Dependence on Creation vs Dependence on Allah

Don’t wait until something is gone before you appreciate its presence. When you’re sick, or in pain, nothing means more to you than your health and relief. When you’re healthy we take the incredible work that our body does for us for granted. When I suffer, I pray to God for relief. When I’m relieved, my neglect of God only deludes me from the reality that God encompasses every moment and place. There’s also this tendency to obscure our need for God when we’re used to discouraging our necessity of anyone or anything other than ourselves. That somehow, our radical dependence, emergence from and perpetual return to God, takes away from the self-sufficiency and independence this Dunya taught us to value. It’s difficult to surrender to the tessellating unity of creation the indivisible co-dependency that multiplicity holds with singularity. When we’re terribly afraid that we’ll be hurt again, that things won't go our way, that we’ll somehow be punished for our vulnerable surrender to God. 

Dependency of any kind is such a fragile state unless it’s mediated by Allah. Financial dependency is brutal, so is the dependency that hearts have on one another. I guess that’s okay when we’re kids dependent on the love and support of our families, but adulthood scraps that. Unnecessarily in my opinion, I don’t think we ever escape our dependency on the love and support of our people. Noticing that all of the rizq is from Allah helps with detachment, independence, but also by letting us remain dependent on our networks of care, mediated by Allah to whom all Love belongs to and comes from. Dependence on Allah’s love or rizq, except as that love and rizq figures between our relationships. If two friends know all their love and their money came from Allah then their dependency on one another is in fact a dependence on the mediation of a higher power both friends adhere to, in principle and action.

Firstly, our dependency on God is different from a dependency on any corporeal person or material object. You might think it brave to strip your essence from the realizable world, stand alone in a void to survive on nothing but sheer will. But it's even braver to realize that we can’t do any of it alone. We can’t face the grandeur of this universe alone, learn its secrets alone, live pleasantly and happily alone. We can either fight our desperate and at times problematic need to belong, to need others and be needed in return, or we can reconcile it with the fear of living at the mercy of creation by living at the mercy of Allah. When we abandon our need for belonging and support to multiplicity, to the transitive properties of a physically present or absent community of loved ones, to objects of power we can hold until they eventually hold us, we’ll find ourselves manufacturing a network of sustenance that is both temporary and unfulfilling. A network of sustenance that is already existent in a more natural, immanent, and dare I say eternal way. Surrendering to the world as-it-is requires we walk through the gates of our hearts as we are. We’re not always going to enjoy the outcome, the circumstances or our response to them, and while ‘I’ am a living testimony of my existence, I trust in the unfolding of my life, I trust in the order that my peace and trials hold in the grand scheme of things. The peace we find after dissonance, the tendency of chaos towards relief and harmony. I and by extension, creation, am never disadvantaged by God, fortune is myopic when we defer to the comfort we get from living in a system governed by Allah, one with a tendency towards equilibrium and balance. 

PS: Just because the universe tends to unfold as it should, this doesn't exempt us from our roles as actors on its stages, as forces of good or idleness.