- in the name of Allah -



One of the most basic essential truths to life I have found is that knowledge carries with it an intrinsic weight. Knowledge is not free. Every grain has the implicit, underlying attribute of how will it be used: to bring about change, to be remembered or forgotten, to be for self-interests or selflessness, all of these are the building blocks which shape how knowledge will affect any particular person. It has the power to bring about positive as well as negative changes, which is maybe the most curious thing I have learned of it. On second thought, this shouldn't be cause for curiosity for me but rather a show of "obviously, duh": a gun in the hands of a criminal does not have the same effect as a gun in the hands of a police officer. The same tool in two different situations serves two very different purposes/implications. But that we can compare knowledge to a gun in any analogy and have it be true, is a disturbing thought. "Knowledge is power", indeed.

Maybe my previous naivete was due to my presupposed inclination to believe that all knowledge was thought of as in itself a good thing, in all situations and circumstances. This formed the basis of many social interactions I had with people where I'd say a specific truth, regardless of the outcomes and without the wisdom to ensure that the truth in question had found a proper home (or wouldn't). It is also true that there's a ton of things human beings learn as they grow older. I've now officially (as of some months back) hit my third decade of existence, so I feel somewhat like an elder statesman in many ways. As the occasion of every cosmic truth I come across happens, it seems to me like it should have been common sense to know this already, to have expected or at least anticipated this realization from any extrapolation of my past experiences. I should have seen it coming (or so I'd like to think). But knowledge of the future is a thing completely unknown to me, even as I try to understand directional flows and ebbs of my own self and all creation. 

So where does this truth sit with me? How will I use it, will it find a proper home, within my soul, or will it precipitate my doom in various, partially unforeseeable, ways? Given some of the tumult I felt in the past few weeks, I might consider the latter. Part of the root of the pain I think is that, when it all boils down to the very last drop, there is only Allah I can discuss this issue with. There's no way for me to know, truly, how any human being would respond to truths like this, whether it might create difficulties and trials for them just as it has for me, maybe in worse or better ways I cannot be sure. I had bottled up my inability to accept some basic facets of existence, opposed in my core their very nature, and all I have to show for this struggle is the inevitable truth that, regardless how I may want otherwise, my own life continues and my soul persists on this plane. That continued existence is not even remotely an accomplishment, if at least we consider (and have always thought) that the taking of one's own life is never a real possibility, then maybe it is merely a non-negative. So, dragging onward through the muck of this self-created sandpit, there is Allah, again, with whom I can speak of this. Admittedly, I am unsure as to what to say. Aside from seeking forgiveness for sins, which is a generally always-fitting state of being, most of my questions seem to want to tap into a divine wisdom I may not have the capacity of grasping. Ironic isn't it? That the lens which seeks to see has not the eyes for its true objective. Still, I will continue to seek it, to try to know that which I do not, and perhaps somewhere down the line, Allah-willing, I can come to *know* the answers to all of these questions.