Perpetual coming of age, on the fast-moving vehicle of life.
My dearest friend has married. This I know because she called me to her house and we danced in a circle and sang that evening, filling her living room with our voices and our warmth sharing in her joy. I know it is real because I feel my stomach pushing against the dress I wore the more I ate in celebration.
When feet are sore and bellies are full and we have celebrated not only her marriage but also our sisterhood, there is an unspoken consensus on sitting down and calmly reflecting. Our unspoken elected emcee decides that we should all give the new bride advice on married life, so we go around the room one at a time with our words of wisdom. Several inside jokes and ‘his money is your money’s later, it reaches me. I let the ladies know that my advice won’t be that funny and is a bit more serious.
‘Keep Allah at the centre of your relationship innit’, is my simple message.
‘That’s a good one’
‘We should have started with that’
I have solidified my coaches-don’t-play status in the field of romantic advice once again.
Advice given, we shift our focus from on the bride to around the room. Someone asks another how their thesis is going. Another person asks when someone is due to have their graduation ceremony. Is anyone applying for a Masters? There is a collective realisation that we are growing up, rapidly. Everyone is graduating or on the edge of doing so. People are lining up jobs and attending bachelorette parties every other month. Babies are on the way. Just yesterday we had skipped out of secondary school holding hands and bracing ourselves for college as we stepped into the world together.
Generally, I find myself realising more and more how fast life is moving. How I left the country for a few months and left behind a kitten, only to return home to a cat. How my younger sisters are teenagers with their own world of worries to contend with, how there is less baby fat to pinch on their cheeks by the day. My father used to be the custodian of a red mug he loved to drink from, red with white lettering. It says ‘the future is exciting’, and at the time it was the biggest and best mug in the house. The mug is now chipped and old, and my father no longer complains when I get the mug before him and keep it for myself.
What causes the most growing pains is not having to be in the big bad world, but realising the nature of it. The first time someone told me I was naive, I was defensive. It turns out, as tends to be the case in my life, that they read something in me that I was yet to see in myself, and I learned this the hard way.
‘There are some people in life…’ I would hear when I was younger, and what would follow was some incredible combination of seemingly pointless unkindness and deceitfulness. How could such people exist? What hand of cards could possibly make such mean-spirited people exist in their evil nature unprovoked? Where would I find them? Growing up is realising how these people truly do exist, but that their misery need not be contagious.
Once upon a dreary semester, an overwhelmed heart and a painful realisation that a friendship had to come to an end, I burnt out. Part of that was not knowing who I was. I woke up one morning and the self who had felt every emotion to the strongest intensity felt all of her feelings in black and white. The girl who had more ganas de vivir and saw the brilliant beauty in everything passed away to allow a tame and adult-ly measured woman to be born. No one asked my permission. I lost a part of myself with no warning, and I have been informed that she will never return, that at some point everyone drops a part of their childish self that they will never pick up again.
I will sorely miss the eyes of mine that saw the world as full of wonder, and I will miss the freedom and innocence of summer days free from work and study. I will miss the friends who taught me hand games at eight and sat with me in coffee shops for hours at eighteen, when we had so little to do and so much to learn at once. I will miss many things.
Yet, as I step into my next season of life, I am excited to see the blossom. There is so much of myself that I am yet to know. It is fascinating to see life take a new shape all around me, like every day I am unlocking a new layer behind a world I thought I already knew. And my greedy heart steals every ounce of happiness I share in with others and makes it mine, too. More and more, I find myself learning and truly understanding that the joy I share with others is my own. That God’s blessings for one do not mean less for another. That my own is written, and that the world is full of emotions waiting to be shared with others.
And I suppose the most brilliant battles are between good and evil, the countless reasons each day my heart sinks, knowing the evil that is being worked throughout the world, by people who were once babies drinking the milk of their mothers. Then, remembering that goodness is still alive, that sometimes it is a quiet, beautiful thing, charging the world like sunlight, though people forget it is there. This is the first battle. The next is the one within myself, as the older I get, the more I learn about the distance between who I am and who I want to be. The daily wringing of my heart, in order to soften it. Scraping, harder and harder each time to try and reach the core of myself and polish it. This discontentment, the cups of pride that I swallow, is a strange and sore motivation. I think so often of death and realised that I have not lived a life that I would like to die for.
It is beautiful, but it hurts. I realise, now more than ever, that life is a strange and beautiful thing, cruel and brief but a powerful thing, worth living. With this new realisation, as my heart breaks in new ways and I shed old versions of myself, I level up, quite literally elevating my poor soul with dua to the Lord of the worlds who has sent me to this dunya for the fight of my life.
I thought growing up would be complete when my height plateaued and my skin finished stretching and I was doing something that made me certain of myself and my place in the world. When millennials talk about adulting, I find it embarrassing. But I now see how much there is to self-celebrate about slowly but surely planting your feet in the world, working things out with no one to hold your hand.
I have noticed that growing up is like turning a corner, that no matter how slowly one approaches it and prepares, there is still the chance that something unexpected awaits once you dawn upon that bend.
Growth and toughening up aside, I still watch with a giddy smile as my mother’s hands make movements in the kitchen as she prepares me a hot chocolate. Some things will never change.
A Prayer for the Gracefully Ageing:
Rabbana, our Lord:
Help us to pass through life gracefully and with ease, and protect us from the trials of this life weighing us down. Help us to be mindful of You and grateful for your blessings.
Let our grey hairs be salvation, let our scars and wrinkles be wisdom. All around us, allow us to leave a legacy of mercy and aid. Heal us, and heal our hurting world, and give us the chance to leave people and places better than we found them. Make us the leaders of the righteous.
Purify us until we are the best versions of ourselves. Change us until You are pleased with us, and allow us to be the light we wish to see in the world. Make faith and guidance dear to our hearts. Give us the strength to make each better each day than the last.
Write us among the truthful, the patient, the people of the Qur’an, and its enlightenment, witnesses to Your Majesty. Do not allow us to be from those who are heedless, who do not ask, learn, or reflect. Bless us in our curiosity and make our quest for Truth lifelong, culminating in the beauty You created of knowledge, exploration, and growth until our last breaths.
Our Lord, do not impose blame upon us if we have forgotten or erred. Our Lord, and lay not upon us a burden like that which You laid upon those before us. Our Lord, and burden us not with that which we have no ability to bear. And pardon us; and forgive us; and have mercy upon us. You are our protector, so give us victory over the disbelieving people. (Chapter 2, The Cow, Verse 286)
O Allah, You are my Lord, none has the right to be worshipped except You, You created me and I am Your servant, and I abide to Your covenant and promise [to honour it] as best I can, I take refuge in You from the evil of which I committed, I acknowledge Your favour upon me and I acknowledge my sin, so forgive me, for verily none can forgive sins except You.
And send Your peace and blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad, and on his family and companions as well.
