Who am I?

 “Who am I?” is a question I ask myself a lot these days. Some days, more than others, it plays like a broken record in my head: who am I? who am I? who am I? and the more I ask myself this question, I am no more nearer to knowing who I am and it feels as if I am getting further and further away from the answer. Some days, more than others, it feels like I am just an outline instead of something solid, definite. It feels like I can fade away into the nothingness.

Today, I had a thought: “what if I’m asking myself the wrong question?” 

Maybe it is unimportant for me to have a grasp of who I am. Maybe it means that I am ever-growing, ever-changing, expanding. After all, we are the metaphors we ascribe ourselves to. Maybe, who I am is slowly being built and made in this uncertainty, in these questions and instead of questioning, I should embrace it, welcome it, live it: one step, one breath, one day at a time. 

I should welcome the unknowing of a situation, and talk and place my trust in Allah, al-Alim, the All-Knowing. I should welcome the uncertainties of a situation, and pour my heart and place my trust in Allah, as-Samad, the Absolute. 

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, 

like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. 

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. 

And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. 

Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.” 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

It is part of our fitrah: this brokenness and hole, these uncertainties and questions this greed for the absolute. A crookedness in our fitrah that is made to lead us all back to Him.