The Shortened Life
Why do we long for things...
AUTHORS NOTE: It has been just over 15 years since I did my last spoken word essay. This is the first one I’ve even thought to write in that time. If I can figure it out - I may do a read-over of it. But please… if you read this, just know, it is in the form of spoken word. x o x o - Jacks
One of my first videos after October 2023, that went viral, was a video of me at just gone 8 am in the morning, having been doom scrolling tiktok, seeing video after video of mother and father, weeping, lost, screaming at the arbitrary and obscene gruesome deaths, the echoes of Alhamdulilah (praise be to God), leaving me utterly destroyed.
I pulled open the camera of my phone, to share anything… to try and pull action from the inept fingers of every person who would scroll past my face.
Would these tears work? Would I be, that I could call upon the whiteness of my skin, the starry title of my religious lineage, the red cheeked and unabashed heartbreak – maybe I could garner the action so clearly needed.
Nothing more than a minute, and within it, the vulnerable honesty that pulled from me, an earnest and devout “if this is how they believe in their God,” … it sits, lingers, and then the waves of Muslims that entered my feed – filled a missing piece of me.
A incomplete puzzle, with an entire area I had no knowledge of how to complete, fixed with the first videos of makluba, and Arab mothers, and their adoration with their prophet.
Felt wholesome in a way that I still am not entirely sure I can explain.
More than a year and a half later.
17 months
17 months, and 6 days.
The horror hasn’t stopped, it’s become a gnawing ache to the possibilities of what could be.
We, all of us, forever changed.
The very fabric of every lie, wrapped in a date we will never forget.
10.7.23
I had so much knowledge yet to learn, and I was already someone that was dedicated to unlearning and learning and relearning – but I had no clue what was to come.
“We fear nothing but Allah.”
“We do not fear death.”
“Praise be to Allah, all things are due to Him.”
It struck me tonight, on the way home, my life in an incredibly swift shift… that suddenly I get it.
Which isn’t to say that I didn’t know… I did.
But there is knowing, and knowing, and sometimes the first comes without the second, but the second can never exist without the first.
I knew things on an intellectual level, but I had yet to understand them on a personal, soulful level.
I feared God, but I knew God, so there was no awe.
It is insane how much of a whole world can shift in 18 months.
How you can have an understanding of who and what you were, and where you were going, and what you knew you wanted…
And then, you coast up lakeshore drive, and suddenly you realize.
It’s why this is different.
It is absolutely why this time is different.
We aren’t just entering another world war.
We are not just witnessing the first live-streamed genocide.
We are not just unraveling every political lie that has been wrapped up in the delusion.
We are not just experiencing a world climate that is faltering on the global scale.
We are not just overcome with it all for no reason.
But we long…
We long for something.
That is what makes us different than them.
We long for something like the togetherness that comes from a world of hope.
A world of love.
They… well they don’t even have the capacity within them to have a desire so grand.
They are stuck on money.
0’s.
The short lived life they lead.
So short sighted.
So small.
The statue of their longing, is a shameful small blight against the shadows of the trees that come from the branches of my longing alone.
The limbs reaching eons into the future.
The way I long… I yearn for something more, something bigger than me, something wider and vaster, and all encompassing.
I long for the world that I know could be. The one that serves us all. The one that lives and thrives in beautiful harmony… elevated and breathing and its waves urging the spin of a planet in the loving embrace of our sun and moon.
I long for more than that…
I long for the very Creator that made us all, and created us all, and has the capacity to love us all.
They want boats.
I want oceans filled to bursting with life, and color, and crystal clear in ways that make the mind spin with wonder.
They want tall buildings.
I want mountains covered in snow, looking down on beaches warm enough to surf, while the native people tell you the lore of the very mountain that you rest your feet upon.
They want money.
I want the security that comes from knowing, NO ONE knows what going without feels like.
They are so SMALL.
Their measly small dreams, pittance in the face of the yawning desire I have for betterment.
The betterment of all.
The betterment for all.
They are such small examples of human depravity.
Yet their impact looks like it has a shadow.
It looms, and it drags us all down with it. And yet…
They will end.
They have a tenure upon the earth that expires.
Just as we do.
Just as I do.
Yet in my living, I have stored up a life that exceeds the shadows of the furthest branches of my dreams. I have saved, and longed, and loved, and hoped, and felt, and cried, and held out the faith that there is more than what we see.
I have yearned.
There is where we know.
They know nothing of knowledge.
They want what can fill the absent afterthoughts of my empty hands.
I get it now.
I get the way in which nothing matters, but it all matters, and yet all that matters is that the things that matter will carry us onto the hereafter.
I have witnessed so much death in the last year.
We all have.
Even those who have their eyes closed.
Their souls have been rendered forfeit, in the trade of one half-lived life.
I am in awe of the Creator.
The one that would drag us all down the aisle of self-reflection, only to find a mirror of ourselves at the end of the altar.
To peer within, is to find the door to the hereafter.
To atone for the flaws, to be grateful for the scars, and to have hope for a better version on the other side.
May we find ourselves in the mirror, and seek God instead.
May we find God in the beautiful flaws that make up the person that looks back.
May we find comfort, solace, in the command of ourselves, that we find purpose in the more rather than shortsightedness of the now.
May we reflect.
And may He find us not lacking.