When it’s good, pray. When it hurts, pray. When you don’t have the words, pray.
Some times it’s hard to face your Lord with your pained heart and everything you’re carrying, but who else can you go to with it except the One who created your heart and everything it holds?
It’s a comeback! Actually, probably not. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’ll probably be another hiatus of several months after this — let’s keep it real.
The cause of me popping my blogging head out into the light of day at last is because I was nominated for the Sunshine Blogger Award. The idea of this Award is that one blogger nominates eleven other bloggers and poses eleven questions to them. Then those eleven bloggers must answer those questions in a blog post and nominate eleven more bloggers, to whom she must pose eleven new questions which they must answer. And repeat. Eleven is the magic number here.
It’s an ongoing cycle into forever — unless one or more of those eleven is like me and puts off the challenge for many weeks or just never gets to it, leading to a catastrophic break in the cycle… Yikes.
Dear Ruqaiyah, this moment you’re in right now, this is the moment to do something. To start something. Stop waiting for tomorrow, next week, or next month. Start now.
Dear Ruqaiyah, happiness is here. Right here, where you are now. It’s not a destination you need to reach ‘someday’. It’s not some place you need to travel to, or arrive at. You simply have to be here, now; you simply need to breathe in, breathe out, and remember your Lord. Here, now. Be happy.
Part of my identity has always been that I am a reader. I cannot remember a time in my childhood — from my earliest memories — that I did not love books or count myself among those who love reading; whether it was thick, cardboard-paged books about a spotty dog, The Famous Five, Sweet Dreams (cringe!), Sweet Valley, then finally the more mature books about life, love and such… books formed a huge part of my identity.
But, increasingly, in my young adult years through to my current adult years (old adult?), I’ve found less and less time for reading. And I know that’s just because I’ve made less time for it. I’ve found more distractions, more stress, more work, more world news, more to fret about, and more Facebook and YouTube to numb my brain with.
The poetry prompt for day 2 is to write a poem that tells a lie. Yikes. This was a difficult one. Really difficult. I ended up staring at a blank screen for hours. Really. It was horrible. So this is the result of that horrible-ness. Not my best work–and that’s not a lie.
I’ve got it all figured out.
No questions about where I’m going.
No doubts about what I’m doing.
I know what I want.
And I know how to get there.
…
Yeah… No.
That’s a lie.
I have so many questions!
Sometimes I just want to ask, ‘Why?‘
I have doubts and fears–
Life is not as easy as it appears.
And writing this poem while to the prompt trying to adhere
Has resulted in a work which is more than a little queer,
I fear.
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Hate it. Love it. Share your thoughts with me below.
Aaah, it feels so good to be sitting here again. So good to be surrounded by words, thoughts, ideas and to actually have time to pen (or the modern-day version of ‘penning’: type) those words down, think the thoughts out, entertain the ideas that flitter in and out. I also have this strange habit of making up stories in my head at random times during a day when I’m tired or stressed and choose to escape inside my head. It’s nice to be able enjoy these mental stories now, and to add more to those stories than just character descriptions for a change–there is still a long way to go before they end up on paper, though, or my laptop screen. For now they will just stay in my head. But I enjoy them up there.
So, yes, here I sit. In my bedroom. On my bed. The same place I’ve sat for most of this year. (And I do not exaggerate when I say that. I SAT here for so much of this year, planning lessons, marking tests and assignments, doing research, NOT going out with friends and family because I had so much work to do, NOT updating my blog because I had so much work to do, NOT sleeping, even though I was on my bed… my butt eventually hurt from the sitting. No jokes. None.) But this place is different now. The French doors leading from my bedroom to our very cluttered and un-scenic back yard are open; air and sunlight is streaming in; there are no papers, notes and books sprawled on all surfaces in my bedroom–save for the fictional ones that happily whisk me away to another time, another land, for which I had longed all year, but been deprived of. And my laptop has once again transformed into a dear, old friend; she is no longer the menace that burned my eyes in the wee hours of the night, draining me of all coherent thought. She is again my friend whom I write to about funny, old things that I think about, I tell her the poems of my heart, and she once again allows me to guiltlessly ramble on about random things on my blog. She is back. I am back. And it feels so darn good.
I am not sure how wide the readership of my blog is–or was–but to those who do read it, those who had taken time to visit in the hope of reading something that will make the minutes pass by less glumly, but found nothing new to read here for days, and weeks, and months… I apologise. I sincerely do. This blog was never meant to be a by-the-way thing for me. From the start, it meant something, and I wanted to continue in that way. I wanted it to always be a place of truth for me, a place where I would write and I wouldn’t hide. Because I often do that. I write when it is convenient for me, and then I shove it to the back when it’s not. And for most of this year, it wasn’t. But a mentor recently told me: ‘You will be a writer by writing–not by planning to do it in the distant future.‘ And she is right, painfully right. So I’m getting back on the proverbial horse, and I’m trying again. I am going to write. Because I want to be a writer. I am a writer. But thinking about writing, planning to write, wishing I had the time to write doesn’t make me a writer. So I am going back to my roots and I’m using words like I’ve always loved to use them. I’m using them to live my life, because they are part of my life. And here they will stay.
