Today was the first day of Law School orientation, all future posts on my law school experience will be under a title yet to be determined, but for now I began using “Chronicles of an Esquire in Training”. This Ramadan my reflections focused on the idea of sufficiency. Particular focus has been on the idea of eating sufficiently. But sufficiency is not limited to just eating food, obviously. I told you about how you should try to use this Ramadan to go on a journey in which you could lose yourself in your inner reflections. Well no journey is going to be a success if you do not plan for it, and here is where I pull out a hadith- The Prophet SAW said “There is no wisdom equal to good planning.”
Wisdom is not this intellectual thingie as much as it is an accumulation of life experiences from which you have learned some lessons. Life experiences that teach the best lessons are failures I believe. I have had a lot of failures, especially those leading up to my being in Law School. I looked at my mistakes and my failures so I could work toward a goal. My goal was to attend law school but it required that I address the shortcomings that prevented me from getting into law school- LSAT score, GPA, credit rating, family and personal discipline or desire to go to law school. Now I am in law school I have an end result I am working toward, I have personal achievements I am shooting for. But oftentimes I found myself setting a lofty goal where there are significant gaps between where I am and where the result I was trying to get to. So when you start toward your Ramadan journey, just think about realistic and achievable goals so that way you can carry out what you want to do during the remaining time in Ramadan.
Read this great article on “Goal Setting for Muslims” by Ahmed Adam.
As you focus on your inner journey of self-reflection for the rest of Ramadan take a look at this video with Sheikh Imam Ustadh Suhaib Webb at Zaytuna College giving a lecture on “Fasting, Materialism and Time Management”
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