The Report That Goes Up on Monday

Here is something we do not usually admit about Monday: we meet it braced. Sunday night the mind starts running the week before the week has started, and by the time the alarm goes we are already a little behind.

The Prophet ﷺ had Mondays too. His week held the same day ours does, and the narration above tells us how he met it. Fasting, and glad to be.

His reason has nothing to do with a scale or a schedule. Deeds go up to Allah on Monday and Thursday, and he loved for his to arrive while he was hungry for His sake. He wanted to be found in that state, at that moment.

We spend real effort deciding how other people will find us on a Monday. What to wear to the meeting. How to sound in the first email. He ﷺ spent that same care on how his Lord would find him.

And the fast he chose is gentle. A meal before dawn, an ordinary day, a prompt meal at sunset, and nothing asked of Tuesday. Two days a week, never back to back. The body is mostly asked to wait, and waiting for Allah's sake has a sweetness of its own once we have tasted it.

Not everyone should. The deen excuses the ill, the travelling, the pregnant and the nursing, and anyone whose medicine keeps its own clock, and it excuses them first and warmly. A body under treatment worships by following the treatment.

For the rest of us the question is quieter than it sounds. Monday is coming either way. In what state would we like Allah to find us when it does?

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Idris and the Well With Two Quiet Days

Idris the young water-carrier was proud of his well, and he lowered his bucket into it every single day, morning and evening, as fast as the rope would run.

His friend Safiyya carried water from her own well across the lane, and twice a week her bucket stayed hung on its hook.

“You are losing two days,” Idris told her. “A well is for drawing.”

“A well is for water,” said Safiyya, and left hers to stand quiet.

Idris drew and drew. And slowly his water turned cloudy, then gritty, then thin, because a well drawn without pause pulls up the mud beneath itself.

Safiyya’s water stayed cold and clear and sweet, all summer long.

“The well is not being wasted on its quiet days,” she told him. “It is refilling from somewhere deeper than we can see.”

Idris hung up his bucket two days that week, and when he drew again, the water came up clear.

Allah built rest into everything He keeps alive. The spring under the well has its quiet days, and so did the Prophet ﷺ, and neither one was going without. They were being kept.

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The fast is one appointment in a day the Sunnah arranged whole. Your Prophetic Day of Wellness lays out the rest of it: waking, water, food, movement, sleep, and the small practices that keep a body well between the big ones.