On Believing in Wisdom

I follow @IslamicThinking on Twitter. A lot of times they say the usual things you hear in a Friday khutbah (sermon) about working to increase your faith or avoiding decreasing it. What I like though, is that sometimes they really capture the way a Muslim thinks, and not necessarily just the way one should think.  One particular tweet from last summer that reminded me of "self-fulfilling prophecy," a notion that has probably single-handedly caused more panic attacks than any other known to man*. The tweet said something like, "if you try to do right thing, a sign you are doing the right thing is that you need not dread the consequences,"and revealed a vein of understanding I could barely grasp at the time but have finally realized to be wildly important to my life.

Now, I know a self-fulfilling prophecy can be a good thing but I most strongly associate it with its negative connotation. Approaching something with confidence and optimism, for me, never entails envisioning the future as precisely as you have to for a self-fulfilling prophecy, but rather, a vague sense of throwing yourself forward. At that point in my life, it had been awhile since an excess of gloom and doom had replaced my confidence and optimism. Upon encountering the @IslamicThinking tweet in question, I became vaguely aware of the reason I was terrified of self-fulfilling prophecy and the reason behind my nagging sense of foreboding about the future.

My awareness was fleeting. After a moment of understanding, it fled my mind. After a few minutes of groping after it, like you do when you forget what you were about to say in a conversation, I gave up. But the desire to understand stayed with me. I stumbled into it unexpectedly a few times but as soon as I would try to commit the understanding to memory or even write it down, it was gone again.

It's hard to face the fact that you're doing the wrong thing. It's hard to come to terms with the idea that you made a mistake and it changed you profoundly. So much that you can't even comprehend it as a mistake.

Luckily, last summer, I was grappling for anything that looked like a viable future for myself and, mostly failing to do so, I had a heightened sense that my life needed to change. I was open to exploring ideas going against the grain of my usual thought patterns, especially any that made me less agoraphobic about the future. So I opened up to the idea that somewhere along the way, I had chosen a wrong path.

Of course, I've always believed that all mistakes are worth making if you learn something from them. In that line of thinking, I'm not really one to follow advice. My tendency is to listen to advice to confirm my own point of view and then go ahead and try things, believing I can always correct myself if I make a mistake. Last summer, I probably should have taken my reluctance/inability to analyze the way I'd been living for awhile through my usual trial and error analysis as a sign I was in serious trouble, but I guess the trouble was too big to see enough of it to identify and maybe somewhere in my mind, I knew that.

Today, before helping my mom do yard work, I was reading and again, something in my book. The Butterfly Mosque, by G. Willow Wilson, gave me a glimmer of the understanding of the tweet from last summer as it applies to my life. I hadn't thought about in a long time. I put down my book and began working with my mother. Meanwhile, I was thinking about the way you learn from season to season about things like gardening and the things my mother knows that I have no idea about, all ideas reflected in Wilson's memoir, I finally grasped the understanding I needed from that tweet.

Looking back now and thinking of the pain and struggle I put myself and people I loved through, has made me realize that learning from mistakes, as valuable as it may sometimes be, is too risky to stake my life on. The mistake I was making, the place I'd gone wrong was with my reluctance to really seek good advice. As life got more complicated, and at breakneck speed due my openness toward complication, the analytical thought I'd honed as a teenager wasn't good enough. With the attitude that I could figure anything out for myself, I didn't even know how to ask the right questions when I needed help. Thinking you're in it alone is a self-fulfilling prophecy and a self-fulfilling prophecy depends on your insistence that you are. There's wisdom in listening to people who care about you and have experienced what you are experiencing. It creates a buffer-zone by giving you less time to and value in feeding your neurosis. The hard part, in our day of youth and information overload and made especially difficult for minorities, is not just getting advice, but believing there is a source that has the advice you need. 



*I can only prove this personally but from what I know about mental illness, which is a surprising amount, I wouldn't be surprised if this applied more broadly.