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