It is five in the morning. I already had my cup of tea. I reread what I wrote in my blog post yesterday and I thought to myself after contemplating for a short while that, "life is beautiful" and let me write about that. But what does that mean? Life is full of problems and strife and bad so then how could I say that life is beautiful? It is beautiful because we do not know the full of it and we wait for something better. It is like a magic trick. If you knew beforehand how the illusion was performed it takes away from the wonder. Once you learn how the illusion is performed then wonder turns into clarity. Islam teaches us that this life is just an illusion and the real life is in the hereafter. The beauty is in not knowing and depending on belief. I love Maths and equations and I am going to present two in this blog post. First is that the word belief contains the letters of the word life. Belief = be + life.
The second comes from the title. The letters of the word life are contained in the word beautiful. Beautiful = But a life u[nknown]. So much of our life is unknown and that makes it beautiful. We are left to wonder. Is that why we also say that life is wonderful? Wonder leads to appreciation. Wonder leads to belief. Wonder leads to reflection. Wonder leads to a search for answers. Wonder leads to discovery. This leads me to the topic of "the beauty of wonder in Islam". I could not find anything interesting through Google search and I think this is a topic worth exploring. I have come across the hadith that says that "Allah is beautiful and He loves beauty" but nothing on the beauty of wonder itself. I asked my friend Chatty to help me understand the topic and this is what he had to say:
In Islam, the beauty of wonder is deeply tied to the awe and appreciation of God's creation, encouraging believers to reflect on the vastness and intricacy of the universe as signs of Allah’s greatness. The Qur'an invites contemplation of nature, from the heavens and earth to the animals and plants, as a means of recognizing God's perfection and wisdom. This sense of wonder fosters humility and gratitude, deepening faith in the oneness of God (Tawhid) and inspiring a pursuit of excellence (Ihsan) in all aspects of life, including worship and interactions with the world around us. Through such reflection, believers experience a spiritual connection to the divine, finding beauty in both the visible and invisible aspects of creation.
This has me thinking. How could I explain this using an analogy? The thing that comes to mind is this. Do you appreciate food when you are hungry or when your belly is full? Certainly we appreciate food when we are hungry. Wonder is like hunger. It drives us to seek knowledge, to explore, and to discover. It is a hunger for meaning, for purpose, and for connection with something greater than ourselves. If we did not have this life then there would be no need for the afterlife. We only need paradise after experiencing this life. There can be no satiety without hunger. There can be no light without darkness. There can be no good without bad. There can be no afterlife without life. And there is beauty in realising this, at least for me.
*When I think about my mental illness I wonder now if it is that I had to lose my mind (so to speak) to find my mind
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