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Today, rather than sharing with you my own thoughts at length, I have decided to share with you the thoughts of another blogger, and just add in some of my own commentary. Her name is Rian; quite an awesome blogger she is. The title of her blog post is You’re Not Doing It Right (follow the link to read more). The reasons for sharing her post with you are two-fold:
1. I am honestly too lazy and uninspired to type my own post right now, but I feel compelled to stick to my self-assigned deadline for my blog posts. Also, a weekend of awesomeness tends to drain one of any residual energy one might have had to indulge in the luxury of typing meaningful and readable words. So, forgive me if any of what is to come is unreadable.
2. I like what she’s saying, and how she says it. I can relate to a lot of it. Many of us have a preconceived notion of what life is supposed to be like, and when our lives don’t quite match that fickle idea we have in our heads, we feel saddened, as though something has gone wrong, something in our lives must be awry. Further than that, some of us apply this thinking to our religion as well: We have to be the best Muslim we can be, we have to do things absolutely perfectly, and if we don’t, we’re just not doing it right. This ultimately causes us to feel despondent in our worship. But, the thing is, firstly, Islam is not difficult, it is only us, Muslims, who sometimes make it difficult upon ourselves. And, secondly, there is no single right way of being a Muslim. Sure, we have the Qur’an and Sunnah (Prophetic way) as our guides, and the madhaahib (Islamic schools of law) we follow, and we have certain faraa’id (things which are compulsory upon Muslims) that we need to abide by, but if we don’t do these things according to our idea of ‘right’, it doesn’t mean we’re not being Muslim right. It only means that we’re getting more reward when we keep trying (the key here is to not be complacent), and we need to remember that, rather than stressing about it and grinding our teeth about it, we should turn to Allah and ask for His Help. No matter how many times we fall short of who we want to be, as Rian says so aptly in her blog: “It doesn’t matter. You’re alive.” And as long as we are alive, the little mistakes we make do not matter in the bigger picture, because we can keep trying. And if we believe in Allah, and are trying to live our lives in His Pleasure, we are doing it right.
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What is it that you sometimes feel you’re not doing right? How do you deal with these feelings and thoughts? Share your thoughts with me in the comments below.
I’m not cool.
There, I said it.
Most of the time, I’m a bundle of thoughts and emotions. I have all these things running through my head; thoughts I want to say out loud, but there’s a voice inside my head that keeps saying, Be cool. And then there are my emotions. Don’t care too much. Okay, you can’t help it if you care that much, but, for goodness sake, don’t let them know how much you care. Okay, cool it with hugs already! Don’t show that you’re upset. Don’t let them know you’re hurting. Don’t hug that hard. Don’t laugh that hard. Don’t love that hard… Just – play – it – cool.
It’s exhausting.
But, like I said, I’m not cool. So, I go ahead and I care a lot about things and people who matter to me, and I try to let them know it, because what’s the point in caring about someone if they never know they’re cared about? And I get upset, I get hurt; I hug hard and I laugh hard (though, still trying to maintain my lady-like, hijabi composure while doing it… uhem…). And… I love hard. Sometimes it ends up leading all the way back to getting hurt, but how do you stop yourself from loving without losing out on all the fun and most amazing parts of loving? And we can’t control how much we love someone–believe me, I have tried (when I was still naïve enough to believe that I could ‘play it cool’).
Sometimes, I still have that little voice in my head telling me to ‘play it cool’ in certain situations, but I shove it away, because, why would I want to play? This is not a game. Life does not have a scorecard keeping track of how hard I hug you in contrast to how hard you hug me back. If I love you, and if I missed you, I’m gonna hug you–and I mean really hug you! And you just better deal with it. And, in addition to giving suffocating hugs, I often say (really) silly things, and ask (really) silly questions. No, I mean, like, really silly. And, back when I was in high school, I used to keep them all in my head, wonder all these weird things only to myself, never letting my thoughts see the light of day. But, now, I’m a little more grown up and I understand a bit more about how the world works, and, with that, I’ve been blessed enough to have friends along the way who laugh at the silly things I say and the silly questions I ask, but love me anyway. And they’re kind of silly, too, so I laugh right back at them.
So, ultimately, I’ve come to learn that life is not about playing it cool. Life (or maybe just one small part of life) is about opening yourself up to being hurt and being laughed at, because that’s the only way you learn to feel, and the only way you learn to laugh at yourself. And I sure do enjoy a good, hard laugh at myself.
And, in conclusion, after all this talk about not playing it cool, I’m not going to play it cool and pretend that I don’t care how many people read this blog, and how many people comment on it. I WANT COMMENTS!! If I didn’t want people’s feedback on what I write, I’d open up a document in MS Word, type all this stuff in there, and save it in a folder on my laptop where I save all my other writings and poetry that I don’t particularly want to share with the world, because I don’t want people’s commentary and feedback on those pieces of myself. This blog, however, is designed for the purpose of people reading what I’ve written, and commenting on it.
So, I look forward to reading your comments 🙂
Words of Thought 