I’d just finished getting my hair cut and styled at the one salon in
London that specializes in curls only to walk out the door to find it
was pouring rain. The nearest Tube station was shut that Saturday for
engineering works, so I scurried down the side streets of the West
London neighborhood to the closest alternative, about a 20-minute walk
away.
Determined to protect my neatly defined coils from unravelling into a
mass of frizz, I huddled under the red umbrella with a duck-head handle
I carry with me every day. Google Maps recommended I walk through
Portobello Market, where merchants selling vintage clothing, handbags
and antiques seemed as unperturbed by the rain and near-zero January
temperatures as the hundreds of would-be shoppers crowding the length of
the road.
With no interest in shopping, my entire focus was to protect my hair
from the rain. I tried carefully to navigate my way through the sea of
umbrellas without poking anyone in the eye with the exposed metal spike
that never failed to come undone from the nylon canopy at inconvenient
moments like that one.
Before entering the final stretch of the street market, I came to an
intersection. The pedestrian signal had just turned red, so I waited at
the corner of the sidewalk, oblivious to the large puddle of water that
had accumulated at the curb beneath my feet. Before I had a moment to
look down or back away, a car sped through the pool of rainwater, which
splashed up and left me totally drenched from the waist down.
I paused for a moment from the shock.
But I didn’t get angry.
I didn’t feel moved to curse out loud at the driver or complain bitterly to whoever was close enough to hear.
Nor did I feel embarrassed at being the only pedestrian at the
intersection who seemed to lack the foresight to leave a little distance
from the curb.
I felt — grateful.
“Alhamdulillah,” I mumbled to myself as I looked down at my skirt and tights that were soaked through to the skin. “Ashukrlillah.” “Splash” by WS Squared Photography
The reaction surprised me. Not that long ago, a similar sequence of
events would have sent me spinning into feelings of self pity,
self-consciousness and whining at how unfair the universe was.
But something is shifting in me now. I
hear Dede’s voice in my head urging us, as an important first step to
spiritual transformation, to stop complaining and seeing the problems in
everything. Each moment contains a reason
to be grateful, he says. Gratitude to be alive, conscious, breathing.
Even when we’re irritated and dissatisfied, we can be thankful for
whatever the Divine Reality, Allah, has in store for us each day.
