By: FAIZAAN BASHIR
It feels as if we started fasting yesterday—more than a week has passed. Another week (or another day), and we are halfway through it. Another two weeks (or another two days), and we are done with it. But what, apart from fasting and restraining ourselves from what we do on non-Ramadan days, symbolizes the thirty days of Parhezgari?
Ramadan allows us to connect with our deeper selves: this month comes as the best opportunity to reflect on what constitutes a human being on the inside: to identify both the good and the bad aspects underlying the human psyche. It means to divorce from what’s known (conscious) and dive deep into the unknown (unconscious) and discover our personalities, tendencies, and inhibitions and organize them and act accordingly.
Ramadan allows us to mitigate evils otherwise permeated, at least on this part of the globe: this one is connected to the aforementioned point. Once we have discovered ourselves wholly and done a coalition of opposite forces within us (an option to do bad and good), we expand our horizons and consider other people’s standpoints. More maturity, that’s. For instance, we won’t feel the urge to passively look down upon people who share differing views on a certain subject, with us knowing that they, too, are personalities—with their own share of personality-induced associations. The more we get to this stage of comprehensive understanding and its implementation thereof, the more we stand the chance of reducing day-to-day human-induced trivial evils.
Ramadan (read 30 days, and not three days) offers us enough time to work on ourselves: This one is connected to the first and second paragraphs mentioned above. Having spent a whole eleven months of minimum self-introspection, we might fall prey to the difficulty of straightening ourselves out initially during this month, but this doesn’t translate into the impossibility of growing sufficient familiarity with inner selves. With continued sustenance of self-reflection for the whole month, we could stand a chance of being substantially different on the end day of the month, thereby positively impacting the rest of the months to come. Patience and courage, that’s what we should cling to.
Ramadan finally allows us to meditate on the finitude of life: it makes us realize the ephemeral nature of life, if attended to properly. That said, it also has us develop compassion for fellow human beings. At deathbed, we best realize (I feel) the futility of accumulating more wealth than we. There’s no better feeling than helping a fellow human being with whatever they’re satisfied with. This is not to say that we are not helping them (last time someone offered me enough Gyaan that was partially coated with smart words); this is to say that we really help them—out of love, heart, and soul. Sans mentioning monotonous, outdated, and pompous words like Khairaat or charity. These reek of amour propre.
May God shower blessings on us!
