The Examined Life @murqabah - Tumblr Blog

not all those who wander are lost -j.r.r. tolkien

Contrast

If we had everything here, why would He create Paradise?

It is a question that answers itself. Darkness is not a flaw in the design. It is part of it — the necessary shadow that teaches the eye to recognise light. We do not appreciate warmth because we are told it is warm. We appreciate it because we have been cold.

This is not cruelty. It is wisdom of a different order than we can fully grasp.

The soul that has only ever known comfort knows nothing, really. It has no depth, no reference, no capacity for true gratitude. But the soul that has sat in darkness — that has waited, and doubted, and endured — that soul knows exactly what light is worth. It receives joy differently. More completely. With the whole of itself.

Surely Allah is the best of creators. Not despite the hardship woven into this life, but evident in it. In the precision of the contrast. In the way suffering, when survived, does not diminish a person but enlarges them. In the promise that this world, with all its weight, is not the destination — only the passage.

Paradise is not a consolation. It is the point toward which everything here is quietly oriented. The darkness we move through is real, but it is not final. And knowing that changes how we carry it.

We were not made for this world alone. And the ache we feel here — that persistent sense that something is missing, that this cannot be all — is not emptiness. It is longing. And longing, rightly understood, is its own kind of faith.

#mine

murqabah

The Bench

When you love someone for an age — a lifetime — it changes you both, irrevocably. The loneliness doesn't arrive all at once. It creeps in at the moments you least expect: when you find yourself still capable of seeing beauty and awe in the natural world, and realise there is no one beside you to turn to.

It dawned on me, sitting on that bench, that we return to certain places not for the places themselves — but to summon them back. To stand where we once stood together and feel, for a moment, that the distance closes.

Some people are robbed even of that. No bench. No place that holds the shape of someone loved.

And when we are that old, worn down to our quietest selves — would we even know each other? Two strangers passing, perhaps a hello, perhaps not even a glance. Or would time, in its strange mercy, slow just enough to give us one moment more?