The Gift of Time

I am fascinated by the concept of time. I recently encountered a period where I was overwhelmingly sick for days - weeks in fact - that I spent each of them just wishing the time away. The days were hard, I struggled to make it through the hours, and when night came, I was so glad I couldn’t wait to fall asleep so that time moved faster and hopefully straight into a different timezone where I’d feel restored and livelier. It went on like that for weeks.

And I realized that the very same twenty four hours I spent wishing away were also the very same hours somebody else in a different part of the world could have wanted to pause to freeze-frame a beautiful moment. Or to complete an impossibly huge amount of tasks where the hours just never seemed enough.

Oh how All-Knowing and Fair, Allah is. We are all given the same amount of hours to either rejoice and be grateful for the blessings that are offered, or to learn and STILL be grateful for the lessons that appear through what we deem as difficulties. And who are we to label each of them as either good times or bad times anyway? What we feel as good could possibly be otherwise if it distracts us from remembering Him, and what we feel as bad could possibly be good for us in ways only He knows, more so if it brings us closer to Him.

And here we are, after the painful hours that felt too long and that week we went on vacation that went by too fast. A year has passed after all. Are our days accompanied by gratefulness and thoughts of Him so we’d better ourselves? (I have failed far too many times.)

God willing, here's to a new year to try again. In shaa Allah.