Well, it’s my birthday. I was (again) hoping for an epiphany so that I would have something worthy of the occasion to share; but alas, except for a dream about storage arrangements that included a friend from Malaysia my daughter’s cat and one of my children, no bells rang, no guns went off. My daughter kept her promise to make me breakfast and I kept my promise to myself about it: wait for her no matter how late, rather than jump the gun because I’m an early riser.
Truth be told, my children have come to that place where it’s very hard to know what to do for a person who demands to be so self-sufficient. You’d think they’d also know I would gladly take any little symbol of love. For all the profundity, I have come to see that it is the thought that counts. If I am overlooked altogether, I do feel slighted.
I thought about not writing a blog at all. Then, I thought about sharing one wisdom for each year, but I was pretty sure I would never find 58. As you can see, both are extreme: one too little, as in not at all; and one too much, as in 58. In the Qur’an we are exalted to moderation to be of the middle way. Buddha discovered that enlightenment was not at the extremes. Everywhere we are taught about moderation and modesty.
When I turned 55 I went skydiving. I like to think of things to mark the occasion that I would be unlikely to forget. But this is only for those round numbers. There’s nothing that rings out of 58. I’ve got two more years, if I live, before I need to find the next big celebration. I’ve got time to plan still. But, why 5-year increments? Seems a bit arbitrary.
Because I accepted Islam in one of those round figures, and spent the first ten years in such constant transition: first the religion itself and learning new things, then, beginning an interaction with a community that likes of which I had never had—a global community with certain shared particulars, like prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage.
Then I got married, and that was a big deal, then I had my first child, and that was a big deal. Then I moved out of the country after never having been abroad, and that was a big deal. Then I gave birth in that new country, and that was a big deal, then I reentered the U.S. and that was a big deal, then I divorced and that was a big deal, then I decided to study for my masters and Ph.D in Islamic studies and that was a big deal. So I moved to a new state with my children and that was a big deal. Well, it seemed I was so busy living one big deal after another that I was not counting. I was not marking time. I wasn’t even taking the time to figure out what I might want when a birthday came along.
By the time I was 30 (two years before I married a second time and started the unmarked cycles again), I had been Muslim for a decade. I had traveled out of the country, living abroad twice and seen other parts of the world. I was a mother twice over. I was established in my studies (well more than established: a die-hard. I aced every class and with one exception, one B+, I kept that record until I graduated). By that time I began to notice that certain issues repeat themselves in the Muslim community. Somehow, I thought if I had figured something out for myself then everybody should have figure it out too, and we would be over that.
It occurs to me that experience may not be the only teacher. I mean, I would not want anyone I cared for to become a penniless drug addict in order to surmise that drugs are no good. But still, when you have experienced some things, the impression the experience leaves is more certain, less deniable. In the Qur’an there is this idea about ‘ilm al yaqin: certainty. There is recognition, there is understanding, there is knowledge, and then there is certainty. We know things, even if we don’t know how we come to know them. That has been my life’s work, hermeneutics—how do we know what we say that we know? What is knowledge really; especially when there are so many different ways to experience and then to interpret the same data?
In the end, maybe we don’t really know anything. Maybe it is all just imagination. We imagine that some relationship with what is to be known is the same as knowing it. What happens when the thing to be known is an abstraction—like truth, justice, or freedom? What happens when we claim to or want to know God?
What does it mean to know God?
For the mystics, it is apparently so important to think of I knowing as a kind of intimacy. To know God is to love God. One Sufi saying is, “Those who wait to know God in the Hereafter never really know God.” To wait to know God until after this life is useless then. Sufis are the ‘spiritually impatient’—those who cannot wait until death to know God. Here knowledge is at-one-meant. To be at one with God in this life, not to wait until we die.
Sometimes, when I enjoy the growth of my grandsons, or the developments of my children, I appreciate the passing of time. I really do. I am not one of those people who wants to be continually 29. I want to know what age can show us, but not to become so old as to not learn. After 10 years as a Muslim and then incrementally for each of the next 5 year cycles, I feel I have left some foolishness of my own follies behind. I then know more about myself, if not about others—but also sometimes about others as well, in the sense of shared humanity, not in the sense of individuals. I began then to relish that which time alone can grant.
Time humbles us. It lets us know that no matter what impact we might have it is only an infinitesimal drop in the cosmic vastness. And yet it is only those drops that make for a life. That makes for meaning in any one’s life. Each day now, and not just on my birthday, I try to learn something new. If not some profound thing, then at least to see with new eyes even something already and always there: signs of life’s continual unfolding. A new bud opening on the tree, an apple fallen from the weight of its own ripeness, the wind blowing this way instead of that.
That’s why I have endeavored to have some kind of new experience of great proportion on my cyclical birthdays. Something that helps me mark the time; because it keeps passing. Time can get lost upon itself, unless we stop to take note; unless we notice; unless we endeavor to be the knower.
A few years ago, I went past my own humble understanding (not knowing and certainly not yaqin, certainty) of the Divine. I went beyond just my own personal terms. It was a nice to have this personal sense that God made a difference to me, and therefore that I made a difference to God. I know now, that I do not. But in knowing this, knowing that I do make a difference to God, the mandate to make an even greater difference to humanity became all the more important. It is not only imperative that I be a grateful servant and a worthy agent of the Divine will; which is the ultimate harmony of all the universe. It is also imperative that I live in this life as the best that I live in this life. That is my responsibility to being alive.
For then, after all of that, there is only death. And in death, the true measure of life is found, not just for some metaphorical afterlife, but for the continuity of life here on Earth. We are each given this life, the Qur’an says, as a test to see which of us will be greater in deeds. That measure continues only for as long as we live unless we make a difference to all of humankind. Thus, for my birthday and for every day, I aspire to the Ghandian mantra: Be the change you want to see in the world.
