It's dusk now as I'm writing this and Ramadan is here once again. It just seems so surreal to me how time flies - it cannot since be one Islamic year already. I still have vivid memories of last year's Ramadan. Just before the start of the fasting month, I was given the news that I was going to be furloughed for a few weeks. While I didn't like the sound of that initially, I was feeling fortunate for the first time ever in more than a decade or so, I was given this opportunity of spending the holy month without having to work, study or being involved in some kind of "formal vocation". Just me and the holy month - adjusting to the longer hours, focusing on the little goals I've got, preparing meals, performing worship as husband and wife for the first time. I haven't had time to fully process through the year, but time waits for no one. I'm here once again.
To be honest, I'm feeling a tad anxious because this time round, I am working. This shouldn't really be a concern considering that I've done this so many times before when doing crazy copious amounts of work back in Singapore. But it's the long hours of fasting, and also taking responsibilities with preparing meals for suhoor and iftar. I am fortunate though that the husband cooks and takes at least 45% of the cooking duties. But I can just imagine all the hectic-ness of it all while still trying to manage a household. It's different when I was living with my family back then. I will nonetheless embrace and dive into it head on, and putting faith in God.
My thoughts and reflection this year is just going to be me being radically honest about the month of Ramadan. Often, we hear so much positivity and goodness - the hopefulness, the enthusiasm, the list of goals to be achieved, the desire to find some kind of peace, healing, love, wholesomeness, respite all within that same month. It all just sounds too perfect. This isn't the same as saying that Ramadan is an imperfect month. I think Ramadan is perfect in and of itself - the month in which the Quran was revealed, the month where God opens His doors of Mercy. God is perfect and there's nothing short of perfection about God's blessings, mercy and love. But it's almost as if we try to put Ramadan so high up on the pedestal, and thereby setting our expectations for our personal experiences with it high as well. But we aren't perfect, and therefore our experience cannot be that perfect either. There are just some Ramadan(s) where we just don't feel completely up for it. It's like being told to watch a Thriller when we just want to watch Cartoon, but because everyone else in the group is mad crazy to watch a Thriller, we just have to drag ourselves to watch it, knowing full well that our hearts are not in it. For Ramadan, we can end up having some good days, some neutral days, and some days where we just whiz through like a zombie. I've experienced a few spiritual highs previously, but I can't deny how there were some Ramadan(s) that felt like the total opposite of that, where I sensed some distance from God, the lack of connection to the sacred, and the seemingly lack of accessibility to a "transcendental" experience.
This year, I hope to embrace this fact fully - fully acknowledging my humanness, my fallibility, the swinging states of my emotional being, the highs and lows of my spirituality and faith, my messiness. Ramadan isn't a spiritual retreat or a vacation where we can just book an instant flight to a place of spirituality and faith. It's not just arriving to one month of sudden and intense feelings of spirituality when we actually feel like crap the months or even the recent days prior to that. It isn't the month where you can suddenly find God. We cannot find God, and we cannot sense that transcendence if we never really try to seek or explore it before within ourselves. God is beyond Ramadan. Yes Ramadan is a gift from God to us, but we find faith and we experience God beyond that. Sometimes, even on the prayer mat whilst performing obligatory prayers, I might not feel or experience God. Yet, I find God in the most mundane and random of all places and states. Sometimes in the bathroom, that moment I slip into a daze, the quiet time in bed before my slumber, when I walk in the park and look up at the trees and skies. I find God when I feel at both extreme ends - when I was in need, and also when I was in deep gratitude - and everything else in between the two. Sometimes, I find God in witnessing the most beautiful tiny moments, and the greatest ones.
This Ramadan, I hope to continue to experience God in the most mundane moments. And if I don't get to experience that spirituality I hope to feel or not being able to tap into that spiritual transcendence, I will remind myself that God is always there. Always there, without any doubt. Waiting. And He knows when my heart isn't all up for it, yet He's always there. And we need to trust that, even if our hearts don't feel like they are there yet. And I suppose, that is, faith.
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