This week (6/9- 6/15) wasn’t my best, I fasted on average about 13 hours a day. I think I began to get tired of fasting, even though it’s relatively easy for me to skip an early meal, I have days where I just don’t want to. I see myself going through the motions of toasting up a waffle, scrambling some eggs, putting it on a plate and consuming fork full by fork full of food, and for what reason? Largely taste, comfort, habit. But what is it that makes food so alluring when we all know that the enjoyment of it only lasts a short while? Worse yet, if we eat poorly enough and often enough not only will the joy be short-lived but the detriments will far out-live our last bites. But isn’t that much like all of this world? The quick thrills we enjoy to our own detriment, to the detriment of our relationship with our Lord, are all short-lived, but we indulge anyway. It’s part of the human condition.
I sometimes watch a show called ‘My 600-pound life’ where men and women over 600 pounds are seeking weight loss surgery. Whenever I watch the show I think, “How does one allow oneself to get to that point?” But the reality is that the same way one becomes 40 pounds overweight is the same way one becomes 400 pounds overweight, bite by bite. God says in the Quran, “And be not like those who forgot Allah, so He made them forget themselves”. A large part of all of our overconsuming is heedlessness, we forget God and forget our own selves. But, we might say, however bad eating too much is, what does it have to do with God? In revisiting Imam Al Ghazali’s work ‘Disciplining the Soul, Breaking the Two Desires’, it’s painful to realize how much we’ve forgotten the prophetic way. One of the myths that persist in the Muslim community is that the prophet, peace to him, ate little, lived in a small dwelling, slept on a straw mat because he was poor. Yet the prophet, peace to him, was not poor towards the end of his life when Islam began to grow. This was, in fact, a point of contention with his wives who saw Islam growing and the increased wealth from the spoils of war, yet they did not see their condition change. This situation caused the prophet, peace to him, to separate from his wives for a period of time before giving them the option of staying in the marriage as it was -under humble conditions, or leaving in kindness. In the end, they choose to stay with the messenger of God.
We should also recall that before Islam began to spread and the Muslims gained wealth from successful battles, the prophet had access to wealth -men like Abu Bakr, Uthman, and his Uncle Hamza, were all wealthy. Yet there’d be times the prophet, peace to him, subsisted on little more than water and dates. And recall when Umar reached the messenger of God and saw him sleeping on a straw mat, he felt guilty that the Kings of the world slept more comfortable than the messenger of God, to which God’s messenger reminded him, “O Umar, is this why we are here? O Umar, aren’t you happy that they have this ‘Dunya’ (this life) and we have the ‘Akhira’ (the afterlife)?” The way the prophet, peace to him, lived wasn’t a result of poverty but of humility and a knowing that made him exceptionally aware of how insignificant the life of this world is.
This coming week is my last post on fasting in this series. It’s been difficult to take myself into account and realize that breaking free from eating habits and even reflecting on my eating habits is not an easy task. Bad habits are hard to break because they become a part of who we are but it’s also that reason that we must strive to break them if we want to become something better.
Until next week,
Take care.
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