The number that keeps moving

There is a number in most of our heads that would finally make us feel safe.

We rarely say it aloud. Still it is there: a figure in the account, a cushion thick enough that the fear finally goes quiet.

Most of us have quietly reached an old version of that number. The one that used to feel like enough.

And it felt like nothing. The relief we were owed never arrived. The self that was going to exhale had already slipped off to set a higher figure.

This is hubb al-mal, the love of wealth, one of the quietest diseases of the ego. From the inside it wears the face of being sensible, of providing, of keeping a little margin.

The Prophet ﷺ called this the shape of the human appetite itself, a hunger set in all of us by design, one that goes on wanting right up until the grave.

That is why the line keeps moving however far we chase it. The wanting was never truly about the amount.

Yet the same teaching leaves a door standing open: the one who turns back is met with forgiveness. The appetite is our condition, and a condition can be treated.

The treatment is to open the hand while the self is still objecting, giving a little before the mind talks us out of it, until giving stops feeling like something lost. A heart that has felt, even once, that releasing something did not end it grows harder to frighten with the old number.

The self learns this only one way, and it is small and physical. Give one thing away today, a few dollars, a bag of clothes, a meal, before the mind can run its arithmetic, and watch the loss it warned of quietly fail to arrive.

Reflect on this: What is the number your nafs, the self, has quietly set as the price of feeling safe, and what fear is really hiding beneath it?

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Every morning before the sky turned pink, little Hamza swept the steps of the small masjid on his street, early, before anyone was awake, when only the birds could see. It was his secret gift to Allah. One morning the door creaked open and out came Baba Idris, who unlocked the masjid for Fajr. Hamza froze, his broom halfway through a stroke. Part of him wanted to stop, so it would not look like he swept to be praised. Part of him wanted to sweep big and grand, so Baba Idris would say what a good boy.

He did neither. He asked himself who he had started this for. “For Allah,” he whispered, “and Allah is still here.” So he kept sweeping, not faster, not slower, exactly as he had swept when the street was empty. “A good deed does not spoil just because a friend sees it,” Baba Idris said gently, picking up the second broom. “It only spoils if you change it for the friend.”

Read the full bedtime story with your little ones on our members hub at oursunnah.com