Medina Stories #10 – All Eggs In One Basket – Advice From Omar Hajaj

One of my good friends and colleagues from the Drina judge, he does great work in the UK martial arts political law.

He gave me some advice at one point that I think is very significant. So you're talking about how, how does somebody not get burnt out? All right, sometimes, okay, let's say that you're a Muslim, and you kind of catch the fire, you catch the zeal, you want to turn back to a law or whatever.

A lot of times, people, they have a very limited imagination as to what it looks like to be religious. And so they'll put all their eggs in one basket, and they end up burning out. So if you think that it only means to be religious, that you're going to, you know, have a pen in your pocket in your breast pocket, and you're going to sit in the machine, and you're going to take notes, and you're going to do all the bookish stuff, you know, memorizing and studying, and this, listen, I love that stuff. That's like my personal, you know, heaven on earth sort of thing. But first of all, nobody's able to do that 24/7 sustainably for a long time. And second of all, not everybody is

completely suited to that sort of activity. And so, my good friend and colleague was talking about having a balanced regimen, right? imagining yourself as you have, like these different baskets, and every day, you want to put something in each basket. So maybe the kind of bookish study of, of Islam, you know, the

writings and the knowledge of our tradition is one basket, and you want to definitely put something in that basket, you want to have some sort of ability to increase your literacy, as in regards to what Islam is, and

what it means and how to apply it. These sorts of things. But there are other baskets, there's another basket that has to do with kind of the more emotional side of faith. Right? Amen. I'm not sure exactly the word that we want to use, but your your, your feeling of connection and attachment to a last panel, tada. So to give an example, one of the things that we would do sometimes as students in Medina is we would go to visit the graveyard agenda bucket, right, where all the companions are buried. There are people being buried there all the time. And so to have a tent, you can attend a funeral and watch the whole process. And it was a very, very easy thing to do, and a

very emotional thing, right, you feel the shortness of your own life, you feel your own dependence in your own on on Allah subhanaw taala, and your own smallness. And so this is something that kind of takes care of another basket. But you also need to be a human being and society, right?

You can't just be the man that lives in the forest, you know, just by yourself. And so another basket is kind of like your social life. And bringing that into the realm of your intention where, okay, who needs my kind of socialization and my friendship, right? And who do I benefit from when I befriend them, right? Because you don't want to just have all friends that are just all better than you. Because you there is going to be people that are worse off than you that you need to lend a hand to and benefit and pick them up. So there will be somebody who really, really could use a good friend are really, really use a good brother in their life. And maybe you don't like you know,

all else being equal, you wouldn't be best friends with this person. But you're doing it for a law. That's what it means visa vie the law or you know you love someone is that you're doing it for a law, you're not doing it for what you're getting out of the relationship you're doing, because it's the right thing to do. So you want to have someone below you, someone that you're reaching out a hand to is like, yo, let's go do this. Let's go do that how you do and check in. And then you also want to have people above you because that's where you get your role models from and that's where you get you're like, wow, I saw I was with so and so. And they did this and I was so amazed at how

they organized at time. I remember I was with some of the older class, the upperclassmen in Medina. And even if we were in the car going, going somewhere, they'd be like, Alright, here's a book start reading. Or here the pop in a tape, we had cassette players back then mashallah pop the cassette in, and let's listen to this speech from the sheikh or whatever, they were never wasting a second, they were always doing something.

So that was something that I've benefited from them. So that's another basket, you're kind of social life and how you balance your social life. And then you also need to have a basket for kind of your body and your health and your your wellness because

you're not just going to be able to run yourself into the ground. You need to have a certain amount of strength, a certain amount of health. This is the body was given to you as a trust from Allah subhanaw taala. It's an Amana and so you need to take care of the trust the industry that well, just like if somebody lent you a nice car Bugatti or Maserati or something like that, you know, you're not going to just

leave it go

We can take it to get it washed once in a while, you know, you know, get the oil change these sorts of things. The same thing with your body. You've got maintenance, upkeep, strength, these sorts of things. It's actually going to enable you to do the other things better. If you're able to take care of everything at the same time and give a little bit to each