By Shabina S. Khatri
November 2006
During announcements delivered after ish’aa salat at the masjid recently, I was amazed to hear four separate requests for monetary donations, one after another – first for IAGD, then for aid overseas, and finally two more for relief efforts closer to home.
It wasn’t the existence of such sheer need that surprised me, but rather, my reaction to these pleas. Feeling overwhelmed, I briefly thought to myself, what’s the point? It’s too much to handle, so why bother at all?
Then, alhumdullilah, my senses returned.
Even though I can’t fix everything, I reminded myself, I could always contribute something.
And something is always better than nothing.
It’s a simple enough notion, but one that’s easy to miss when you have been conditioned, like so many of us, with an all-or-nothing mentality.
The detrimental thought process works something like this:
Say you wish to establish a regular exercise routine. The first few weeks go smoothly and then inevitably, you miss a workout – on a Monday.
Uh oh.
Now, it’s suddenly 10 times harder to get to the gym the rest of the week. Why? Because you’ve fallen behind, and under the all-or-nothing approach, one setback is inexcusable. So you become discouraged and forego workouts all week, which only makes you feel worse, so you skip the next week as well, perpetuating the cycle of your supposed failures until even the thought of returning to your original schedule exhausts you into complete inactivity.
Whew.
As Muslims, we’re supposed to be the most enthusiastic practitioners of the middle way. But too often, we get just as caught up in extremes as everybody else.
Fortunately, life doesn’t have to be this dramatic.
It is critical that we work to find long-term solutions to recurring problems like poverty, crime and corruption. But such grandiose efforts can always be supplemented with smaller gestures.
Few of you, for example, would assert that not having the time or ability to memorize the entire Qur’an excuses you from learning the Fatiha. Similarly, then, while you may not have the energy to clean up all the trash littering your college campus, that’s not an excuse to disregard the empty pop can sitting at your foot. And on a grander scale, you may not be able to solve homelessness in Detroit, but that’s not an excuse to turn away the one man who asks you to spare a dollar for dinner.
In the best-selling book “The Tipping Point,” author Malcolm Gladwell contends that when small numbers of people start behaving differently, that behavior can ripple outward until a critical mass or “tipping point” is reached, changing the world.
As an example, he credits the cleanup of New York’s subways in the 1980s to the city’s subsequent drop in violent crime.
“Weird as it sounds,” Gladwell concludes, “it is possible to be a better person on a clean street or in a clean subway than in one littered with trash and graffiti.”
On an intuitive level, it makes sense that little things can add up to spark very significant changes. Consider the implications of something as small as smiling and holding the door open for a stranger. The gesture could inspire the beneficiary to do the same thing for the person behind him, and so forth, paying forward your good deed infinitum.
But even if the heavens don’t open up and mountains remain unmoved by the actions of one individual, it helps to remember that results aren’t everything.
Intentions matter, too.
Our beloved Prophet (SAW) once said, “If an individual has an opportunity to plant a tree, even if he knows the Day of Judgement is imminent, let him plant the tree.”
So even if the world is coming to an end and no one is around to benefit from our actions, we are advised to complete good deeds. Why? Because if nothing else, they benefit us.
There are many reasons, then, to not give in or give up when our efforts seem in vain – and the primary one is that they’re not in vain.
Because whether through our time, our money, our hands, our tongues, our smiles or our du’as, we can always contribute something.
And something is always better than nothing.
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