In a masjid at the edge of the city, boys gathered each evening to recite words they did not yet understand. Among them was a boy whose palms bore the memory of the rod, for his teacher’s patience was as thin as old parchment and his mercy thinner still. On this particular evening, the rod had spoken with a special cruelty, and when the teacher turned away, the boy fled. Past the rows of seated students, through the heavy doors, out across the courtyard, into the garden, hiding in the bushes for his silent weeping.
“O Allah,” he prayed “You promised ease after hardship. I have waited and waited for Your ease. Please, I cannot wait anymore.”
He heard footsteps approaching and pressed himself deeper into the leaves, certain it was his teacher come to drag him back. But the steps were too light and fell without an echo. Parting through the branches came another child, a garden-boy, dressed in verdant robes of a blooming garden in spring. He carried in his hands a simple wooden spindle around which a thread was wound.
And it was said: “O little one! The hours of your hardship have indeed been long. Behold, this is the thread of your life. Draw gently, and a minute passes in seconds. Draw with strength, and an hour passes in minutes. And should you draw with all your might, whole years pass in hours.”
“You would give this to me?”
And it was said: “Each life is given as thread on a spindle, though few can see it. I merely make you aware of what you already hold.”
In fear of facing his teacher’s wrath, an all but certain punishment, the boy drew his thread gently. He found himself cradled in his mother’s lap, her lullaby somewhere above him, the slow stroking of her hand against his hair. The stinging in his palms had faded to the faintest ache. He let his eyes close, drifting toward sleep, and only distantly wondered at the lost hours; the walk home through narrow streets, the evening meal, the questions his parents must have asked. The hours were lost to him, as a dream upon waking, and he gave them no more thought.
Years passed, as they do, and the boy grew into a youth.
At thirteen, he escaped a cousin’s wedding, where formal clothes would have stiffened his shoulders and aunts would have pestered him with questions about his studies. At fifteen, he escaped the slow agony of high fever that held him burning and shivering in a darkened room.
Yet his thread made no distinction between what was hard and what was merely slow, and in time, neither did he. He no longer blew on his tea but instead appeared in the moment it had already cooled. He no longer knew the slow middle hours of a long journey. He would not sit through the boredom of an afternoon with nothing to call it forward.
When he reached the age of twenty, he apprenticed himself to a silversmith, a man of considerable skill but little warmth. To shape the metal without forcing it, to set the stones so they seemed to have always belonged there, to polish until the surface held even the light of a fading candle; it was bitter work, the pay meager. Whatever progress he made was too slow to notice and too small to satisfy. One night, after his master had berated him for a crooked setting, he sat in a cramped room and took up the spindle once more. For the first time, he noticed his thread was thinning, though a great deal still remained. He weighed the coming years of poverty and patient labor against the wealth and skill that surely awaited further along.
He drew with great strength, and watched the years unwind around him.
Now he stood in a shop larger and better appointed than where he trained; it was his own. His clothes were finer. His hands bore the calluses of his trade but also the confident grace of mastery as he set a sapphire into a ring of gold. He expected pride when he turned the finished ring in his fingers, watching the perfect facets throw brilliant stars of light. And the ring was merely set aside as he began the next commission.
At thirty, he was last among his peers to marry and begin a family. Unwed, loneliness gnawed at him in the evenings. Even so, the thought of courtship, with its awkward conversations and fears of rejection, filled him with a kind of exhaustion. And so he drew his thread. Now there was a woman in his home preparing the evening meal. She turned and smiled at him, and he understood that she was his wife. Her name was Layla, and they had been married for some months now. The melody she hummed while she worked, the generosity with which she gave to the hungry, the great love between them – he was aware of it all.
Not long after the birth of his second child, old age claimed his mother and she was returned to her Creator. His disbelief became denial, denial into realization, realization into grief. Grief that suffocates all matters of the mind until he could think of nothing else, do nothing else, endure nothing else. And yet the world did not pause for grief. So there was dread, dread of what grief required of him: funeral proceedings, a crowded house of low voices and condolences he did not know how to receive. And so he drew his thread. Now the funeral was over. The house was quiet. The relatives had left. His own grief had been efficiently excised, leaving only the passing awareness his mother had departed.
Long years continued to unspool, pulled by a hand that had grown arthritic and spotted with age. Past the tedium of maintaining his workshop, past the dull aches of illness, past the slow deterioration of his body. Even his wife had died. Or had she left him? He could not remember; he may have drawn past that too.
Lying now in a small room in a building he did not recognize, his breath came in shallow gasps. The spindle rested on the table beside him, his thread wound around it so thin it was nearly invisible. Parting open the door came a figure, one dressed in verdant robes of the eternal gardens. His onetime savior, the garden-boy, stood before him still a child despite a lifetime past.
And it was commanded: “Speak of your life and how you lived it.”
“When my Layla smiled at me for the first time, I was not there to receive it.
The body that gave me life, I should have helped bury it. I should have sat with my family and shared the stories of our mother’s life. I should have wept until I had no tears left. She is gone, and there is only emptiness where grief should have resided and made way for peace.
Those who came before me have long passed, the friendships of my childhood long gone. I am a stranger in this world with not even the memories of a full life to bring me comfort.”
And it was commanded: “Speak of your wealth and how you earned it.”
“There must have been a morning I woke and the silver first bent perfectly to my will. Every harsh year of labor pointed toward that morning. If only I had known that day, my livelihood may have been fulfilling.”
And it was commanded: “Speak of your knowledge and how you acted upon it.”
“All the little joys of my life were bland. A meal is best after hunger, rest is refreshing after toil. A man knows his blessings best when he has first known their absence. But I knew neither hunger nor toil. I had known only the blessings, and so I had known nothing at all.”
As his breathing grew shallower, his thread began slipping off the table, unspooling of its own accord.
[He] will not be dismissed from his Lord on the Day of Resurrection until he is questioned about five matters: his life and how he lived it, his youth and how he expended it, his wealth and how he earned it and he spent it, and how he acted upon his knowledge.
Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2416
Know that there is much good in being patient with what you detest, victory will come with patience, relief will come with affliction, and with the hardship will come ease.
Musnad Ahmad 2803
You only remained for a little while, if only you knew.
Quran 23:114