Your goal should not just be to avoid hell
Naomi Askew
How often is the goal to escape our own mind?
We drown noise with more noise - music, scrolling, constant busyness, just to avoid sitting still and disciplining our thoughts.
That’s ghaflah.
Not just distraction — but disconnection from Allah.
For some, it looks like numbness, like sleepwalking.
For others, like me, it looks like overthinking, overplanning, trying to control everything — staying constantly busy.
But those are just symptoms.
The root is not having Allah at the forefront of our minds.
To help keep my self consciously aware of Allah, I have started asking myself:
What is most pleasing to Allah?
Instead of just reducing my decisions to:
“Is this haram?”
So instead of:
“Is music haram?”..... lets read this hadith, that ruling, this lecture.... maybe he just has beef with Taylor Swift.
Ask:
Would dhikr be better?
Qur’an?
Silence — just sitting?
This has helped Islam stops feeling restrictive for me
and started feeling freeing.
I'm no longer seeking knowledge to begrudgingly comply or to find a technicality but instead to change my proximity to Allah.
Stop trying to just avoid punishment.
Start trying to seek Allah's pleasure.
And everything will change.