No expectations, only contradictions.
My aunt emailed this today. It makes a lot of sense; especially when the writer says the recipe for unhappiness is having expectations. Having recently come out of a decade old relationship and starting a new one, I certainly have my expectations and yes, I have been let down. But I have been pleasantly surprised after I conditioned myself to think that not everything has to be as how I planned, not everyone has to act as how I imagined they would. No expectations, no disappointments = A happier me.
Nonetheless, for relationships, I have learned that with communication, this can be helped. When you explain / express yourself; your thoughts, your feelings, your expectations especially, I realize that things can be managed after all. As for the rest, we can just shrug and tell ourselves: Some things are beyond our control.
All is well with that article until I see this line that I don't agree with: When you’re in
trouble don’t depend on yourself. Don’t depend on people. Depend on God.
I hope this is not blasphemy, but I think God gave each of us a brain, and God made us human (with emotions, empathy, etc.) so that we can depend on ourselves, and because we live in civil societies, we need to depend on other people too (and be dependable), otherwise what's the point of creating you?
So use it, have some faith in others.
And if it didn't work out, life goes on. I would rather be heartbroken and sad many times than a walking zombie of you ask me.
Article below:
"For your reading knowledge and beautiful reminder.
Why Do People Have to Leave Each Other?
When I was 17 years old, I had a dream. I dreamt that I was sitting inside a
masjid and a little girl walked up to ask me a question. She asked me:
“Why do people have to leave each other?”
The question was a personal one, but it seemed clear to me why the question was chosen for me.
I was one to get attached.
Ever
since I was a child, this temperament was clear. While other children
in preschool could easily recover once their parents left,
I could not. My tears, once set in motion, did not stop easily. As I
grew up, I learned to become attached to everything around me. From the
time I was in first grade, I
needed a best friend. As I got older, any fall-out
with a friend shattered me. I couldn’t let go of anything. People,
places, events, photographs, moments—even outcomes became objects of
strong
attachment. If things didn’t work out the way I wanted or imagined they
should, I was devastated. And disappointment for me wasn’t an ordinary
emotion. It was catastrophic. Once let down, I never fully recovered. I
could never forget, and the break never mended.
Like a glass vase that you place on the edge of a table, once broken,
the pieces never quite fit again.
But
the problem wasn’t with the vase. Or even that the vases kept breaking.
The problem was that I kept putting them on the edge of tables.
Through my attachments, I was dependent on my relationships to fulfill
my needs. I allowed those relationships to define my happiness or my
sadness, my fulfillment or my emptiness, my security, and even my
self-worth. And so, like the vase placed where it
will inevitably fall, through those dependencies I set myself up for
disappointment. I set myself up to be broken. And that’s exactly what I
found: one disappointment, one break after another.
But
the people who broke me were not to blame any more than gravity can be
blamed for breaking the vase. We can’t blame the laws of
physics when a twig snaps because we leaned on it for support. The twig
was never created to carry us.
Our weight was only meant to be carried by God. We are told in the Quran;
“…whoever rejects evil and believes in God hath grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold, that never breaks. And God hears
and knows all things.”
(Al-Bakarah,
2:256)
There
is a crucial lesson in this verse: that there is only one handhold that
never breaks. There is only one place where we can lay
our dependencies. There is only one relationship that should define our
self-worth and only one source from which to seek our ultimate
happiness, fulfillment, and security. That place is God.
But
this world is all about seeking those things everywhere else. Some of
us seek it in our careers, some seek it in wealth, some in
status. Some, like me, seek it in our relationships. In her book, Eat, Pray, Love,
Elizabeth Gilbert describes her own quest for happiness. She describes
moving in and out of relationships, and
even traveling the globe in search of this fulfillment. She seeks that
fulfillment—unsuccessfully—in her relationships, in meditation, even in
food.
And
that’s exactly where I spent much of my own life: seeking a way to fill
my inner void. So it was no wonder that the little girl
in my dream asked me this question. It was a question about loss, about
disappointment. It was a question about being let down. A question
about seeking something and coming back empty handed. It was about what
happens when you try to dig in concrete with
your bare hands: not only do you come back with nothing—you break your
fingers in the process. And I learned this not by reading it, not by
hearing it from a wise sage. I learned it by trying it again, and again,
and again.
And so, the little girl’s question was essentially my own question…
being asked to myself.
Ultimately, the question was about the nature of the
dunya as a place of fleeting moments and temporary
attachments. As a place where people are with you today, and leave or
die tomorrow. But this reality hurts our very being because it goes
against
our nature. We, as humans, are made to seek, love, and strive for what
is perfect and what is permanent. We are made to seek what’s eternal. We
seek this because we were not made for this life. Our first and true
home was Paradise: a land that is both perfect
and eternal. So the yearning for that type of life is a part of our
being. The problem is that we try to find that here. And so we create
ageless creams and cosmetic surgery in a desperate attempt to hold on—in
an attempt to mold this world into what it is
not, and will never be.
And that’s why if we live in
dunya with our hearts, it breaks us. That’s why this
dunya hurts. It is because the definition of
dunya, as something temporary and imperfect, goes
against everything we are made to yearn for. Allah put a yearning in us
that can only be fulfilled by what is eternal and perfect. By trying to
find fulfillment in what is fleeting, we are running after a hologram…
a mirage. We are
digging into concrete with our bare hands. Seeking to turn what is by
its very nature temporary into something eternal is like trying to
extract from fire,
water. You just get burned. Only when we stop putting our hopes in dunya, only when we stop trying to make the
dunya into what it is not—and was never meant to be (jannah)—will this life finally stop breaking our hearts.
