the only way to survive this vicious world a virtuous man is to wake up with the sole and singular intent to spend all your waking hours in devotion to God. life is full of betrayal and bad ethics and dog-eat-dog physics and entropy and mighty unpredictability. what could shield you from tomorrow? cease relying on your power or status, or your mind-mapping and planning. your physical body and rational mind can only do so much. you must go one step further. or rather, one step back: initiate an action from the intent to sacrifice it. start your day saying, “I will give all of today to God, moving right, doing only that which is my duty to do.” doing thus makes you invincible. it lifts you beyond, and thereby protects you against, the world. a legion of angels will accompany your every meter. light will radiate through your muddied face signalling to the evil-doers “beware, herein stands a man of God.” move right, brother, should you want to retain your virtue forever young and virgin.
we are now living in the dark age of the “practical.” the “useful.” grind culture. hustle culture. self-improvement. the “don’t waste time!” the numbers and metrics. the toil for the sake of it. the give one more. even if you liberated yourself from a 9-5 you will still suffer from the sickness of serial entrepreneurship. building businesses because there isn’t anything else to do. you, like all others, live your life worshipping output. you seek God in the material. actually God is not sought at all. you move before even thinking. nothing will free you from this world except for religion. religion in its true essential format. and that is the categorical truth. contest it all you like. your intellectual arguments as to why God doesn’t exist are instantly refuted before you even speak by the restlessness and lack of content in your soul. show me a content atheist and I’ll concede. but you simply can’t, because there’s no such thing.
you’re not splendid enough in how you love. you drink your coffee mindlessly. you don’t close your eyes when you dream. you don’t give gratitude on your knees. you broke your heart once and are afraid to break it again. you tip waiters “as per your budget.” you only invest in the S&P500. you keep saying “it wasn’t meant to be.” your highest excellence is excuse-making. your religion is “it’s good enough.” when will you learn? life is for the alive. and you’re just a dead man meandering. will you ever exist?
freedom can only be attained when one surrenders. a slave to people is a wretched slave but a slave to God is a free person. and thus a true “muslim” (that’s the etymology of the word). and perhaps an angel in the making. God drew your destiny for you pre-birth. your path was always predestined. now, to choose to not betray that and live it, that’s the only choice of free will there is. and to accept one’s fate without complaint is liberation. all the rest is decadent romanticism. make your destiny to live what was predestined for you. otherwise, you betray God. and enter “hell.” think about it.
in the Quran, God says He has tied our destinies to our necks. there’s nowhere to run, then. and you can either choose to be disheartened by this or choose to be freed. everything that will be yours is already yours. every sorrow, livable. as it is so written
you are always lazy and not reaching the pinnacle of your potential because you have not yet learned the skill of inducing “panic” on demand. once you learn how to reliably summon the state wherein you deeply see how little time you have to realise your dream, you’ll unlock energy reserves so vast you’ll downright start crying. there was never anything wrong with you after all. you just missed a little urgency. I am here to share the good news: it is inducible. and please. please. please: induce it before it becomes real.
how does one reconcile a simple life with an excellent life? cillian murphy has no doubt broken the ceiling and beyond when it comes to honing one’s craft, achieving otherworldly excellence, yet he somehow finds space to enjoy the simple things.
hard to convince me that this very simplicity got him to where he is today. surely he had to bend over backwards and sacrifice a great deal for his craft. only after reaching the highest pinnacle could he have then slowed down and reverted to normalcy.
if I, as a 27-year-old, were to live by this quote below today, I feel I’d mightily fall behind. perhaps youth is the game of the extreme. all exertion with no balance.
yet that could be merely the mental disease of youth today. endless movement. endless productivity. a deathly pervasive gnawing that if one stops one would drown.
yet what if that is precisely required for a phase, until excellence is reached?