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Salam @shaz, the pop up ad is getting out of control while viewing marriage profiles, please monitor the content of the ad
I often get flashed with women in bikini for vaseline ads, women in awkward positions for pillow ad, etc. Kindly don't show such ad to male users. Thank you.
We can't skip the hard part, it's where growth begins.
There is a thought that has unsettled me for a long time. Perhaps people do not cling to happiness nearly as tightly as they cling to the sadness they have learned to survive.
At first, I resisted the idea. It seemed too cynical, perhaps even unfair. After all, who willingly chooses sorrow over joy? Yet the longer I have watched people and, if I am honest, watched myself, the less certain I became that the answer was obvious.
Maybe no one consciously chooses sadness. Maybe we simply become fluent in it.
There comes a point when pain ceases to be an interruption and quietly becomes a language. We begin to understand ourselves through our disappointments. Our fears explain our decisions. Our wounds begin introducing us before we do. What once happened to us gradually becomes the place from which we interpret everything else.
If that is true, then healing asks something unexpectedly difficult. It asks us to become unfamiliar to ourselves.
Perhaps that is why freedom can sometimes feel more frightening than suffering. Suffering, at least, is known. Yet I wonder whether the deeper problem is not sadness itself, but what sadness eventually teaches us to value.
Pain has an unusual way of making calculation feel like wisdom.
A disappointed heart learns to compare. A betrayed heart learns to count. It remembers who left, who stayed, who apologized first, who loved more, who sacrificed less. At first, this arithmetic is understandable. It protects us from repeating old mistakes. Perhaps every mature person carries some measure of it.
The question is not whether we calculate. The question is whether we eventually forget how to stop.
There seems to be something distinctly modern about this. We increasingly treat every part of life as something to optimize. We optimize our time, our health, our careers, our habits, our relationships, even our healing. Efficiency quietly becomes a moral virtue. It should not surprise us, then, that eventually we begin trying to optimize the heart itself.
We ask not only whether something is true or beautiful, but whether it is worth the emotional investment.
Perhaps this is wisdom. or perhaps it is fear wearing the clothes of wisdom. And I am no longer sure the difference is always obvious.
To calculate is not inherently wrong. Islam itself teaches discernment. Trust is not blindness. Mercy is not the absence of boundaries. The believer is neither naïve nor reckless. Experience matters. Yet experience can become a poor master when it quietly replaces trust with suspicion and caution with permanent distance.
Not trust in people. People have always been imperfect. Trust in Allah. There is a subtle but important distinction between the two.
Sometimes I wonder whether many of our disappointments begin the moment we ask creation to provide what only the Creator has promised. We expect permanence from what is temporary, certainty from what is fragile, and completeness from hearts that are as dependent and unfinished as our own. Then, when people fail us as they inevitably do and we conclude that emotions themselves are dangerous.
But perhaps feeling too much was never the problem. Perhaps the direction of our dependence was.
The Qur’an does not promise a life untouched by grief. If anything, it tells the stories of people whose faith was refined through it. The prophets were not spared heartbreak. They buried children, lost loved ones, endured betrayal, loneliness, exile, and slander. Their tears were never condemned. Their grief was never evidence of weak faith.
What distinguished them was not the absence of sorrow but the place to which sorrow ultimately returned. Perhaps this is what we misunderstand about the heart.
The heart is not wrong because it feels deeply. Nor is it virtuous because it feels little. Its virtue lies in what ultimately governs its loves, fears, hopes, and grief. Islam does not ask us to become less human. It asks us to order our humanity correctly. That is a more demanding task.
It means allowing ourselves to love people without asking them to become so important for us that we forget everything else. It means grieving without despairing. It means protecting ourselves without worshipping safety. It means hoping without believing that the world owes us the outcome we imagined.
I suspect this balance is much harder than either complete vulnerability or complete detachment. Both extremes simplify life. One trusts too easily. The other trusts almost nothing. Faith asks something more uncomfortable: a heart soft enough to love, wise enough to discern, and humble enough to know that even its own judgments may be incomplete.
Perhaps that humility is what we are really missing. Not because we no longer feel. Not because we feel too much. But because we have become increasingly convinced that we fully understand our own hearts. I am not sure we do.
Perhaps the heart cannot be mastered in the way we master a skill or solve an equation. Perhaps it was never meant to be optimized at all. Perhaps it was created to be guided, corrected, softened, and, above all, returned again and again to the One who knows it better than it knows itself.
If that is true, then the opposite of emotional calculation is not emotional impulsiveness. It is surrender.
Not surrender to every feeling that passes through us. But surrender to the One who gave us a heart before we ever knew what to do with it.
And perhaps that is where genuine freedom begins.
What's your favorite way to connect with Allah and Islam?
For me it's Dhikr, nature and music. Yes, music. 😆 For me it's a spiritual experience.
I nominate @lv6nna , @maluka1989 and @Antoinne84109565
How it works
If you want to accept the nomination you answer the question in the comments. Then you either nominate three people of your choice in the comments or you copy the question (press & hold a post to copy the text) and post it on your own profile along with your nominations.