We
must also realize that nothing happens without a purpose. Nothing. Not
even broken hearts. Not even pain. That broken heart and
that pain are lessons and signs for us. They are warnings that
something is wrong. They are warnings that we need to make a change.
Just like the pain of being burned is what warns us to remove our hand
from the fire, emotional pain warns us that we need to
make an internal change. That we need to detach. Pain is a form of
forced detachment. Like the loved one who hurts you again and again and
again, the more
dunya hurts us, the more we inevitably detach from it. The more we inevitably stop loving it.
And
pain is a pointer to our attachments. That which makes us cry, that
which causes us most pain is where our false attachments lie.
And it is those things which we are attached to as we should only be
attached to Allah which become barriers on our path to God. But the pain
itself is what makes the false attachment evident. The pain creates a
condition in our life that we seek to change,
and if there is anything about our condition that we don’t like, there
is a divine formula to change it. God says:
“Verily never will God change the condition of a people until they change what is within themselves.”
(Ar-Ra`d,
13:11)
After
years of falling into the same pattern of disappointments and
heartbreak, I finally began to realize something profound. I had
always thought that love of dunya meant being
attached to material things. And I was not attached to material things. I
was attached to people. I was attached to moments. I was attached to
emotions.
So I thought that the love of dunya just did not apply to me. What I didn’t realize was that people, moments, emotions are all a part of
dunya. What I didn’t realize is that all the pain I had experienced in life was due to one thing, and one thing only: love of
dunya.
As
soon as I began to have that realization, a veil was lifted from my
eyes. I started to see what my problem was. I was expecting
this life to be what it is not, and was never meant to be: perfect. And
being the idealist that I am, I was struggling with every cell in my
body to make it so. It had to be perfect. And I would not stop until it
was. I gave my blood, sweat, and tears to this
endeavor: making the dunya into
jannah. This meant expecting people around me to be
perfect. Expecting my relationships to be perfect. Expecting so much
from those around me and from this life. Expectations. Expectations.
Expectations.
And if there is one recipe for unhappiness it is that: expectations.
But herein lay my fatal mistake. My mistake was not in having
expectations; as humans, we should never lose hope. The problem was in
*where* I was placing those expectations and that hope.
At the end of the day, my hope and expectations were not being placed
in God. My hope and expectations were in people, relationships, means.
Ultimately, my hope was in this
dunya rather than Allah.
And
so I came to realize a very deep Truth. An ayah began to cross my mind.
It was an ayah I had heard before, but for the first time
I realized that it was actually describing me:
“Those who rest not their hope on their meeting with Us, but are pleased and satisfied with the life of the present,
and those who heed not Our Signs.”
(Yunus,
10:7)
By thinking that I can have everything here, my hope was not in my meeting with God. My hope was in
dunya. But what does it mean to place your hope in
dunya? How can this be avoided? It means when you
have friends, don’t expect your friends to fill your emptiness. When you
get married, don’t expect your spouse to fulfill your every need. When
you’re an activist, don’t put your hope in the results. When you’re in
trouble don’t depend on yourself. Don’t depend on people. Depend on God.
Seek
the help of people—but realize that it is not the people (or even your
own self) that can save you. Only Allah can do these things.
The people are only tools, a means used by God. But they are not the
source of help, aid, or salvation of any kind. Only God is. The people
cannot even create the wing of a fly (Al-Hajj
22:73).
And so, even while you interact with people externally, turn your heart
towards God. Face Him alone, as Prophet Ibrahim (as) said so
beautifully:
“For me, I have set my face, firmly and truly, towards Him Who created the heavens and the earth, and never shall I give
partners to Allah.”
(Al-Anaam,
6:79)
But
how does Prophet Ibrahim (as) describe his journey to that point? He
studies the moon, the sun and the stars and realizes that
they are not perfect. They set.
They let us down.
So
Prophet Ibrahim (as) was thereby led to face Allah alone. Like him, we
need to put our full hope, trust, and dependency on God.
And God alone. And if we do that, we will learn what it means to
finally find peace and stability of heart. Only then will the roller
coaster that once defined our lives finally come to an end. That is
because if our inner state is dependent on something that
is by definition inconstant, that inner state will also be inconstant.
If our inner state is dependent on something changing and temporary,
that inner state will be in a constant state of instability, agitation,
and unrest. This means that one moment we’re
happy, but as soon as that which our happiness depended upon changes,
our happiness also changes. And we become sad. We remain always swinging
from one extreme to another and not realizing why.
We
experience this emotional roller coaster because we can never find
stability and lasting peace until our attachment and dependency
is on what is stable and lasting. How can we hope to find constancy if
what we hold on to is inconstant and perishing? In the statement of Abu
Bakr is a deep illustration of this truth. After the Prophet Muhammad
ﷺ died, the people went into shock and could not handle the news. But
although no one loved the Prophet ﷺ like
Abu Bakr, Abu Bakr understood
well the only place where one’s dependency should lie. He said: “If you
worshiped Muhammad, know that Muhammad is dead. But if you worshiped
Allah, know that Allah never dies.”
To
attain that state, don’t let your source of fulfillment be anything
other than your relationship with God. Don’t let your definition
of success, failure, or self-worth be anything other than your position
with Him (Al-Hujurat,
49:13).
And if you do this, you become unbreakable, because your handhold is
unbreakable. You become unconquerable, because your supporter can never
be conquered. And you will never become empty, because your source
of fulfillment is unending and never diminishes.
Looking
back at the dream I had when I was 17, I wonder if that little girl was
me. I wonder this because the answer I gave her was
a lesson I would need to spend the next painful years of my life
learning. My answer to her question of why people have to leave each
other was:
“because this life isn’t perfect; for if it was, what would the next be called?”
PS: Read
Part 2 of this eye-opening article at Yasmin’s site"
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