Today is Sunday, I have one week and the serious countdown begins. The clock is ticking. In addition to general packing and logistical preparations, I must begin to make amends. Actually my list is not that long, once I contact my immediate family.
This harks back to two things, in “making the will before hajj” one is also making plans for some kind of finality. If not physically then at least metaphorically. That is probably why so many people actually wish to die at hajj. This is the place and time where one’s life should come before one’s eyes and then washed as if a tsunami of purification and expiation ran over it. To stand on Arafat on the 10th day of the last month of the Islamic lunar calendar is to bare one’s soul and then to hope and pray for a new one—one that is purified and whole. Out with the old and useless, in with the new and renewed.
For me, then this week I am scheduling a one-on-one with each of my children. Surely they are the dearest to me of all my earthly attachments, and the ones I would most want to make amends with before I go. I have been thinking about this but now is the time to move forward. I will compose a few notes to keep me focused and think clearly about at least one major thing that endears me to each of them and one major things that I find wanting. I have asked them to do the same and then to select a good time to talk or to skype.
Then there are only one or two things that I feel I need to address before I go. In one case I have already written my concerns and now must decide what to do with them: post them as letters, publish them here, or just read them between myself and Allah.
Most of my life, I am here to say, humbly has been in a trajectory that is in accordance to my best intentions. I don’t mean perfectly in that trajectory, but I do not have major regrets, except for occasionally in the outcome of some of my personal relationships. I’m not the kind of person who says she has a lot of friends, Facebook notwithstanding. Some people consider me friend while I would consider them a colleague. Colleagues are good; they are part of the working order of our complex roles in life.
My friends know secrets about my struggle to live as a decent human being, which I have never made public, and yet are crucial to my ability to continue to participate in that struggle.
I think of the quote from a novel I once read: sometimes you have to act like a hero in order to live as decent human being.
Some of these friends I do not see regularly, since they are literally all around the planet. However, without exception, these are persons whose moral codes and personal dignity mean so much to me that I cannot imagine the world without them or without their advice. They are the ones who remind me about beauty and majesty of the creation.
This will be an intense week and I don’t know how much will be worth public consideration. But here I am Oh Lord, Labayk Allahuma Labayk, towards Your house I put my intentions. Take me home.
