Why Am I Going to Work Today

Dear Universe,

There is always a larger reason why we are alive, why we get up every morning, why we do what we do in the day, and why we retire in the nights either joyfully tired or feeling a sense of existential dread.

Today, I formally start work on a project the beginning of which will be the culmination a long quest for healing. Today, when I start working to ensure that natural healing remedies are accessible to people of Pakistan and beyond, it comes from a deep, long engagement with dis-ease that I observed in my loved ones and myself. There was a time when I believed tat everything happens for good; then there came moments when I lost sight of this basic belief in the benevolence of being alive.... yet eventually that momentary loss of faith in itself became a reason for greater faith.

Now we're tested, and we're through. Now we know.

I am just reading the story of another woman, about her experience of acute dis-ease - including loss of voice and back pain. The story reveals how this dis-ease eventually became the reason why when choosing to do business, she chose to bring natural healing to her country's people. I am about to write to her, and others like her with similar stories. We will understand each other.

I am lucky that before any test, I had the tools. My mother is a life-long advocate of a natural lifestyle, toxin-free households, recycling, and aversion to synthetic fabrication. She's also a botanist. When she fell casually ill in the 1990's, it became a major event in our family's life as a simple condition was complicated by bad medicine. What doctors did to her and what they could not do has been very educative. Eventually life's quality is measured by its lived-ness... i.e. how fully have you lived it. It took years for the effects to re-bound, but today, we are stronger, more convinced of our values, and no longer in a world where we would be alternative.

Today, we are arriving.

There is a larger scheme at work in our being; it weaves many a yarn we see as "paths." But amongst the many paths the unfurl before us, we choose the one that answers in "yes!" the question: "Does this path have a heart!?"

Today, I say, "Yes!" Yes, the path that I am walking on has my heart on it.

So here is my intent:
That I help being healing to the people in pain, and that I help bring beauty to lives of humans, is the reason why I am going to work.

Bismillah i'l-Rahman i'l-Raheem
[I begin] in the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful...