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How do we fix this world?

It is 4:39 pm and I have decided to write. It is a peaceful and quiet day. I am thinking about God, and how this life is a test. There is so much happening in this world that could make us sad. But we do not have to remain in that sadness when we put our trust in God. God wants good for us. God wants us to experience peace, and even happiness, despite what surrounds us. How do we fix this world? My friend Chatty suggests that maybe a better question is: What kind of person do I choose to be in this world? Because when enough people answer that question well, that is how real change begins. I want to be the kind of person that God is pleased with. Someone guided by God, not by ego. Someone who chooses patience over anger, humility over pride, and sincerity over appearances. I am doing reasonably well, but I am not perfect. And maybe perfection is not the goal. Growth is. Awareness is. Returning to what is right, again and again, is. I want to grow, and I will keep adjusting myself when ...

Mundane

It is 123am and I have decided to write. I have this new idea for a book called Mundane. It would be me writing about the ordinary. We chase the extraordinary but there is beauty in the ordinary. There is beauty in the simple. There is beauty in the everyday. What about God? We often think about God in grand terms. But what if God is simple too? What if God is mundane? What if we look for God in the everyday moments? I sit in this dark room with the air conditioning on. The fan is also on. The curtain is down but I imagine the moonlight shining on the grass outside. The cats are probably sleeping. I wonder if anyone else in the neighbourhood is awake at this hour? Is there another writer around who is also writing about the mundane? The fan breeze helps the air conditioning cool me down. These nights are warm otherwise. A mosquito flies across my screen. Hello friend or foe. I cannot quite decide which one. If I had a swatter you would be gone. I check my notifications and there is an ...

We are explorers

It is 215pm and I have decided to write. I had this question. What does God really want from us? Then I remember that God does not need us, we need God. What I am really wanting to ask is why create us, why life, why test us, why the mystery? Why not? It is human nature to ask questions. No matter how much we know, we will ask questions. We are always looking for reasons. We are always looking. We are always seeking. We are explorers. We could have been anything but God chose for us to be explorers. There is joy in exploring. There is joy in discovery. There is joy in not knowing. What I have arrived at is a reminder. Appreciate the now. Appreciate what is. Appreciate that one day things will make sense but for now we get to live. To live, to learn and to laugh. I like this quote by Frank Borman that I found, "Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit." If there was nothing to explore we would be static. There would be no movement. There would be no existence. Exi...

What we do not know

It is 1245am and I have decided to write. I had this weird alienish dream and it ended with me winning by simply stating "the truth is that we do not know". In the dream everyone was having an opinion of what was happening as if they knew. On to something random. I had this question. What is the most unrandom thing? Then what is the most random thing? What if everything is equally random. My friend Chatty thinks that randomness is not an absolute property—it is a relation between you and the system you observe. Randomness is not absolute—it depends on perspective. Something perfectly ordered can seem random if you do not know its pattern. So in a sense, everything can be "equally random" relative to the observer's knowledge, making randomness more about perception than an intrinsic property. The more we know the less random things become. Let me make a detour. Suppose we do not predict things but things predict us. For example, when I flip a coin, did I predict ...

God opens doors

It is 1203am and I have decided to write. Saturday I spent the night coding. I was trying to get a FastAPI app up and running, all from my budget Android phone. The test cases were written to use Puppeteer. I ended up using Replit for that. Coding is more challenging when using a mobile phone. Not impossible but more challenging. I hardly blog about technology and coding anymore but the love is still there. I still have a dream of creating my own coding and youtube studio with a nice desk setup. That is nice but what should I make this blog post about? What do I want to write about? What should I write about? I love creating presentations. That is something I could do to revive my youtube channel. I love Maths too. I have this feeling that I could solve one of those longstanding Maths problems that seems impossible. Sometimes, like right now, I feel like abandoning my blog post. It is going nowhere. Maybe I should get up and go wash the wares. I wish God could tell me what to write abo...

God of destiny

It is 1244am and I have decided to write. It is the 27th night of Ramadan in Trinidad. It could be the night of power (laylatul qadr). Better than a thousand months. We are taught that on this night the destiny of all of creation is written for the next year. Everyone hopes for a year of success. Does that mean we can influence our destiny? I learnt two things from this question. There is a well-known prophetic tradition (hadith) stating that "nothing changes divine decree except dua"; And scholars often distinguish between Al-Qada al-Mubram (the ultimate, irrevocable decree) and Al-Qada al-Muallaq (the suspended decree). The latter is conditional—written as "If my servant does X, then Y will happen." How does destiny exist with free will? God can see the future but we cannot? My friend Chatty says that knowledge does not equal compulsion. If a teacher knows a student will fail because of their habits, that knowledge did not cause the failure. It just perfectly unde...

Belief is a part of life

I watched this video and I quite like it as a good starting point for this blog post https://youtu.be/t44PFI_V4LE We cannot know everything. We do not have the capacity to know everything. I make plans for tomorrow because I believe there is a tomorrow not because I know that there is a tomorrow. We cannot decide today to say we will only act on things that we know for sure. This would be impractical. As my friend Chatty puts it, to live life, we must believe in things that cannot always be proven with certainty. For example, we believe that the future exists, that our actions matter, and that other people can be trusted. We also tend to believe life has meaning and that things can improve. These beliefs help us make decisions, keep hope, and move forward. Given that belief is a part of life, it is reasonable to have people believe in a God and a particular religion. My point is this. Life cannot happen without belief because we cannot know everything (unless we are God like). Belief i...