Meditation: On accepting one's time in history

Your life was intended to be now

O, my soul! You do not live by chance:¹ your life is by the determination of God,² and intended to be now.³ As you are created,⁴ you are given also a fixed number of days.⁵ And upon your journey’s completion, you will give account.⁶

Your term is given to you now. To imagine yourself suited better to a previous age is ignorance and presumption.⁷

You can live no life other than your own.⁸ Here and Now are the grain which feed the mill from which your bread will come. And while the eating of bread is the lot of all men, you are given to taste none but your own.

Simplicity, and acceptance of the time God has given you to live in, that is the wise course,⁹ and the one least prone to hinder the Wayfarer on his journey.

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This post forms part of the Meditations series, the introduction to which is here.

The footnotes below lead to the online version of The Qur’an: A Complete Revelation. It is free to use and is designed to aid students of both the Qur’anic text in English and of the original Arabic. You can download the full work free or purchase it in hardback (at 10% less than with online bookstores).

Commenting subscribers are invited to identify errors in syntax, spelling, in my reference links, or deviations from clear sense — as well as to suggest additional references.

In either case, they are asked to include the excerpt from my text their input relates to, and in the case of suggested additional references to link to them using the copy link function from the dropdown feature found at each verse here.

1. 22:5, 45:24.

2. 11:107, 85:16.

3. 2:134, 2:141.

4. 2:21, 6:2, 7:11, 7:189, 16:70, 18:48, 22:5, 35:11, 37:96, 41:21, 56:57, 64:2, 67:24, 74:14, 78:8.

5. 3:145, 6:2, 6:60, 6:128, 13:38, 16:61, 35:45, 39:42, 40:67, 65:2.

6. 6:51, 6:94, 8:24, 11:103, 23:79, 56:50, 67:24.

7. 3:66, 11:47, 16:93, 17:36, 25:63, 43:20.

8. 6:116, 53:28.

9. 17:36, 26:224.