Reclaim your heart by Yasmin Mogahed
Topic 1: "Why do people have to leave each other?"
When I was 17 years old, I had a dream.
I dreamt that I was sitting inside a Masjid and a little girl walked up to ask me a question.
She asked me. "Why do people have to leave each other?"
The question was a personal one, but it seemed clear to me why the question was chosen for me.
I was one to get attached. Ever since I was a child, this temperament was clear.
While other children in preschool could easily recover once their parents left, I could not.
My tears, once set in motion, did not stop easily.
As I grew up, I learned to become attached to everything around me.
From the time I was in first grade, I needed a best friend. As I got older. any fall-out with a friend
shattered me.
I couldn't let go of anything.
People,
places, events, photographs, moments---even outcomes became objects of strong attachment
If things didn't work out the way I wanted or imagined they should, I was devastated.
And disappointed for me wasn't an ordinary emotion. It was catastrophic.
Once led down, I never fully recovered.
I could never forget, and the break never mended. Like a glass vase
that you placed on the edge of a table, once broken, the pieces never quit fit again.
However, the problem wasn't with the vase, or even that the
vases kept breaking. The problem was that I kept putting them on the edge of the tables.
Through my attachments, I was dependent on my relationships to fulfill my needs.
I allowed those relationships to define my happiness or my sadness, my fulfillment,
or my emptiness, my security, and even my self-worth. And so, like the vase
placed where it will inevitably fall, through those
dependencies I set myself up for this disappointment.
I set myself up to be broken. And that's exactly what I found one disappointment,
one break after another.
Yet the people who broke me were not to blame any more than gravity can be blamed for breaking the vase.
We can't blame the laws of physics when a twig snaps because we leaned on it for support.
The twig was never created to carry us.
Our weight was only meant to be carried by God. We are told in the Qur':an:
". . .whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy
hand-hold
that never breaks. And God hears and knows all things."
[Qur'an, 2:256]
There is a crucial lesson in this verse: that there is only one hand-hold that never breaks.
There is only one place where we can lay our dependencies.
There is only one relationship that should define our self-worth and only one source from which
to seek our ultimate happiness,
fulfillment, and security.
That place is God.
However, this world is all about seeking those things
everywhere else. Some of us seek it in our careers; some seek it in wealth, some in status.
Some, like me, seek it in a relationships. In her book, Eat, Pray, Love,
Elizabeth Gilbert describes her own quest for happiness.
She describes moving in and out of relationships, and even traveling the globe in search of this fulfillment.
She seeks that fulfillment--unsuccessfully--in her relationships,
in meditation, even in food.
And that's exactly where I spent much of my own life: seeking a way to fill my inner void.
So it was no wonder that the little girl in my dream asked me this question.
It was a question about loss, about disappointment.
It was a question about being led down. A question about seeking something and coming back empty-handed.
It was about what happens when you try to dig in concrete with your bare hands:
not only do you come back with nothing---you break your fingers in the process.
I learned this not by reading it, not by hearing it from a wise sage,
I learned it by trying it again, and again, and again.
And so, the little girl's question was essentially my own question. . . being asked to myself.
Ultimately, the question was about the nature of the dunya as a place of fleeting moments and
temporary attachments. As a place where people are with you today and leave or die tomorrow.
But this reality hurts our very being because it goes against our nature.
We, as humans, are made to seek, love, and strive for what is perfect and what is permanent.
We are made to seek what's eternal. We seek this because we were not made for this life.
Our first and true home was Paradise: a land that is both perfect and eternal.
So the yearning for that type of life is a part of our being.
The problem is that we try to find that here
And
so we create ageless creams and
cosmetic surgery in a desperate attempt to hold on---in an attempt to mold this world into what it is not, and
will never be.
And that's why if you live in dunya with our hearts, it breaks us. That's why this dunya hurts.
It is because the definition of dunya, as something temporary and
imperfect, goes against everything we are made to yearn for.
Allah put a yearning in us that can only be fulfilled by what is eternal and perfect.
By trying to find fulfilment in what is fleeting, we are running after a hologram. . .a mirage.
We are digging into concrete with our bare hands.
Seeking to turn, what is by its very nature
temporary into something eternal is like trying to extract from fire, water.
You just get burned.
Only when we stop putting our hopes in dunya,
only when we stop trying to make the dunya into what it is not---and was never meant to be (Jannah)
---will this life finally stop breaking our hearts.
We must also realize that nothing happens without a purpose.
Nothing.
Not even broken hearts. Not even pain.
That broken heart and that pain are lessons and signs for us.
They are warnings that something is wrong.
They are warnings that we need to make a change.
Just like the pain of being burned is what warns us to remove our hand from the fire,
emotional pain warns us that we need to make an internal change.
We need to detach.
Pain is a form of forced detachment.
Like the loved one who hurts you again and again and again,
the more dunya hurts us, the more we inevitably detach from it. The more we inevitably
stop loving it.
And pain is a pointer to our attachments. That which makes us cry,
that which causes us the most pain is
where our false attachments lie.
