DAILYREFLECTION
Have We not smoothed out the earth ˹like a bed˺, and ˹made˺ the mountains as ˹its˺ pegs,
Every family has one person who does not wobble.
The aunt who arrives with food in a family's worst week and never mentions the cost. The father who stayed calm at the hospital while everyone else came apart.
From outside, the only view available, that calm looks like temperament. Something they were issued and the rest of us were not.
A tent peg argues differently. Its head is a knuckle of iron the size of a thumb, and all of the work happens underground where nobody can inspect it.
Mountains are built the same way. Geologists put roughly one seventh of a range above the plains and six sevenths of it below, a root pressed into denser rock, so the ridgeline in every photograph is the small share.
Steadiness is mass, and mass accumulates where nobody is watching. Most of us only ever meet the seventh.
The other six are things we are never shown. The hour before fajr that nobody schedules. The apology sent privately for a wrong the other person never learned about.
The grudge put down years ago at real cost, which is why he can sit in a room with the man who caused it and pass him the bread.
The Prophet ﷺ stood much of the night, two thirds of it, or half, or a third. The composure his companions saw in daylight was the seventh above the plain, and the nights were the root.
There is relief in that. The calm we admire in somebody else is a deposit, and deposits can be started tonight at any size.
Erode the top off a range and the root rises, and buried rock comes up nearly as high as the rock that washed away. Something gets taken off most of us eventually, and what surfaces is whatever was already down there.
Reflect on this: Do one good thing today that leaves no receipt, so that nobody can ever hand it back to you as credit.