometimes it looks like laughter echoing through a kitchen. Sometimes it looks like remembering the sweet someone mentioned months ago, or stopping beneath the same tree every afternoon because traditions, however small, become homes of their own.
Love is curious that way.
It rarely visits us in the moments we expect. It settles instead into ordinary habits until one day we look back and realize those habits were shaping an entire life…
Perhaps that is why we spend so much of our lives misunderstanding it..
We search for intensity when love has always preferred consistency…
We wait for grand declarations while it is busy making tea, buying groceries, feeding cats, answering late-night phone calls, remembering birthdays that everyone else forgot, and noticing when someone has become quieter than usual.
Love notices.
It pays attention.
It remembers.
Maybe that is why consideration has always felt holy to me… Anyone can say, I love you.. Very few people remember how frightened you become before a doctor’s appointment… Or which side of the bed lets you sleep more peacefully…. Or that you like vanilla in your coffee because somewhere, many years ago, a little girl sat beneath a tree with someone who loved her enough to make an ordinary afternoon unforgettable.
The older I become, the less interested I am in finding extraordinary love.
Ordinary love has always seemed far more miraculous.
It asks for no audience…
Only another day… or another conversation. another cup of coffee.
or maybe another chance to remember….
to be continued…
