This was supposed to be my second post of a 30-day writing challenge, inspired from an e-mail I got from Discover Praxis. After deciding to commit myself to the challenge, my second day proved to me that it wasn’t a realistic goal – my little Fatima experienced colic which is unusual for us, wouldn’t sleep at her usual time and wanted to be held for a few hour until we went to bed together. I decided I could still commit to writing more frequently than I do, but just not every single day for the next 30 days, hoping to still reap the benefits of writing frequently. At least I’m grateful for the encouraging e-mail, so thank you Praxis.
Back in high school, nearly 8 years ago, one of my three A level classes was in Biology and my teacher had suggested a book called ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ by Bill Bryson. I went ahead and ordered the book. I started reading it, or at least I must have because I found a bookmark at page one-hundred-and-something but I never finished it. A week ago, I was looking for a book in my mom’s library and I found this uncompleted book of mine. I decided to give it a go and I am really enjoying it to say the least. There was a section on supernovae (plural of supernova; a powerful and luminious stellar explosion) and the author was comparing the size of the closest supernova candidate in our galaxy to the size of our Sun (it takes a massive star, much larger than our Sun, to produce a supernova). I took a moment to absorb that, to fathom the overwhelming magnitude of what surrounds us and I literally felt my body quiver. We tend to think of the Milky Way as so wide and complex, yet we’re only a tiny part of an entire galaxy of solar systems which is also a small part of many other galaxies, and who knows what else beyond those.
While reading the chapter on the Cosmos, theories on how it came to be, what keeps entire bodies of planets and stars ‘hanging’ and allows them to move in an orderly manner, I kept recalling the verse from the Qur’an:
Islam is a religion that regards reflection as highly esteemed and encourages mankind to reflect on the creation in order to come to know God, the Creator of the Cosmos and everything within it and beyond it.
What I find even more interesting is that despite how tiny we are amidst all this enormous creation, there is still so much detail in our small world: the many different satisfying tastes of herbs and fruits that we sense with our tongue, the beautiful colours and scents of flowers, the cellular structures, the strong impact of our complex emotions, to name a very few.
Solicitous Home 