How to remain positive & motivated in challenging times #03

Bismillah al Rahman al Rahim Al hamdu Lillahi Rabbil Alameen wa Salatu was Salam, ala LMB even more surely, Muhammad Rasul Allah is Allah Wally, you are Ali. He was worried he was already why Halevi de la casa de limiters leave and as he does era

farmajo

Myrobalan Sisters, we are

on the third of the holdup.

With the title being positive in challenging times,

we looked at two aspects of challenging times, why they happen, and how to tackle them, by drawing on our strength from experience of our own personal history, as well as the history of our people and the world.

Today, we see what strategies work in helping us deal with challenging times.

To begin a word about having a so called positive attitude and outlook.

The reality is that we have little or no control over what happens to us most of the time, but we have total control over what we can do with what happens to us, how we choose to view it, how we choose to address it, whether we choose to engage with it or not engage with it. All of these are in our control.

That begins

with how we choose to view what happens. I'm reminded of a

actually a very funny incident, which happened, which I was witness to, and we have many years ago, almost maybe 30 years ago, we had is one of the least developed provinces of India, known mostly for the utterly horrible conditions of all public services, the astronomical corruption even by Indian standards, and the number of people it regularly gives to the Indian civil services.

We had stopped at a traffic light which was in itself something to wonder because it takes more than a traffic light to holiday behind a driver.

The road was a series of potholes joined with strips of asphalt laid at the time perhaps when the first pyramids were being built in Egypt.

As we waited for the traffic light to change, I saw a young man of perhaps 15 come racing down a slope on my right on his bicycle. Predictably, he hit a pothole bounced, was ever on for a few seconds, landed very expertly and yelled, why can't die. Wow, what a pit.

And without missing a step, he whizzed through the red light, proving his pure blooded Bihari lineage.

And thereby, I learned the lesson. The boy had no control over the condition of the road. But he could choose his reaction to it. He chose to laugh and make others laugh. It is that simple.

Sometimes people challenge you and ask what will change if you are positive? I say maybe nothing in the outer world, but everything inside you.

That in turn, changes how you view the external challenge and enables you to take a different approach which can be the solution that you need.

As they say, by the rules of aerodynamics, a bumblebee cannot fly. But bumblebees don't know aerodynamics. So they fly.

Our condition a great akindi Our conditioning, a great part of it

is based on on our education. And this predestined us to succeed or fail?

Yes, you can break out of it. But most people don't.

Let us remember that our own ideas are the reason why we are in this mess.

So another version of the old idea won't work.

We need new ideas, which may scare the daylights out of us, but which will illuminate the way in this world darkened by what we have earned.

I believe we need a two pronged strategy.

Return to Allah subhanho wa Taala del 11 and change how we educate our children.

So let's look at these two.

The first one is to return to Allah subhanho wa Taala Jelena.

That is the starting point. We saw we saw in the last two dramas. I explained to you

How calamities come when we invite them by deviating from the path that Allah subhanaw taala chose for us.

Allah that is it

are the two locomole Islam Medina. Allah is pleased with Islam as your deen. But by our actions and sometime they Allah, Allah, Allah may Allah protect us from ourselves, even by our speech, we say no, you may be pleased. With this, we are not pleased.

As though for Loyola, even though we live in Delhi

it's a no brainer to understand that the first thing to do is to far and Toba

to repent and turn away from our disaster, inviting lifestyles

and become obedient to Allah subhanaw taala.

This must be done individually

as families and collectively,

as communities and globally.

The good news is that Allah Jalla Jalla, whose decision for relief will come when we reach a critical mass, and not when every single individual has changed.

So let's begin. Let us look at ourselves, our lifestyle, our earnings, our spending our priorities, and above all our standards and role models and ask what needs to change?

Believe me, we don't need a degree in Islamic law to figure out what we must change. We know it all. The time has come to do what we know we must do.

How many of us don't know for example, that to pray the five for Salawat on time is essential.

All that eating Halal

is essential to the acceptance of our Riba and

or that were or that if we deal in interests, our name will be written in the list of the enemies of Allah.

If you are shocked by that, ask yourself what do you call someone that you are at war with?

