SoHo, Manhattan, NYC, 2015
Time confounds Man, just as it always has for centuries. It keeps us prisoner of ourselves, while we struggle and scramble to cling onto meaning, hope, fear, love, and despair in the little time we have. Either Man forgets that he has little time, or he races against it in a perpetual marathon that he always loses–for who can run faster than time? It speeds up the more you want it to slow down. It slips out of grasp when you think you have it under control.
And yet still, the world slows down to an utter halt when you pull the beads. Time is not something you ought to master, perhaps it is just something you need to flow with.
I hear the birds outside, the cars, the voices, and in my own mind there is a voice that whispers to me of all I should be worried about, all I should be fearing, all I should be thinking of. But dhikr mutes the sound of everything else but yourself. The very same silence that is terrifying is also the silence that can save you from yourself: if you let yourself go, if you let yourself listen.
Allah does not speak to you from outside yourself, He stays within you where He has always been. Everything you see with the physical eye is an illusion, a mirage, a distraction, and yet it is also all a part of Him, He who lies within you. Perplexing, but freeing. Yet we still stumble and slip, as that is the condition of Man, I suppose.
