Sunday 24 November 2013

The Feeling of Meaninglessness

Artwork from a dear sister


      Time is frozen; Irrelevant.

     Words can't seem to bring themselves together to make meaning. Why should it matter anyway?

     Meaninglessness is not limited to the depressed and lazy. Meaninglessness can hit the most motivated and happy people you know. It can be for a few hours or weeks but it doesn't discriminate. All that is common between these moments of meaninglessness is that plaguing feeling of helplessness. Even if you know it's just for a few minutes, life becomes a blur and you lose sight of reality.

     Maybe you're stressed. Or maybe you're avoiding a confrontation or an obligation. But all that you can feel is uselessness right now. You feel time slipping away from you and you can't catch up to it. The present moment is meaningless. So is the next few minutes that are lost in thought...

     But wait, stop yourself for one second. 

     Imagine capturing those irritating thoughts that tell you how lazy and incompetent you are. Okay, now take a look at their composition. They look just like thoughts, right? Maybe bubbles or words or whatever. But, they are only what we perceive them to be.

     Now take a deep breath...

     Collect those thoughts once more and picture a box appearing in a scene of nothingness. Now, take a firm hold on those thoughts and place them one by one in that box. Stack them nicely; for you want to respect their existence. Accept them as having lived and breathed like they were real people.

     Find a key for that box and lock that box shut. Imagine a silent cloud slowly floating to where you are. The cloud is here to take your box. Place the box on that cloud and give it up. Not just to the sky. Give it up higher. Much higher. Give it up to Allah.

     What were these thoughts anyway? You can't seem to remember anymore. All that you know is that you feel like you've lifted a huge boulder off your shoulders. They're in someone else's care. And there's no being out there in existence that can handle them better than Allah. So take it easy and trust.

     These thoughts were floating in your head trying to find purpose. Yet they were only a burden that kept getting heavier with the passing of time. They were tiny products of your own creation; roaming in a head of a single person...

     A single person among many who inhabit a beautiful place called earth.

     The earth is a part of a family of planets, who happen to orbit around a single sun.

     That sun is one of billions. 

     And the space that we conceive is only a single layer of many others. 

     All of which mean no less than a mosquito's wing to Allah.


    

      So how big are those thoughts now?



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