Series of Lucid Observation (SOLO)
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Every lunchtime at the cafeteria, I can’t help noticing how much food gets left on people’s plates and bowls. My mind jumps straight to the irony of how much waste are here, while elsewhere people are starving, or don’t know if they’ll eat tomorrow.
It made me realize that this world doesn’t have a resource problem, it has a distribution problem. And that, I suspect, traces back to capitalism. It keeps people anxious, always bracing for scarcity, so they hoard more than they need for the “just in case”. They stash money in banks, pour it into companies, and in doing so, only feed the rich and stretch the gap between those who have and those who don’t a little wider.
That’s the keyword I suppose, anxious. In arabic, it’s called وسوسة (waswasa), the whispers of Satan that slip into our hearts.
It’s said by Imam Al-Ghazali in his book “Censure of Wealth and Miserliness”
whoever has enough to meet his needs in the present, need not be overly distraught over the future. Rather he must trust in the promise of God:
“And there is no creature on earth but that upon Allāh is its provision” (Q.S. 11:6).
“Satan threatens you with poverty and orders you to immorality” (Q.S. 2:268)
saying, “Unless you strive mightily to amass stores [of wealth], you may fall ill and be afflicted with incapacity, so you will be forced to beg and suffer the resulting humiliation.” And so [a person] spends his life anxiously seeking [more and more] out of fear of suffering. Meanwhile, [Satan] laughs at him for the suffering he endures in the present while, at the same time, he grows heedless of God —all due to some hypothetical future hardship that may never come to pass.
I accidentally came across some bank account information once. The balance was around IDR 2 billion. Envy was not my first reaction, nor was amazement. The first feeling I felt was… pity. I don’t know for whom. Perhaps for the people who could have needed that money, or for my future self. I imagined myself in the future holding onto that much money (a future that, given the industry I’m in, is not particularly far-fetched) and I already felt a deep disgust toward the person I might become. Or perhaps, more frighteningly, toward the person I already am.
I kept being anxious about the future. I was so afraid of suffering that I failed to notice the people who are actually suffering, physically, right now, around me.
I ate up the term “Islamic finance,” a phrase that has been contaminated by the same worldly desires it was meant to guard against. I wished for myself the privilege of paying zakat māl, as if accumulating enough wealth to owe it were itself a spiritual milestone.
But our Prophet ﷺ and his companions did not treat wealth as something to be accumulated and left sitting idle. They spent it continuously on the dīn and on those in need. That, perhaps, is the real best investment a Moslem can make.
How far I had deluded myself, dressing up worldly ambition as faith.
That was my wake-up call, and it made me realize one, probably obvious, thing:
Everything in this life should flow continuously.
Money and wealth should be spent and distributed so that they can return to you. Arguably, every problem in this world begins when humans try to force nature to act against its own will.
The will of nature is to be cyclic, dynamic, sometimes symmetric. Like the swing of a pendulum, the oscillation of a sine wave, the cycle of water. We are not above the rules of nature. When you really think about it (especially if you are an electrical engineering student), you are just a finite resistance walking around the earth, carrying a current flow of destiny.
We are merely a vessel for things to pass through. A vessel does not claim ownership of whatever flows through it. We need to let things pass through us.
Our irrational emotions, our greed, our contempt, our anxiety, our envy, our hatred. All of them grow from our insistence on holding onto things that were never ours to begin with.
We despise capitalism, yet still treat money, power, and respect as our gods.
We hate a person because we see them as an entity unto themselves, rather than as a creation of God.
Only when we surrender ourselves to the One greater than ourselves can we begin to realize that nothing in this world truly belongs to us and we are not entitled to anything, and therefore nothing in it can truly possess us.
May peace be upon us.
Another excerpt from another book which I found quite revolting to my mind:
It was said to a wise man, “How is your morning?” He said, “I arose eating the provisions of my Lord while obeying His enemy Iblis.
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