Allah Jalla DeLallo declared war on those who deal in interest in any form.

Those who borrow those who lend those who

witnessed the deal, who are working in interest payments, interest based banks, all of these people are in the same category.

Now, if you had in that list, the list of people on whom Allah declared war and who accepted this declaration of war by our action, then how can we expect Allah subhanaw taala help and protection?

I will let you make your own list, but will suffice to say that unless we clean up our act, nothing will change.

And what's more, the real story will start when we die. That story has an ending that I don't wish on anyone.

As always a Syrah also Rosa Salem is an excellent guide. If we take the Macan period Rasulullah, Salem, focused only on one thing, and that was to build and strengthen the connection of his followers with Allah subhanaw taala.

This period was perhaps the toughest period in the Sierra, with challenge after challenge. The Sahaba were persecuted, they were attacked, some are tortured, even killed, but they were not permitted to retaliate even in self defense.

The only course was to be patient and to turn towards Allah subhanaw taala. This had the effect of temporary iron in the fire to create steel.

They understood the power of obeying Allah Rahu and His Messenger SallAllahu sallam, we must learn that the solution to our problems lies in obeying Allah subhanaw taala. Not in making excuses to disobey.

Second thing that we need to do is to change how we educate our children.

If you remember, I said that our conditioning predisposes us to winning or losing.

And that conditioning begins from the minute we are born. So how we raise our children is an extremely, extremely critical element of ensuring those children are winners in this life and the next and we as parents are responsible.

To address the need for change in education, we must ask ourselves a very serious question.

And that question is, what does my child represent?

Is he or she my legacy? Is he or she might Sacajawea look at your site your child in the face and ask her so this question, is this my son? Go to jail

Is this child my legacy? How important is the child to me?

It's not merely a matter of saying, Oh, I love this child and so on. Ask yourself the serious question.

So if so, if this child is your legacy If this child is your Sacajawea,

what is my responsibility towards my child?

I say this because,

in my experience, most parents do not have any idea of their own power

to script the future of their child.

Consequently, they do not have a specific plan for their child.

They just routinely do what everyone else does, and suffer the consequences. Ask yourself, if your child is worth your full thought, time and effort,

or is it enough simply to throw money at the child hoping that that will take care of all his or her needs.

And if you think your child is worth your full thought, time and effort, and ask yourself, what you want this final product that is your child at the end of his or her school education, to be like.

That is what you must focus on creating.

We managed to create a global society, which is almost exclusively focused

on amassing material wealth, and possessions.

A society where worship of personal desire is the predominant religion and selfishness is the primary virtue

of society, which defines success in terms of ends, without any thought about the means.

A society where compassion costs to others of our achieving our roles, cost to the well being of the environment, hopes and aspirations of the less well endowed, have all lost meaning and are not considered even worthy of passing thought.

The reality is that we are burning our candle at both ends, and are about to be plunged into darkness from which nobody can emerge unscathed.

As someone once said, growth for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.

This was my friend mothergunship, who was a professor at Accelera. And he said gods for the sake of growth is the philosophy of the cancer cell.

In this case, look at look at look in the mirror, and meet both the cancer cell and its victim.

In the words of J. Krishnamurti, who said, It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

He said It is no measure of health, to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. We are profoundly sick. Make no mistake, and I don't mean the COVID.

The COVID is a symptom of our sickness as a society. Globally speaking, it is for this reason that we need to rethink education because our present education system, which was started during the Industrial Revolution in the UK, and later America, and was exported to the rest of the world is spectacularly successful.

It hasn't failed. It is hugely successful. You may be surprised to hear this, but it is indeed successful in creating what it was designed to create, which is unthinking, unquestioning, obedient workers.

Education was and continues to be modeled on the needs of the military industrial complex, with children being treated as raw material, to be altered to suit the needs of the manufacturer, in which the need of the raw material are of no significance.

Standardization is the key with conformity being the cardinal virtue,

individualism, imagination, curiosity, diversity, non standard ways of learning are all seen at best as a nuisance to be cured, or at worst, as a virus to be rejected.

Standardized testing is the tool to convert oppression into a virtue and force all square pegs to fit into round holes.

