Live thoughtfully

Auto-generated transcript:In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds, and peace and blessings be upon the honour of the prophets and messengers, Muhammad and the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family and friends. Tasliman kathiran kathira. Faham Badum. My brothers and sisters, as we enter a new year, and today is the 31st of December 2025, tomorrow, inshallah, will be the 1st of January 2026, it's useful to take stock of what we achieved in the last year and decide what we want to do with the year that Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has given us once again. Another year, another chance to get it right, if we wish to. The reason we need to be concerned about this is because a day will come which will be our last. It will be the last sunrise or sunset that we will see. It will be the last meal we eat. The last salah we pray or choose. The last prayer we choose not to pray. It will be the last words we say to the last person who is destined to hear them. It will be the last place we go to from which we will then be taken away. We will no longer be able to go or come as we wish. Not go on our own, but taken away. That day will come. That day will come. We don't know when, but we know it will come. The sun will rise for the last time for us. Maybe that day is today. As I grow older, I am aware of an ever-increasing sense of urgency. A feeling that I have progressively less time to leave behind a legacy that can be a credit to me. This sense of urgency has nothing to do with the fact that the reality of time running out is one that we all face. It has more to do with a desire to do something to maximize the benefit of the time that I have left. Naturally, like all of us, I have no idea how much exactly is left. So all the time I have left is a time of time. There is no more reason to act fast. Allah SWT warned us in the Quran again and again and again. And Allah SWT said, It's not the dying that is worrying. It is the accounting. We will not die and become dust. We will not die and become dust. We will be resurrected and called to account. What will we do? What will we do? In this process, to help us to work through this, I developed a theory based on my own life experience, which I call living thoughtfully. Living thoughtfully. I believe that before we act, if we think about what we are about to do, the reasons for it, the possible effects of it, and other alternatives that we may have, and then ask ourselves, do I really want to do this thing in this way? Then we will be able to vastly improve our own effectiveness. But, can we do that? In living thoughtfully, the most important matter is to check our intention. We have the first hadith in Bukhari, narrated by Sayyidina Umar ibn al-Khattab, that Rasulullah SAW said, the reward of a deed is based on its intention. The rewards of deeds are based on their intention. A bribe, for example, is after all a gift. The difference which makes one right and the other wrong is the intention. A gift is good. A bribe is haram. It's bad. Imam al-Nabawi, Rahmatullah Ali, one of the most eminent scholars, author of this hadith, writing about the importance of intention. In his book, Ar-Riyadh as-Saleheen, he begins by saying, He said, He said to live with the awareness of the intention in all that we say, in all that we do, and in every situation that we find ourselves in. Whether visible or hidden. Whether visible or hidden. Imagine living with such a heightened sense of purpose that before a person says anything, he asks himself, why am I saying this? He thinks of the effect of his words. If I say this, what will happen? And then takes responsibility for that. Yes, I want this to happen. Or he said, no, I don't want this to happen, so I will not speak. Now he does the same with every action of his and reflects on his contribution to a person's life. To any situation that he or she is faced with. If we behaved with such a tremendous sense of responsibility, no matter what our position in life, what a wonderful world we would be able to create, our problems of inequity, poverty, environmental degradation, and moral bankruptcy can all be traced to one source. A lack of responsibility for our speech and actions. We lack concern. We must change that. I call on you to do so. I contrast living thoughtfully with the opposite. Living thoughtlessly. Just remaining alive. Going from sensation to sensation. Like a cow or a goat or a dog. Not that I have anything against cows or goats or dogs, but I would like to believe that I am different. In today's social media dominated world, this is what we are doing even more. Living from dopamine hit to dopamine hit. We must break out of this and realize that our clocks are ticking. And our time is drawing to a close. Age is not an indicator of how much time we have. Old or young, we will die at our appointed time. Nobody will get an instant more or less. Our only hope is to make our time as valuable as possible. I have called it maximizing ROI, return on investment. Because our time, energy, money, emotions, thoughts, aspirations, desires, and the choices we make, are all investments into our lives, albeit sometimes, or most of the time, unconscious. It is important, therefore, that we stop to assess what the return on our investment is. Especially, as much of that investment is impossible to retrieve once it is made. Time passes and never returns. Yet, it will have consequences, whether we like them or not. When we look around us, we see some people, seem to accomplish far more than others. Though all of us have the same amount of time, the others complain that they have no time. But if you ask them, can you tell me what you did yesterday, and why it was important? They are not able even to recall what they did. Let alone to say why that was important. The same thing is true of other resources, which we have at our disposal. Be that money, or network of people, or access to education, or anything else. It is my contention, therefore, that the secret of accomplishment lies not in the amount of time or resources that we have, but in what we do with them. How we use them, how we leverage them, how we conserve them, and how we spend them, all have an impact. Living thoughtfully is not only about being goal-focused, but also about being aware and concerned about the effect of our actions. Of being conscious about the fact that while we need to accomplish our goals, we need to find ways of doing that without damaging, harming, or oppressing others. Our problems today with global issues, be those related to wars, global warming, rapacious grasping of resources by those who have the power to do so, and consequently, more expenditure on military and weapons, than on health, education, and eradication of those. All of these, including poverty, all relate to the same thing, which is living thoughtlessly. Living as if the consequences of our actions will not come home to roost on our own rafters. Just as they say, when a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, a tsunami is born in Indonesia. Whether we live thoughtfully or thoughtlessly, it has a profound, powerful, and visible effect in all aspects of our lives. It is not possible to pollute the water of the lake that we swim in without that pollution affecting us. That is the reason I believe that the most important thing for us to do, and to teach our children to do, is to live thoughtfully, to live responsibly, to live knowing that we are accountable to Allah from the beginning, and to know that we are not the only ones who are responsible for our lives. I ask Allah to help us to live a life of purpose, and live a life which spreads goodness all around us. To live a life such that when we leave this world, it will be said about us that he was a good man, that she was a good woman, and that people will feel our passing. That is the loss. I ask Allah to help us to be people who live for the sake of helping others, of taking others out of difficulty, of standing up for the weak, of fighting all sorts of oppression, no matter where it comes from. I ask Allah to help us, and to forgive us, and to be pleased with us, and never to be displeased. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon the noble Prophet and his family.