Tom Facchine – This Is Just How I Am

How able are we really to change our

manners and our habits? Right? And we we

hear this all the time, or at least

we make excuses for ourselves all the time.

Somebody gets angry. They curse. They throw something.

They hit somebody. Oh, I do that when

I'm angry. Or they get sad and they

say, oh, this is just how I am.

Right? And we've reached a challenging time in

history in our society where we have a

lot of kind of ready made excuses for

people who really just have poor behavior. Not

to say that every single poor behavior is

simply,

you know, poor manners. There are such things

as chemical imbalances. There are such things as

clinical

diseases, but,

we definitely have reached the time where people

have ready made excuses

for their poor behavior at a time like,

more than they've had in in the past.

And so, at all of us, Fahani, he

wants to take this on. He said, okay.

Well, how much power or ability to act

and control and change our behavior do we

actually have? He talks about things like nature.

He says everybody has a certain nature and

everybody has a certain personality, and these things

you don't really have control over. So let's

say, for example, if you have a,

a short temper. Okay? Or if you are

very sensitive and you kind of take what

people

say about you, you take it personally. Or,

you get emotional, like some people get emotional

in different ways. These are things that Allah

Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala created you with. You're not

gonna change that. However, you can intervene and

change how you respond to those sorts of

emotions and respond to the ways in which,

Allah created you those sorts of capacities.

So that has to do with your manners

and your habits. So if you want to

put it on one side, we have our

nature and our personality, which Allah kind of

gave us and that this is something that

is not really able to be changed. Then

we have habits and manners and those are

the things that you can change, and so

everything that we're talking about here is,

doing what we can. Right? You can't necessarily

let's say, for example, you're somebody who has

a short temper. Okay? You can't use the

fact that you have a short temper as

an excuse to not work on your anger.

Okay? It might be harder for you to

control your anger than for other people. Some

people are naturally patient people. They're just, you

know, they don't get angry hardly at anything.

Like, for that person, it's easy. Right? But

just because it's harder for you doesn't give

you an excuse to not do it. Right?

In fact, it's possible that the reward for

you might be greater if you try hard

to control your anger because it's something that

you actually have to struggle with. And there's

a very nice hadith of, Ashaj, that where

the prophet you know, he praises Ashaj because

he,

Ashaj Abdul Qays because he,

has two qualities. He says you have 2

qualities that Allah loves, and he says you

have alhamwal ana'aana. He says that you have

forbearance

and you take your time. You don't rush

things. And then, Ashayd has a really, Abdelkhais

has a really, really interesting response. He asks,

and we all, you know, 1400 years later

benefit from from his question because he asks,

is this something that Allah created me like,

or is this something that I kind of

did myself and I'm responsible for it? And

the prophet

he

said, no, this is something that Allah created

you like. And so then, Ashaj Abdul Qais

has an another amazing sort of response, and

he says, praise be to Allah who created

me with characteristics that Allah loves. Right? So

there are some things, yes, okay, Asha Jabal

Qais had this capacity, he had this natural

quality, it came from Allah. Not everybody might

have that, but that doesn't mean that you're

not responsible for trying to obtain it. Maybe

you have to work harder than Asha Jabal

Qais, but maybe you'll see a special sort

of reward because you had to struggle with

that.