Salih of Qaswin gathered his students and told them: "Keep knocking on the door of Allah and never stop, for by His mercy, Allah will eventually open His door for those who sincerely seek Him."

Rabia Al-Adawiyya was walking past the mosque when she heard this.

She stopped.

"Oh Salih, who said Allah's door is closed to begin with?"

An atom is 99.99999 percent empty space.

The chair you sit on. The food you ate this morning. The relationship you have invested years in. Your own body. All of it, at the level of matter, is almost entirely void. The solid world is a surface. Underneath it: space, and more space.

This is the structure of matter.

The Qur'an contains a name for Allah, As-Samad.

Most translations render it "self-sufficient." But the Arabic root means something more specific. Solid, impenetrable, non-hollow.

Allah is the One with no holes, no parts, no separation. Where Allah is metaphorically whole, we are nothing but holes.

The feeling that nothing fully satisfies — not the achievement, not the accumulation, not the relationship finally arrived at — is not a sign that you have chosen the wrong things. It is the accurate perception of a hollow world by a being made of the same hollowness. In essence, when we reach for anything in existence other than Allah, we are reaching for emptiness. Nothing in this world can fill us because everything in this existence is also made of empty atoms.

It is only when we reach for God that we are spiritually filled and content because He is Al-Ahad, the one, the complete, the indivisible essence that transcends numbers or parts.

Unlike every created thing, which can be broken into components, into molecules, into atoms, into the void that makes those atoms, Al-Ahad cannot be divided. He is not one among many. He is not a larger version of the things that disappoint. He is the only thing in existence that is not made of nothing.

The restlessness is not a malfunction. It is a compass. And it has only ever been pointing in one direction.

The person who feels too far gone to begin again, who wonders whether the door is still open after everything. The door was not opened by knocking. It was never closed. The desire to knock was the door already opening.

Reflect on this:

When was the last time you felt that nothing in this world was enough, and where did that feeling lead you?

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