See with our nose

https://youtu.be/rWvlGzItHqY Auto-generated transcript:I'm back again in my favorite place in Hyderabad, KBR Park. And as I'm walking, I'm hearing the bulbul calls. All kinds of names it has, Indian nightingale, also they call it and so on. I don't know what it is. It's a bulbul. And whenever I think about these zoological names, and I can't remember one, I console myself and say, well, I don't know or I can't recall the name of this bird, but the bird doesn't know either. I don't mean that entirely facetiously. Of course, you know, feel free to laugh. But the reason I'm saying that is because one of the downsides of knowledge is that it makes you jaded. I was speaking to a young friend of mine, may Allah bless him, very, very knowledgeable. He's a high school kid, but extremely knowledgeable about wildlife, birds. He has a special interest in, literally passion for, insects. I call him Spider-Man. He loves spiders and scorpions and all kinds of loving beasts like that. And knows a hell of a lot about them. And his bird identification is incredible. Knows all the names. But yesterday when I was having a conversation with him, I went over the weekend to Sarpanparli Lake, which is a very beautiful lake. I'm saying this for those who are listeners from here, who know the places on the way to Viharbas. And we saw a bunch of birds. So, point herons, cattle egrets, painted storks, stilts and What is turns, river turns and so on. So, as I was telling him these things, for every one of them, he said, Oh common, oh common, oh common. Meaning, these are common species. It's not a rare one. Thought that came into my mind was, that this is the first sign of being jaded. Where you're looking at, looking for some, you know, scintillating experience, some aha moment, every time in life. Now, the bad news is, it doesn't exist. Because most of life is repetition. Most of life is seeing the same thing again and again. So, you have two options. One is, you are constantly seeking this aha experience, this new thing. And so, therefore, when you see the same thing again and again, you're just bored. You don't want to see it again and again. But guess what? That's your fate. You will see it again and again. On the other hand, you have another person like me, for example. I don't care how many times I see the same thing. I never cease to be amazed. I never cease to be astonished. I never cease to marvel at the glory and magnificence of the creation of my Rab, Jalal Jalal Hu. I don't care if I see the same thing 50 times, 100 times, 1000 times. Incidentally, this is also the secret of my life. The secret of marriage, of a good marriage. As I have said many times before, I fall in love with my wife every morning, and every evening, and every afternoon. Same wife for the last 40 years. Alhamdulillah. Alhamdulillah. The thing is, if you find beauty in something, the beauty is there. And the more you can look at the same thing and enjoy that beauty, the happier person you are, the happier you will be. Because there are that many opportunities of enjoying that beauty. Whereas if you are looking for new things all the time, you will get them once in a while, but only once in a while. The major aha experiences of life, the major thresholds of life, are very few. Getting married, the day of the ceremony, the anticipation of it, and then the ceremony itself, and so forth, is one experience in your entire life. But your wife or your husband, you are going to be seeing them every single morning, every single afternoon, every single evening. And what happens to a lot of people, and I have seen this also happening, is that over time, they get bored. They get just used to seeing each other. They don't take care of their appearance. If you see them, if you turn up at their house, that's why I have, I make it an absolute rule, I always take an appointment before I go to some people. Because I want to share, save myself the shock of seeing this person, this friend of mine or whoever, in a state when they are just being themselves. I'm sorry, I don't want to see you as yourself, because life has taught me that that's an experience that is not safe. Because as Garfield said, what is seen cannot be unseen. And may Allah have mercy, some people, the state I've seen them in, I say, wow, this is something else. The same person, I mean, this guy looks like something the dog forgot to bring it. You know, I mean, really. So please, train yourself. And the way to do that is to develop shukr. Develop the ability, the tendency, the urge, the yearning to thank Allah . To be in a state of shukr the whole time. SubhanAllah, SubhanAllah, SubhanAllah. Marvel at the creation of Allah. Marvel at the fact that Allah gave you a life, eyes, and then He gave you full color vision to be able to appreciate, not just see, but appreciate the color, the beauty, the texture. He gave you a sense of smell. As I walk in the forest, I am very consciously aware of