Questioning is treated as rebellion and dealt with exactly as questioning, also called rebellion is treated industries suppressed by force, calling it unionization and labor unrest or in the world, suppressed by millet by the military calling

insurgency

scant if any attention is paid to addressing issues that lead to the unrest because after all, the need of the bosses,

Bri teachers, school authorities in collusion with ignorant parents that production must not stop.

Whatever the cost, this is supreme.

What we need today to cure our potentially fatal global malaise is the opposite of what our schools are designed to produce.

We need people who are thinking, questioning positively rebellious leaders with the commitment to work for the benefit of others.

People with the skills to diagnose define, conceptualize, strategize, communicate and monitor. But before all that, the integrity, compassion and energy to continue to work in the face of disappointment, discouragement, and opposition.

I submit to you that we don't have an implementation or quality problem, we have a design problem. A railway carriage is not designed to fly. It is designed to be dragged along behind an engine. No matter how much power you add to its engine or how luxurious the interiors a train will never fly. Because flying is a is first a design issue.

No matter how

much a microlight aircraft, for example, on the other hand flies even with fractional horsepower, because it is designed to fly.

Our education is not designed to create leaders. It is designed to create mindless obedient follows fancy infrastructure using state of the art technology in teaching high or low fee or teacher salaries will still not produce leaders. Because we are building railway carriages designed to be dragged along behind an engine.

We can't build planes in a train factory. If we want to fly, we need to build a plane. In fact, we need to rethink our education design based on our objective of taking to the air.

Design dictates performance. We need to redesign not alter trains expecting them to fly.

Innovate, the focus must be more on tools of learning than on accumulation of random data. focus must be on the spirit of inquiry on asking the right questions, with the best question being the one which has no answer yet.

So the search can continue. And the student doesn't sit smug like a bug in a rock content that he or she has the answer and need not look any further.

Real education is to deliberately put yourself in a state of positive confusion,

of productive stress, where you are forced out of your comfort zone of certainties. One reality that is clear from all this, which takes us to the core issue of all learning

is the importance of of variety and diversity of life experience. Not standardization. But it's the exact opposite diversification.

The question for us, therefore is how do we help students to have a wildly diverse menu of life experiences so that they have a sound basis for diagnosis and decision making. In summary, therefore, real education is the result of the integration of academics with structured life experiences, helping students with the tools they need to derive applicable lessons.

In my view, this can't be done while keeping our current so called education system in place.

There is only one thing to be done with our production factory style Robo producing education system, which is to give it a decent value.

We will start afresh with a totally new approach arising out of accepting the reality of our children that they are not little boxes to be filled and labeled. But living, breathing thinking human beings with opinions, likes, dislikes, differences in how they learn, what interests them and what doesn't and above all, the need to learn how to apply the learning.

We need to start by convincing ourselves which is teachers, policymakers and parents. that children need not agree with us. They need not share our priorities about their lives, that they can

have their own aspirations and dreams, and that our job is not to change them, but to enable them to achieve what they want to achieve.

This doesn't mean that we have no role in guiding our children, just that we understand the difference between guiding and forcing. Our role is to guide and empower, not to force.

The biggest challenge

and greatest resistance to this new philosophy will come from our own minds and hearts. Truly, it is not easy to accept that we have successfully destroyed several generations including of course our own in the process, and to accept that we are totally gloriously shamelessly wrong in everything we did in the name of education.

It will not be easy to accept that we, the educators of the world, are responsible for the totally immoral, greedy, toxic and societal society that we are now living in.

But that is the truth.

The beauty of accepting responsibility for a problem is that then and only then, are you given the ability and strength to solve it.

You can't change what you don't own.

So, let us begin by being brutally honest and own responsibility for the problem and pray for success in solving it. The solution is integrated education. And what is that? That we will see? Next? Juma inshallah. Cabana for Villanova for NASA yet in outdoor fun amount of rock, proper as alumna and Susanna Willem toquilla out are handling economical kasidy Yeah, he aka yo Mira Hartigan stirreth Shanna cool Akula Illa, was Allah Allah Allah will Karim Allah Allah he will savage may be Raha me or hamdulillah have been Alameen wa salam aleikum wa rahmatullah wa barakato.