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It occurred to me during my study class last Sunday morning that I cannot account for the past eight years of my life. I cannot account for the way I used my time. On the one hand I acknowledge that there’s some kind of amnesia clouding my vision at the moment – I have been tracing this strange melancholy of mine back to just last summer, while in reality I know that I have long had to live with this mood. ‘What’s wrong with that guy?’ people used to ask as I passed them by at college over a decade ago, ‘He never ever smiles.’

So yes, my selective memory is wiping out my past reality… I lamented recently the incoherence of my tongue as if this is a recent phenomenon, but in truth I have always been quiet, always short on words. For me, these days history seems to extend backwards no further than last summer and it’s as if all was rosy up until then. Possibly the immense stress of buying a house, changing jobs and the operation was a breaking point, separating the past from the present. Caught between two poles, a low and a high, the past year has seemed quite strange. But the reality is that there’s some kind of amnesia clouding my perception.

On the other hand the truth speaks. In the study class on Sunday we are learning the last juz of the Qur’an, one sura a week. Where have the past eight years gone? What did I learn in that time? In all that time what did I learn of fiqh, except of the very basics in a generic round-about kind of way? The sad and dawning truth is that I hardly did anything in the course of those three thousand days, during those seventy-thousand hours. Ninety-nine months have passed me by and I cannot account for how I spent them.

There is nothing to be gained from mourning of course, but I still feel sad. So many missed opportunities. Arising on the Day of Judgement, what could I possibly say for myself if I were to die today? Ya Allah, have mercy on my soul. I have certainly wronged myself.