Captioning provided by MUHSEN (www.muhsen.org)
There's this really cool poem that I enjoy,
and it's in Arabic.
And allow me to translate parts of it for you.
So the poet, he says an nafsu,
you know, your inside, inside you.
Tajda wa'anta koona faqeeratan
It hates the fact that you might not get
everything you want, everything you desire,
or that you experience poverty.
wal faqru khairum min ghinan yuthreeha
Perhaps not having everything you want
is better than having everything you want
that allows you to transgress
and feel that you have no limits.
Whatever I want, I can have at any time.
(ethereal music)
He goes on to say
wa ghinan nufusi huwal kafa'a
You know, the true enrichment,
the true joy,
the greatest content you'll have in life
is to be able to appreciate whatever
you have in life, to its fullest.
Fa in abbat, if you can't train yourself
to be appreciative of the large and the small,
fajami'uh maliddunya layaqfeeha
then everything in this world,
if it was given to you,
you still are going to want more.
hayal qana'atu fal zamhaa
Learn to find peace with all conditions inside yourself.
You will feel like a king.
laulam taqun illa rahatil baalee wal badanee
Even if your kingdom is just
that you have a good night's sleep,
and a good rest,
and a happy environment around you.
What's the meaning of that poem?
Well, what it means to me,
a certain, a number of things,
and I hope it's something that you can kind of reflect on,
whether you're young or old,
that what are the things that we value so much,
they're usually things that other people, we assume, value.
So you want to have something,
not just because it's going to give you joy,
but you want to be able to kind of
show other people that you have it.
So you're trying to live your life
through other people's eyes.
So if I got these pair of sneakers,
or I got these new Jordan 1s,
by the way, I love Jordans.
I got a few myself.
I'm not saying don't have the nice things in life.
You got to have nice things in life
because that makes you happy as well.
But that isn't the secret to happiness.
Meaning that if I don't have it,
or if something happens to them,
or I misplace them or lose them,
or I couldn't afford it at a certain period of time,
it doesn't mean that I can't find joy in other things.
Why? Because I'm not looking at it through
other people's eyes who I want to observe me
and to judge me as being a little bit higher
just because I got that thing.
And that comes back to the ego,
and how we kind of view things in the world.
We're going to talk about the ego
and its place in making us susceptible
or likely to fall into errors and sins.
Ego is that inside feeling that you have
where you may feel jealousy,
you may feel pride.
How dare they say that about me?
You may feel levels of anger,
levels of hostility,
where you may feel that other people are judging you,
or other people are, you know,
looking at you in a way that you don't feel is right.
All of those sort of things that relate
to your ego and how you value yourself
and the value you put on yourself.
One of the best things that you can do
is to strip away as much of it
from where you believe other people value you from.
And, in fact, you will see a lot of social media,
for example, Instagram now,
you'll notice that they took off the likes.
Before, when somebody liked your photo,
it'll say how many likes
and people were doing crazy things to get
more and more likes,
which really wasn't good for their health.
Really wasn't good for their mental health
and their ability to judge right and wrong.
So Instagram and Facebook,
they took that away because they knew
it's self destructive.
Why it's making you feel happy,
not because of what you're doing,
but what you experience from other people.
And the greatest is joy
that you will have is being able
to enjoy from the inside out.
And that's what Islam says.
Islam wants us to connect to Allah,
Subh'anaHu Wa Ta-A'la
That in whatever condition we are,
we have rida with Allah.
In the next session,
I'm going to speak to you about
being content with Allah,
content with Islam and content with
our Nabi Muhammad SallAllahu Alaihi Wasallam
as our messenger.