Reflections on life and opposites

Recently I’ve been thinking about how life seems to be made up of “opposites or polarities”.

Last week my friend’s mother passed away, two days after that my sister gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. My friend is naturally extremely devastated and saddened, she looks like she never wants to smile again. My sister is naturally elated and so happy that she can’t stop smiling every time she sees her new-born child.

Life and death, two opposites, yet two things that are an essential part of our lives on this earth. It seems that life is filled with these polarities, Life-Death; Happiness-Sadness; Light-Darkness… perhaps everything in life has an opposite.

Interestingly it seems that these opposites are interlinked, thus confirming that its necessity in life. Think about it- if we never experience joy then we can’t understand sorrow, if we never experience sorrow then we can’t appreciate joy. If we have never had happiness then sadness becomes obsolete and if we’ve never seen light then darkness is something we see as natural. Without opposites, things don’t seem to make much sense, do they?

Eternal life may seem like an ideal to some people, but ask a really old person about that and they’ll probably tell you they’d prefer death because life has just become tiring. Birth in itself cannot be extricated from death.  

What I also found interesting when thinking about this is that with some of these opposites, we actually have a choice as to which one we will hold on to. For instance, we can choose whether we want to let light into our lives, or if we want to continue to dwell in darkness. We can choose happiness over sadness, (by focusing on all the favours of Allah for instance). We can choose to make wise decisions instead of stupid ones. Okay, so when it’s our time to die we don’t really have a choice in the matter, but we can choose how we wish to live, and these choices will ultimately determine our final outcomes, not only in this world but in the hereafter as well.

So basically while it saddens me immensely to see my friend in mourning, I know that one day she will be rejoicing life again- and I have to admit that while I’m thrilled to see my sister so elated and rejoicing new life- I cannot forget that one day she will have to face sadness of losing a loved one.

Life just has to be this way, like I said, if we don’t experience both sides of these polarities then we will never appreciate and understand life, and this means that we will never grow. After all, doesn’t Allah Almighty remind us of this in the Glorious Quraan when Allah Most Merciful, Most Gracious tells us that: ‘Indeed after hardship will come ease’. Without the hardship we will never be able to appreciate the ease. SubhanAllah (Glory be to Allah) Allah truly knows everything. May Allah Almighty help us to deal with whatever we have to deal with and may Allah give us the gift of appreciation and contentment with whatever situation we are in!

 

All Praise is due to Allah Almighty!

 

Image from here