Imagine having a friend that’s your other half. You do everything together- you even think together. Fast forward. You grow apart, situations change, and you aren’t the friends you were before. You depended on that friendship, so now you’re just a half of that whole you two were together.

Imagine pushing yourself for four years in school to get accepted into the program you’ve known you wanted to do since high school. You focus on nothing else and put all your energy into it just for the time to come, and you don’t get in. You put all your faith into your success, and so you came up with nothing left.

It’s not the end of the world.

The key is realizing that your happiness can’t depend on your friend or your success or anything else that can come and go. Your happiness has to come from a deeper place where you depend only on Allah swt to give you that contentment. He is consistent in a world full of inconsistency. He is the same yesterday, today, tomorrow, and for eternity. While friends and material things will always fall short, Allah will never fall short.

When something slips from your fingers, it could be to make room for what you never expected to happen. Keeping a positive outlook is the best way to just keep going until you finally have what you were meant to while this whole time you’ve been looking around the wrong places. Fulfillment is within reach; you just have to know where to find it.

“They plan, and Allah plans. And surely Allah is the best of planners.” Quran 8:30

By Shereen Rammaha