Being human through reflection

[Music]

good morning to everybody

imagine that

you’re on a you’ve gotten lucky

and you’ve gotten admission into one of

the ivy league universities

and as a pakistani you can imagine the

excitement that goes around

and the panic that comes with it

regarding the fact that

you’re traveling to the us maybe for the

first time and

there there’s tons of family members

telling you so many things and how you

should go what you should do what you

should pack

how you should dress what you should be

doing

and then finally the day comes when you

are flying

and you’re flying emirates

jfk and the lahore flight is always very

normal

in fact like we say in urdu pakistan

right that’s how it is but when you’re

done with your transit in dubai

and you’re about to sort of board the

next flight which is not a security

security point you immediately realize

that everything has changed

the people around you are different it’s

a different culture people are more

sophisticated probably

and as you stand with your boarding pass

waiting to get into the plane and there

are probably a 200 passengers behind you

when you present your boarding pass the

guy looks at you

and says sir could you please step aside

for a moment and stand on this side

and whoa what just happened he didn’t he

doesn’t tell you so you move aside

and you see these 200 people staring at

you and now everybody is going in

going in till everything is done

and then when everybody is done the guy

walks up to you

so you can imagine the nerves and in

these five

ten minutes you’ve probably regretted so

many things about yourself

especially if you look like me right so

you’re probably regretting

what is it that i did which sort of led

to this

so he comes up to you and he says that

our economy class was full and we had an

automatic system upgrade

here’s your new boarding pass we’ll put

you in business class

right and all of a sudden the excitement

is just

out of this world and you think to

yourself wow

right because you’ve gotten a free

upgrade

but think about this again whether you

call this luck

fate takdeer whatever you want to call

this you were destined to get this so

you got it

but what was actually happening you were

being tested

in those 10 minutes when you did not

know

what life had for you right what life

and in those 10 minutes your true

character

actually reflects who you are what your

belief system is

and how composed and reflective you can

be so my friends if all of us

look back at these small little 5 to ten

minutes moments of mystery and suspense

and panic that we go through in life

you will find that most of us tend to

fail

most of us tend to drop our belief

systems

drop our values forget about who we are

and we tend to panic

and at least when i look back in my life

what i recognize is the fact

your time does pass by and eventually we

make sense of whatever happens

so somebody said an amazing thing that

basically we never learn through

experience

we learn through reflecting on

experience

and the problem with us today is this

that we experience so many things

yet we never reflect on that particular

experience we never

learn from the broader scheme of things

that are going on in life

which is why we all tend to be failures

in one sense or the other

so that’s something that we have to sort

of begin with and try and understand

that we have to be we have to pause you

know because of this

increased notion of materialism around

us we’re all

obsessed and sort of gathered around by

material things we all tend to sort of

be really really into things whether

that’s technology

it’s changed so much that back in the

day

if you if you look at a new plant which

you really like you know you would you

would feel it

you would touch it you would try and get

a sense out of it and now you just

google it

all you have to do is take a picture

using an app and try and google

what that plant is all about so you’ve

been devoid of that experience of trying

to understand what it is

and because of this i feel we’ve stopped

being human

that’s really something very interesting

a few years from now

me and my wife and my elder daughter we

just had a daughter back then

was three years old we were flying from

lahore to

abu dhabi my parents live in abu dhabi

and we were using one of the local

airlines

so those of you who’ve traveled know

what it’s like to use a local airline

and all of a sudden there was extreme

turbulence

right and the plane took a dip right

obviously so everybody got alarmed and

then the plane took a second dip

and that was for a good three four

seconds

and everybody on flight started to

scream like anything

allahu akbar and whatever anybody could

remember

i remember my daughter looked at me and

said baba mujahid

i’m scared and i said right

so i i and so because when the flight

was normal but everybody was still

praying and people are just state of

panic

so within two minutes my wife turned to

me and very seriously said

salaam can you write down my will right

if i die can you write

so i said

so it’s the same thing right so what

just happened

that most of us if you reflected are we

ready to die today

have we done what it’s take what we

should have done

so when we’re in a state of panic when

we think

all is going to end when we think we

cannot handle it

what we realize is this that there are a

lot of incomplete jobs behind us

and actually all we had to do was this

that take a step back from your normal

routine

take a step back from what you do

usually and try and make sense of it

that why are you doing it in the first

place

does it have any benefit for you or

especially for the people around you

or for the people that matter in your

life and a lot of times you’ll find that

the answer is no

you’re just in this rat race which

actually has no finish line

so you might become number one running

fast and fast and fast

but when you were number one you realize

the race is never ending

so we have to sort of take this step

back

we have to take this step back now once

you do that

