Life hands us Lessons so we learn from it, but, as the humans we are, we also tend to forget these lessons. I think this post would be a good reminder for myself as well as anyone out there.

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In 2018 the last few days of Ramadan particularly the last 10 days, had been an amazing spiritual journey. A journey that, I had not experienced ever in my life in the past years of Ramadan.

I lay in prostration, praying hard and long. I prayed for those near to me and far, I prayed for forgiveness. I prayed for all goodness. I prayed for a calm mind and a strong heart.

The following days’ certain things started to happen, to be more precise, bad and unfortunate things started to happen.  A friend said some things that hurt me very much. I had misplaced my inhaler and that too during a time when my wheezing attacks were very frequent. To top it off I accidentally dropped my phone into a stream of rainwater! As a result, I could not hear anything on my phone. Like these, things just started to come one after another.

I asked myself, why these things are happening one after another, especially when I had just earnestly prayed so much in the last few days. Then it dawned on me, I had prayed for a calm mind and stronger heart!

Now, I confess that I have had worse things happen to me, and the above mentioned probably are not the gravest compared to other personal situations from my past. However, this time there was a difference. This time I had not hit the roof like how I would have reacted in the past.

These series of mishaps or incidents were my training. How else am I going to learn to calm myself down? How else is my heart going to be stronger unless it goes through the situations to become stronger? 

It is like going to the gym to build your body up and staying fit. That is hard work, pressure, pain sweat, and guts! We are not going to get that six-pack and rock hard biceps by just doing nothing or less, we put pressure and stress on the muscles to build it up.

Likewise, I suppose all the hardships, minor ones, and majors ones come our way to build our mind and heart up. That makes us stronger. Life is not going to wait for you to join a  “life gym ” to build your mind up nor are you going to say ” I am weak at heart so let me go take on some pressures and problems in life to make me stronger! ” Life is just going to hand it to you and you just have to learn to deal with it, and if you do not learn from the first lesson, you get more lessons until you learn what life has intended for you.

Life calls, knowing how to answer it is all that makes a difference!