the smells. Every place smells different. It smells different when it rains. The first smell of the earth after it rains. It's called Ather-e-Gil. The Ather, the perfume of moist soil. They actually make that. Ather-e-Gil. The perfume of the first smell, the aroma of fresh rain on parched soil which has been burning in the sun all through summer. And it's a very beautiful smell. It's a very beautiful smell. It's a very beautiful smell. It's a very beautiful smell. All through summer. And what does that smell like when the rain first falls on it? SubhanAllah. It's amazing. So there is a perfume by that name. Ather-e-Gil. Looking at trees, a dead one like this, where the bark is gone, it's completely dead. But it serves the purpose. It's a it's a purge for things, birds, um, termites are eating it. It's, at some point it will fall and then becomes a home for the insects and so on to shelter. We don't have extreme climates here in this place, Alhamdulillah. So, we don't have to worry about snow and ice and all that. But we do have sometimes fairly heavy rain in the monsoon. But that again, in Hyderabad is not like the monsoon we used to have in the Anwal, isn't it? In the tea gardens of, you know, literally a week of continuous rain, like standing under a waterfall, not even a shower for a week. Here it's not like that. Here it's, you know, maybe some minutes at a time. But can be heavy. And these, uh, dead falls, um, and trees like this, they provide a lot of very welcome shelter to, uh, the birds and the insects. And the bees, and the small forms of life. So, everything has value, everything has purpose. Everything has beauty. And everything is something that you thank Allah for. And you thank Allah for that. As I mentioned, you also thank Allah for the ability to see it in full color, the ability to perceive depth. Imagine what I'm seeing here, uh, the camera is hopefully picking it up, but at no point will this camera be sufficient to perceive the depth of what I'm seeing with my so-called naked eye. Um, because in my, my eye can see, can instantly alter and adjust to different grades of lighting. The lighting which is in bright sunlight and the light, the lighting under the trees, which is the shade, the lighting further in, which is almost dark, well, I can see it. Whereas the camera will not be able to see it. You know, really specialized cameras and so on, and even though the phone cameras are very good, but still, this is all Allah has given. All of this Allah has given. You know, I recall this very, uh, salutary incident, where I was at a party once, and, um, we were, we were at this buffet counter picking up our food, and the wife of a friend of mine was ahead of me, and we were just talking, so I said to her, the food is, uh, in this place is particularly good, uh, in this home. These people are fabulous cooks. She said to me, I cannot taste anything. She says, my taste buds are completely gone. For me, everything tastes like cardboard, you know. I mean, I don't think she tasted cardboard, but the point is being that she has no taste. It's like eating sawdust or something. She said, I just eat for nutrition. I need, I know I need to eat, but otherwise, I don't know, you can have anything at all. I have no sense of smell, no sense of taste, because the two are linked. If your smell goes, you can't taste. And at a small level, we would have experienced this when we have a very bad cold and then, and you know, completely nose is blocked. Uh, when you can't smell, you find you can't taste either. The two are linked. I was shocked. So here's this lady, um, she's got food on her plate, which is absolutely delicious, but she can't taste it. So I said, what is this? I mean, is this some condition or what happened? She said, I don't know. She has three children. And she says, as soon as the third was born, this happened. Just switched off. No sense of smell, no sense of taste. And, and here I am. Now imagine how much we must thank Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for giving us the sense of taste as well. And on the contrary, think about the animals. Think about dogs. Think about cats, who sense of smell is totally incredible. In terms of distance, in terms of what they can smell, in terms of how they can differentiate and recognize things with the smell. Um, dogs actually see with their noses more than they see with their eyes. A dog will see something and then he has to smell it to confirm what he has seen. And, cats also, incredible sense of smell. But these same animals eat decomposing meat, which smells so terrible and nasty that quite apart from the fact that if we eat it, we will also die. They don't die. They thrive. A dog can eat a you know, weak old cartus. So also, cats. And nothing happens. For them it's nutrition. They do well, they thrive, they survive. Um, we couldn't even go near it. But these animals, even though our sense of smell is so bad and so weak, but these animals have