Dreams...
It may be a dream afraid of waking up, or it may be a dream coming to realization in the next morning.

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Meaning of Serenity

How do you define serenity? How do you differentiate serenity from happiness? How do you achieve a state of serenity within your inner psyche?

These questions might be what many of you (and me obviously, or I wouldn't write this entry) have been asking your whole life. Different persons have the different kinds of views on how an individual can achieve a stable state of serenity. Serenity is the state, for me, where you know everything happens for a reason and that you can achieve acceptance without giving up. I don't know about you, but I get my definition of serenity from this old-timey Islamic song that I have been listening to since years ago.


Basically, this song's basic gist is that in every condition, we need to exercise humility.

When you feel difficult, you are not nerve-stricken...
When you're poor, you're still grateful...
When you're sick, you're not restless...
When you're rich, you're generous...
When you're in power, you're trustworthy...
When you're successful, you don't forget...
When you're healthy, you don't abandon God...

The best line that I have been amazed over and over is this one,

"Serenity is when you can understand the art of God's work..."

The point of this line is, many of us blame the Higher Power whenever they are in distress. In some worse cases, they even abandon their religion because they're losing their faith toward God. But, how many of us who could actually understand how in all these challenging processes, God has provided us with a bigger life meaning? How many realize that God has drawn a life journey for us to embark so we can reach to the final destination with a happy ending? It's true, God's work is an art and just like any art, it has to be appreciated, and it has to be understood.

So, if you feel unhappy, submit yourself to God and see what He has in store for you. Discover and explore life and find out what God has kept for you. Everything happens for a reason, and no matter how much of a cliché this sentence is, it's still true. Start appreciating the substance of it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"submit myself to God"; what exactly does that oversimplification mean? Does that mean to remove my free will from self, sit in a cross-legged position, and wait for God to speak to me, to make a decision for me when my consciousness is wracked with indecision? Or, does that mean, just do it and let the situation progress from there?
How much of God's will supercedes our will, or better yet, do we indeed have any will at all, perhaps we just prefer to think we do?

Anonymous said...

I did say afterwards to explore the world and your life. Submitting yourself to God means having faith because without faith, you'll feel as if everything will fall apart. Submitting to God means whenever you fall down, you know that He is going to pick you up.

I think you think too much about the ratio of our power:God's power. As a Muslim, we have the belief that God's power is absolute and we can never overcome God's power.

In Islam, whatever you do, it's preferable to have three things: conscientiousness (ikhtiyar), efforts (amal), and tawakkal (faith and submission). We usually have the first 2 aspects, but we rarely have the last part. This is what I meant by submission to God.