personal best
The person who starts the race is not the same person who finishes the race.
In the waning hours of the holy month, I’d like to reflect a bit on Ramadhan.
Another year, another month of fasting. This time tomorrow, Muslims worldwide will celebrate another Eid, a day full of food and feasts. For me, it’ll be my 20th Ramadhan (give or take a few years).
My parents first introduced me to Ramadhan with capitalist incentives, AKA paying me for every day I participated in the fast. These incentives then rolled over to other crucial parts of Ramadhan such as reading the Qur’an and praying Tarawih (the optional prayer done only during the month of Ramadhan). The latter was often the hardest — my 8-year-old self could barely keep his eyes open after 9 PM, let alone for the duration of the entire prayer.
By elementary school, my parents no longer needed (or wanted) to incentivize me. I was put into an Islamic school and stayed there until 9th grade, which meant that my parents could rest easy knowing that I would keep fasting — if not from will, then at least from peer pressure.
Fasting became easier with time, as many things do. But as a hereditary Muslim (or a Muslim who became a Muslim solely because my parents are) I had a time when I wasn’t entirely sure whether Ramadhan meant that much to me.
I don’t claim to be a perfect Muslim. Heck, I would even consider myself to be below average.
It’s easy to take faith for granted if you have never had to live without it. For the first 20 years of my life, I felt no need to make a dedicated effort to improve or strengthen my faith — it was a given, a constant, effortless, and no need for maintenance.
But in the past few years, I’ve had times where I question my faith. I don’t think it was to an extreme extent — as in, I never considered moving religions. But I wasn’t as pious as I once was when I was younger, and some core tenets of the religion confused me. Questions such as: if my best friend dies and isn’t a Muslim, can I not meet them in heaven?
These questions in turn affected how I practiced my faith, including Ramadhan. I would fast, but I would question how important fasting was. I’d break my fast if I felt even the slightest discomfort, and find reasons that may or may not have been valid to eat something. I would forget to read the Quran, and not pray Tarawih. I was far from an ideal Muslim — I’d say I was even far from the bare minimum.
I’m thankful that this is no longer the case. But I also think it’s healthy to have a period where you question your faith, especially if you inherited a religious belief instead of actively choosing it.
I’m lucky to have met a wide variety of people throughout my life, with beliefs ranging from future religious leaders to hardcore atheists. The conversations that I’ve had with my friends have shaped my view of religion to a simple belief: Religion, and your relationship with God, is an intimate, personal relationship.
Yes, there is a public set of rules and norms set by the Quran, Bible, Torah, or whatever holy scripture you may choose, but faith is something personal. How each person perceives their faith, how they practice said faith, and how they speak with God (or any other cosmic entity for that matter) differs wildly from individual to individual, so much so that the core tenets of Islam and other religions seem to act more as guardrails and guidelines.
I have friends who have converted from Islam to become a Catholic, from Catholicism to Islam, from living in Islamic boarding schools to becoming borderline atheists, from stout agnostics to devout believers.
We live in a world full of inexplicable coincidences — where solar eclipses can only happen because the moon happens to be 400 times smaller than the sun, but also 400 times closer. In a world like that, I think each of us is just trying to find explanations for the unexplainable, and faith is just one of many paths to be able to understand the world a bit better.
I now see Ramadhan as akin to a marathon — a massive event that you prepare for once every year, where it’s much less of a race but rather a celebration. It’s not a competition with other people and more of a competition with yourself.
It’s easy to be disheartened and think that you’re not doing Ramadhan ‘right’ when you look at other people. It feels like everyone is doing more than you — having easier fasts, regularly doing Tarawih prayers, pursuing Laylatul Qadr (the most powerful night on the Islamic calendar, where good deeds are multiplied by 1000 months).
But Ramadhan isn’t meant to be a competition. Like a marathon, the only way you ‘lose’ is if you never wanted to join in the first place. You don’t need to go at anyone else’s pace, you can find a pace that’s right for you. Of course, you’ll still need to fast and pray (just like how you still need to run to actually finish a marathon), but you can decide how much effort you want (or don’t want) to put in.
So maybe it’s true that other people are doing more prayers or they’re more pious. Does it really matter? We’re all going to fast the same relative amount of hours and days. We’re all experiencing similar feelings of hunger and learning to practice self-control — who’s to say that the fast of a lifelong Muslim is any holier or more valuable than the fast of a Muslim who never fasted in the past but is now trying to fast again?
Well, God can. But no human can say which is more valuable.
What you should strive for is to achieve your personal best — to be a bit better every year. In a marathon, you try to be a bit faster every year. In Ramadhan, maybe you read a bit more of the Quran than you did last year, or you pray Tarawih at the mosque more often, or you pray to God more regularly.
For me, that’s the spirit of Ramadhan — striving to be a bit better, year after year. It’s about finding what your pace is, and what you want to improve on, and striving to be the best you’ve ever been, not the best compared to everyone else.
Someone recently asked me “What’s the point of pursuing Laylatul Qadr if I’ve sinned so much in the past?”
If anything, Laylatul Qadr — and really Ramadhan as a whole — is much more for the sinners than it is for the pious. There’s a quote I read that said: “The strongest people at a marathon aren’t the elite athletes — it’s the people who finish last.”
It’s easy to pray and fast and do all of the recommended rites if you’re pious. It’s much harder to do if you’re a past sinner trying to be better. Ramadhan, and all of the deeds we can do throughout the entire month, are an extended olive branch. They’re an opportunity to begin again — an opportunity that, if you choose to accept it, offers redemption far beyond any sins you may have done in the past.
But faith is an individual process. This writing is not a mandate that all should return to God, or everyone should start devoting their entire lives to Islam. That isn’t the message I’d like to send, nor is it a message that I’m qualified to deliver.
What I’d like to say is that I, like the majority of the world’s population, have struggled with faith in one way or another. In my case, my struggle has been with my identity as a Muslim, and whether I’m doing enough or whether I even deserve to call myself a Muslim.
I’m sad that Ramadhan is coming to an end, and I hope that I’ll get the chance to see Ramadhan next year.
But I won’t be too harsh on myself if I’m not a perfect Muslim by the next Ramadhan. Maybe that was never the goal to begin with.
For me, Ramadhan is another chance to try again. It’s a chance to be a bit better, year after year.
It’s about trying to set your personal best, and trying to beat that personal best the year after that, and the year after that, and the year after that.
I rarely write about religion, but I hope that this might help someone out there who’s struggling with their faith.
We’re all trying our best, and that’s what matters.
