بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ
Before the peaceful (alhamdulillah) days of this past week, ever since I first went to the doc for a diagnosis back in January, there was turmoil and complete uncertainty unlike anything I'd ever faced. Here I'll try to capture what it was like in those days.
To frame the context for 01/2020, I have to mention something of the magnitude of disappointment in every one of my visits to Morocco, since I first went on 10/2018. First one asks, what had I sought? The same thing as ever: closeness and intimacy with someone I (can at least be able to) care about deeply. Through various layers of misdirection and reasons for denial (as personal as mere happenstance sometimes), my Rabb saw fit to deny me that in every moment of proximity He gave me with my Gift. Yes, there were occasions her and I approached very very closely...but the plateau of two human beings meshing and bonding was never reached. I can't recount how often it was ridiculously, tantalizingly near to me, yet escaping from me in unbelievable and unpredictable ways.
This past January, in a moment a few days before my return to the States, it was denied to me again - this time because I wanted to understand her intent in other matters, even though she was fine with unthinking and simply taking for granted how things were up until then. It is beyond any human level of irony that the impetus for my Gift to reach out to me in the way I may have wanted...would come AFTER I had left, AFTER my diagnosis that endangered the idea she might ever see me again. Every chance we'd spent up until then in actual physical proximity, fell to some meager friendship-level of physical/emotional intimacy, while ALMOST RIGHT AFTER she realizes I might not have long left to live....brings out all the typical low-grade, 'why in the fuck hadn't you realized this before' type of emotion that had been about 98% absent prior to this.
In conjunction with my diagnosis, and resulting job and degree uncertainty with progress of education, this whole thing...threw me for all kinds of loops. Every time I would and had tried to care for my Gift, instances came to mind detailing the ways I'd been let down. Not being able to fulfill the prototypical husband-like responsibilities I'd set for myself, just added to the layers of unimaginable lack of comprehension of anything.
If this seems like a shitstorm, it was (and still is, technically, as I'm still living through the aftereffects of everything). The truth has always been that whatever I find or don't find in life is something Allah owns, myself included. If He would choose me not to find that plateau, then I'm not gonna find it, period. I don't think what I have or can muster is quite "tawwakkul", but I would call it *submission*. That is what I boiled it down to, as I never had any support other than His, what He'd given me of family and knowledge and existence. The quality of prayers since some months back suffered, but I tried to keep up whatever physical aspect of the obligation that was possible, even as internally various notions of a rebel tried to rise up.
At the end of every day, and at its every beginning, I am His. I've not often liked the trials as they're being lived, and takes a good bit of time to understand and accept if acceptance is ever really found. But there is one thing, my most important objective, that helps to ensure I'm always bi ithniAllah going to turn back to Him sooner or later: that finding of my dream. Without that aim and the strength of its pursuit He let me have, can't say how many times I would have given up and gone in any number of different directions. But alhamdulillah, I ultimately haven't, and have no intention of it. Regardless the ridiculous, unfathomable kind of trials we face in life, doesn't change what it is we're truly seeking. Every soul will have what it strives for - ya Rabb, make this true for me even as scattered as my effort may be, ameen.
No comments:
Post a Comment