another thing that we then have to

realize is the fact most of us

then make another mistake that although

we’re taking

a step back we’re so obsessed with

material things that we cannot connect

things to the divine creator or to our

true source of identity

to who we belong where do we come from

what is it that we’re thinking

so i’ll give you an example of this that

i had been hearing this

hadith saying of the prophet muhammad

sallallahu alaihi wasallam in different

words that

this world is trivial right it says

all of these things keep coming to you

and we hear this and we think yeah

that’s fine

so 2013 when i flew to work and i took

my family with me

second day my daughter who was two

months old at that time

got extremely unwell and eventually the

third day we had to sort of admit her in

the birmingham children’s hospital

and everybody was panicking back in

pakistan and people were crying my

mother was crying my mother-in-law was

crying

and that’s when i realized just just by

taking a seven hour flight

from lahore to heathrow i left behind

everything that i had possessed my

contacts

my car my home my wealth and none of

that was of use to me

in fact all that i had at that time was

my own character

with my own self that do i have the

strength

to now deal with this situation or not

and generally speaking when we tend to

forgive

forget this what we do is this that we

think

that more than our character what

matters is the material things around us

and that that’s what gets us into

trouble in fact very interestingly uh

one of my

wife’s cousins uh was detected by with

cancer in the u.s

at the age of 40 which is a very young

age right and the doctors told them that

you don’t have more than six months to

survive

and then miraculously he he lived for

about seven eight years

but then he eventually passed away may

allah bless him so i remember he went

through a lot of pain

and i would tell my parents as well so

some years passed by

and my father had come here for a

wedding and the

the cancer patient was also there so

they met at a wedding right

and after that wedding basically i told

my father that you know

this is the same uh purpose of my wife

that i used to talk about he’s

struggling with cancer you know

and you know people like us always want

to use these incidents to sort of tell

okay look at how allah is and he’s sort

of you know giving you shifa and all

this

so you know before i could say that to

my father immediately he turned to me

and he said son

you must realize this is what the united

states of america is

i was like no this is what god is right

so it’s a perspective of what you’re

thinking do you think that everything is

being done by material gains or do you

think that there’s something more to it

so we all have to remember that while we

must make the best effort in this world

right we have to rely on a higher

creator

and that will come through true

reflection that will come through

true reflection so i want to basically

end with giving you one story

which has really helped me and then i

tried it in my daughter and that will

help me more as well

so i’ll share that with you and chella

we leave you with that

so you know when you when some things

change or when some things have more

importance for you

you all tend to be nervous just like i

think most of the speakers here are

nervous including myself

because we’re not used to this sort of

aesthetic

so i started doing one thing that

imagine what is the worst possible

thing that can happen

on that particular day or on that

particular event

which holds importance for you what is

the worst possible thing that could

happen

i could mess up a talk i could fail an

exam not to say i want to

i could maybe do something which

shouldn’t have been done

so what right so what think of the worst

possible thing

and prepare yourself that i’m even

willing to go for that

and your heart will be at peace

and it works so i’ll give you this

example last year i was in abu dhabi

with my daughter and i was trying to put

her to sleep she was six and a half at

that time

six and a half half child right so we’d

open the window because it was a very

nice

spring sort of weather and she said baba

i’m scared

i said why are you scared she said baba

mama told me that there are strangers so

i have to stay away from strangers and

there are thieves so i don’t know what

mama had been telling her right but

that’s what we do here now so she said

that i’m scared that somebody will climb

up

like if we live on the 17th floor i

think somebody’s going to climb up come

inside

and get me and i tried consoling her but

she just was about to cry

so then i asked her i said acha tell me

something if the thief comes

what will happen so she thought of bear

this is a six year after

she said he’ll take me i said then what

will happen

right so she was waiting what do you

mean she’ll take it

if he takes you what do you think he’ll

do to you he said he won’t give me food

i said then what will happen he said

i’ll try i said okay if you’ll cry then

what will happen he said he’ll beat me

he said it’s a pirkkya what will happen

right so she kept on saying

this this i said okay i kept saying what

will happen then so eventually she

immediately said

that i’ll die right i said so

then what will happen so she paused for

a bit

and said i think i’ll go to paradise

i said there’s your answer right for

most of us

the the worst thing that can happen to

you is that you will lose your life in

this world

so then what i mean we’re already bound

to lose it right

so the issue that we have is this that

we’re trying to control

and hold on to a thing which does not

belong to us in the first place

ladies and gentlemen my friends we fill

this auditorium

thinking that we’ve made sense of the

world around us thinking that we’re

going good in our careers in our lives

but really we’ve not and all of us

must use this moment now use this

opportunity now

to start thinking about life from a

different perspective

and that is only for our own self may

allah bless you allah

[Music]

you