A Letter to Whoever Needed to Land Here Today

You didn't find this page by accident. And whatever kind of day you are having — whether it is a good one you want to savour, or a hard one you are quietly surviving — this page was made for you.

The Small Things That Actually Contain Everything

We spend so much time waiting for the large joys — the news, the arrival, the answer — that we miss the ones that were already present. These ones. The ones that cost nothing and require nothing except the willingness to notice.

None of these things are large. None of them require special circumstances or a certain kind of life. They are available today, tomorrow, in every season. The practice of happiness is, in a significant part, just the practice of noticing what was already there.

He did not say you would run out of blessings. He said you would run out of the ability to count them. They are that many. They are that present. Even right now, even today — even in whatever today actually is — they are there, available, quietly surrounding you on every side. The question is not whether the blessings exist. The question is whether you have stopped long enough to notice them.

The Kind of Joy That Does Not Depend on Anything Going Right

There is a happiness that is conditional — it requires the circumstances to cooperate. And then there is a happiness that is rooted in something underneath the circumstances entirely. This is the second kind. The one that holds.

He Wired Joy Into the Design

Joy in Islam is not an accident or a bonus. It is embedded in the structure of this deen from the very beginning. The Prophet ﷺ said: How remarkable is the affair of the believer — all of it is good for them. If something good happens, they are grateful, and that is good for them. And if something bad happens, they are patient, and that is good for them. Every direction the believer turns, the outcome is good. That is not spiritual bypassing. That is a genuine reorientation of what you call good and bad — one that makes joy available in both.

The Qur'an does not promise a life without difficulty. It promises something better: verily with hardship comes ease — not after it, with it. Running alongside it. Embedded within it. The same sentence that contains the hard thing also contains the relief. They are not sequential. They are simultaneous. And the one who knows this — who has genuinely felt it in their bones, not merely memorised it — carries a quiet lightness that the world cannot explain and cannot take away.

The Remembrance That Settles Everything

Not in the achievement of the goal you have been chasing. Not when the relationship is finally repaired. Not when the illness passes, or the finances stabilise, or the children stop worrying you. In the remembrance of Allah — now, as you are, before anything external has changed — the heart finds ṭuma'nīnah: that deep, settled, unhurried peace that is the foundation of all real happiness.

This is not a platitude. It is physics. The heart was made for one thing — to know and love and remember its Creator. And when it is occupied with that thing, even briefly, even imperfectly, even in the middle of a hard week — it rests. It settles. It exhales in a way that nothing else quite produces. Ibn al-Qayyim raḥimahullāh wrote that the heart is like a bird: its head is love, its two wings are hope and fear, and its tail is submission. When all of these are present together, the bird flies beautifully. When one is missing, it struggles. But even a struggling bird, when it turns its face toward Al-Wāḥid, finds something to rest in.

Things That Bring the Heart Alive

• 01 Praying Fajr and watching the world wake up after. There is a particular quality to the morning when you have already spoken to Allah before it began. The day feels different. You own it differently. The light looks different. Something is settled in you that was not settled the day you slept through it.
• 02 A moment of genuine khushū'. When the words of the prayer land somewhere real — when you hear what you are saying and it means something in that moment, not as performance but as actual conversation — the feeling it leaves is unlike anything else. You go back to ordinary life slightly changed.
• 03 Finishing a fast. The particular gratitude of the moment before Maghrib. Your body asking and asking, and you saying: not yet, for His sake. And then the relief of breaking it — dates, water, the basmala — with the knowledge that every hour of that hunger was seen and recorded. That is not deprivation. That is intimacy.
• 04 Reading the Qur'an and finding a verse that was waiting for you. You have read it before. But today, on this particular day, with this particular thing on your mind — the verse opens differently. As if it was written for you, today, in this exact moment. Because in a way, it was.
• 05 Making du'ā for someone you love without telling them. The private generosity of it. Carrying someone's name to Allah when they don't know you're there. That is love in its most unperformed, most real form — and it returns to you as barakah in ways you will not always be able to trace.
• 06 Saying alhamdulillah and meaning it. Not the reflexive alhamdulillah of habit. The one that rises from somewhere genuine — when you look at your life, with all its imperfection and all its difficulty, and you find, underneath everything, a real and settled gratitude for the fact that it is yours.

A List to Read on the Days When You Have Forgotten

Some days you need someone to say the obvious things out loud. This is that.

• ✦ You have survived every hard day you have ever had. The batting average is 100%. Whatever came — illness, loss, disappointment, the kind of loneliness that sits in a crowded room — you came through it. You are still here. That track record is yours and no one can take it.
• ✦ The things you are hard on yourself about — the prayers you missed, the intentions you fumbled, the version of yourself you have not yet managed to become — are held by a God who made forgiveness more beloved to Him than punishment. He already knew who you were when He chose to create you. He knew every mistake. He made you anyway. On purpose.
• ✦ There is someone in the world whose life is better because you exist in it. You may not always know who. You may not always feel it. But the way you loved someone, helped someone, showed up for someone — it counted. It is in the ledger. It does not disappear when you have a hard week.
• ✦ The season you are in right now is a season. It has a beginning and it has an end. Not every season feels like spring — but every season is moving. Nothing about your current circumstances is permanent. Not the difficulty, not the confusion, not the distance from where you want to be. It is moving.
• ✦ You are allowed to want good things for yourself. You are allowed to hope. You are allowed to ask Allah for the specific, personal, detailed version of the life that would make you genuinely happy — and to believe that He is listening to that request with care. He made you. He knows what you need. And He is not withholding from you out of indifference.
• ✦ The mercy of Allah is not something you have to earn back after a bad stretch. It was never contingent on your performance in the first place. It encompasses all things. You are a thing. Therefore it encompasses you — right now, today, in whatever state you are currently in. The door is not closed. It was never closed. You just have to turn toward it.

This verse was not written for the person who has never strayed. It was written for the person who has — and who needed to know that straying does not permanently change the address of the door. The door is still there. It opens from the inside. And you are holding the handle right now.

A Du'ā for a Heart That Is Looking for Peace

The Prophet ﷺ taught us to ask for the specific things the soul needs. This is asking for one of them.

One Last Thing

This is it. Read it slowly. Then close the page and go be in your life.

You are going to be okay. Not in the distant, vague, eventually-things-will-work-out way — though that is also true. In the immediate, present, right-now way. You are okay. You are being held. You are not as alone as the hard moments make you feel. And the God who created the first light this morning, and calibrated the oxygen in the air you are breathing, and arranged the exact chain of events that led you here to read these words — He has not stopped paying attention to you. Not for a single second. Not once. Not ever.

Happiness is not a destination you arrive at when everything finally lines up. It is a practice. It is the daily, imperfect, sometimes-stumbling choice to notice what is already good, to trust what has not yet arrived, to remain in conversation with the One who is both the Source of every joy and the Comfort for every sorrow.

You are allowed to be happy. You are allowed to take up the space that happiness takes up. You are allowed to laugh fully, to rest completely, to enjoy the good things in your life without immediately bracing for them to be taken away. That is not ingratitude. That is the life He wanted for you — a life where the good things are received as the gifts they are and held lightly, with open hands, as everything in this world should be held.

He found you. He guides you. He provides for you. Past tense, present tense, and — if you keep turning toward Him — future tense too. That is the whole story. That is the thing that makes joy possible in every season, not just the good ones.

Now go drink something warm. Call someone you love. Pray two rak'ahs. Watch the sky for a minute. And remember — just for today, just for this moment — that you are held, you are loved, and you are enough.