----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why Do People Have to Leave Each Other? Part II
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 disappointment for me
wasn’t an ordinary emotion. It was catastrophic. Once let down, I never
fully recovered. I could never forget, and the break never mended. Like a
glass vase that you place on the edge of a table, once broken, the
pieces never quite fit again.
But
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 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 disappointment. I set
myself up to be broken. And that’s exactly what I found: one
disappointment, one break after another.
But 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
Quran: “…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
handhold 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.
But 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 our 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 let 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. And
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 we 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 fulfillment 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. That 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 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 the 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
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 with 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 fulfill your every need. When you’re an activist, don’t
put your hope in the results. When you’re 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 you. Only Allah can do these things.
The people are only tools, a means used by God. But they are not the
source of help, aid, or salvation of any kind. Only God is. The people
cannot even create the wing of a fly (
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 inner state 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 Muhammad ﷺ died,
the people went into shock and could not handle the news. But although
no one loved the Prophet ﷺ like Abu Bakr, Abu Bakr understood well the
only place where one’s dependency should lie. He said: “If you
worshipped Muhammad, know that Muhammad is dead. But if you worshipped
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 handhold 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 isn’t perfect; for if it was, what would the next be
called?”