And it is those things which we are attached to as we should only be attached to
Allah which become barriers on our path to God.
But they pain itself is what makes the false attachment evident. The pain creates a condition in our life
that we seek to change, and if there is anything about our condition
that we don't like, there is a divine formula  to change it.
God says:
"Verily never will God change the condition of a people until
they change what is within themselves."
[Qur'an, 13:11]
After years of falling into the same pattern of
disappointments and heartbreak, I finally began to realize something profound.
I had always thought that love of dunya meant being attached to material things .
And I was not attached to material things. I was attached to people. I was attached to moments.
I was attached to emotions. So I thought that the love of dunya just did not apply to me.
What I didn't realize was that people,
moments, emotions are all a part of dunya.
What I didn't realize is that all the pain I had experienced in life was due to one thing and one thing only:
love of dunya.
As soon as I began to have that realization, a veil was lifted from my eyes.
I started to see what my problem was.
I was expecting this life to be what it is not, And was never meant to be: perfect.
And being the idealist that I am, I was struggling with every cell in my body to make it so.
It had to be perfect. And I would not stop until it was.
I gave my blood, sweat, and tears to this endeavor:
making the dunya into jannah. This meant expecting people around me to be perfect.
Expecting my relationships to be perfect. Expecting so much from those around me and from this life.
Expectations. Expectations. Expectations.
And if there is one recipe for unhappiness it is that:
expectations.
But herein lay my fatal mistake.
My mistake was not in having expectations;
as humans, we should never lose hope.
The problem was in "where" I was placing those expectations and that hope.
At the end of the day, my hope and my expectations were not being placed in God.
My hope and expectations were in people,
relationships,
means.
Ultimately, my hope was in this dunya rather than Allah.
And so I came to realize a very deep Truth. An ayah began to cross my mind.
It was an ayah I had heard before, but for the first time I realized that it was actually describing me:
"Those who rest not their hope on their meeting with Us,
but are pleased and satisfied with the life of the present and those who heed not Our Signs."
[Qur'an, 10:7]
By thinking that I can have everything here,
my hope was not in my meeting the God. My hope was in dunya.
But what does it mean to place your hope in dunya? How can this be avoided? It means when you have friends,
don't expect your friends to fill your emptiness.
When you get married, don't expect your spouse to fill your every need.
When you're an activist, don't put your hope in the results. When you are in trouble, don't depend on yourself.
Don't depend on people.
Depend on God.
Seek the help of people---but realize that it is not the people (or even your own self ) that can save.
Only Allah can do these things.
The people are only tools, a means used by God.
But they're not the source of help, aid or salvation of any kind.
Only God is.
"The people cannot even create the wing of a fly" [Qur'an, 22:73]
And so, even while you interact with people externally, turn your heart towards God.
Face Him alone, as Prophet Ibrahim(as) said so beautifully:
"For me, I have set my face, firmly and truly, towards Him
Who created the heavens and the earth, and never shall I give partners to Allah."
[Qur'an, 6:79]
But how does Prophet Ibrahim(as) describe his journey to that point?
He studies the moon, the sun and the stars and realizes that they are not perfect. They set.
They let us down.
So Prophet Ibrahim(as) was thereby led to face Allah alone.
Like him, we need to put our full hope, trust, and dependency on God, and God alone.
And if we do that, we will learn what it means to finally find peace and stability of heart.
Only then will the roller-coaster that once defined our lives
finally come to an end.
That is because if our inner state is dependent on something that is by definition inconstant,
that inner state will also be inconstant. If our interstate is dependent on something
changing and
temporary, that inner state will be in a constant state of
instability,
agitation, and
unrest.
This means that one moment we're happy, but as soon as that which our happiness  depended upon changes, our
happiness also changes.
And we become sad.
We remain always swinging from one extreme to another and not realizing why.
We experience this emotional roller coaster because we can never find stability and lasting peace
until our attachment and dependency is on what is stable and lasting.
How can we hope to find constancy
if what we hold on to is
inconstant and perishing?
In the statement of Abu Bakr is a deep illustration of this truth.
After the Prophet Mohammad (S.A.W.) died,
the people went into shock and could not handle the news.
Although no one loved the Prophet (S.A.W.) like Abu Bakr,
Abu bakr understood well the only place where one's dependency should lie.
He said:"If you worshiped Muhammad(S.A.W.), know that Muhammad(S.A.W.) is dead.
But if you worshiped Allah, know that Allah never dies."
To attain that state, don't let your source of fulfillment be anything other than your relationship with God.
Don't let your definition of success, failure, or self-worth be anything other than your position with Him?
[Qur'an, 49;13]
And if you do this, you become unbreakable,
because your hand-hold is unbreakable. You become unconquerable,
because your supporter can never be conquered.
And you will never become empty, because your source of fulfillment is unending and never diminishes.
Looking back at the dream I had when I was 17. I wonder if that little girl was me.
I wonder this because the answer I gave her was a lesson. I would need to spend the next painful years of my life learning
My answer to her question of why people have to leave each other was:
"because this life is not perfect; for if it was, what would the next be called?"
