Ecclesiastes 12:1 · World English Bible
Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, before the evil days come, and the years draw near, when you will say, “I have no pleasure in them;”
Ghaflah: Heedlessness Ghaflah is the drift that sets in when nothing hurts yet. Strength and time feel endless when you have plenty of both, so the question of who made you never comes up.
From the Sufism reading below.
The same verse, read by one tradition.
SUFISM
Ghaflah: Heedlessness Ghaflah is the drift that sets in when nothing hurts yet. Strength and time feel endless when you have plenty of both, so the question of who made you never comes up. The fog is comfortable, and a person can spend twenty good years inside it before wondering where they went.
Dhikr: Remembrance Dhikr is keeping God in mind, said aloud or held quietly. Habits like that settle slowly, and they settle best before life starts pressing hard. Someone who begins young has the words ready when bad news arrives; someone who begins at the end learns them while worn out.
Khalq jadīd: Creation made new each moment Ibn Arabi taught that God remakes the world every instant, so nothing lasts two moments running. Being made is not finished business; it is happening in the breath you are taking now. Remembering your Maker then means turning toward someone holding you up at this minute, not recalling a fact about how you began.
Take advantage of five before five: each season gets spent while it lasts The Prophet listed them: youth before old age, health before sickness, free time before busyness, wealth before poverty, life before death. Each pair names something you hold now and will not hold forever, which is easy to miss while you still hold it. Young strength is a short window, and whatever gets planted in it is what stands later.
Remember often the destroyer of pleasures: death keeps sweetness in proportion The Prophet said it in one line, and al-Ghazali built a whole book from it. Holding the end in view while food still tastes good keeps a person from resting their full weight on what they enjoy. When the day comes that nothing tastes like much, whoever leaned on taste alone has nothing left.
Sufism lens
What do I hold today, strength, time, quiet, that I am spending as if it will always be there?
The mind is formed by what it practices, repetition by repetition, until the groove is deep. Habits laid down early are the ones available when life turns hard.
We act as if our supply of time were endless while we waste the part already in hand. The young are the most careless because they feel the richest.
Awakening is only ever available in this breath, not the one that already passed. Life is being handed to you now, which is why now is where attention belongs.
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