Forged In Fire

For steel to strengthen, it must first be immersed in the hottest flame.

The strength of a man is forged the same.

The Phoenix rises from the ashes bearing no name, a slate with no stain – nothing left to lose, everything to gain.

Innocent beginnings and excruciating endings. Lessons learned the hardest way. Hard lessons created the man you see today, and inspired him to find his own way like a battle-tested soldier.

What hurts, but does not kill you only makes you colder. It raises the limit of the weight you’re able to carry on your shoulder.

Because of that, I’m bolder in the sense that no thing can fear me. You can feel confidence radiating when you stand near me. At this point a cast iron pan couldn’t even seer me because I’ve been initiated — far from my final form but I’m ascending to a top-tier me.

No longer aimlessly pursuing. Instead, cultivating my mind is what I’m doing. And I’ve grown to appreciate the pain I feel from the flame

Because it reminds me that I’m still human.

Q. A.

Black Don’t Crack

Black is not a color.

Black is a foundation.

From it, everything is created.

Within it lies infinite inspiration.

Black tells a tale of profound pain, struggle, and grief, that is continually transformed into beauty beyond belief.

Black does not surrender because Black is the ultimate defender.

Its traits are so versatile, mixed and prepared by the most masterful blender — Allah.

And may his name be praised for the Genesis of Black, as he ensured that within us there is no thing we lack.

Never allow your will to waver, nor your confidence to slack.

Because Black may bend, but it can never crack.

Q. A.

Winter is Coming

My heart grows colder with every sunset. The days of warmth are no more. A dim flame flickers inside me like faulty wiring. It is only a matter of time before darkness swallows this light. The shadow has been dying to re-emerge. Taming this beast been the task of the evolved me. Firefighting the temptation of embracing a scorched earth mentality. Though my pure soul, once thought to be immortal, has become a perfect fatality. Earnestly I tried to prevent laying my goodness to rest, but frostbite is on the verge of consuming the scarlet engine inside my chest.

Q. A.

Look In The Mirror

The plague of the modern ego appears increasingly insurmountable.

Entitlement has spread like a wildfire.

It has almost become taboo to hold one’s self accountable.

The path of least resistance is usually the default selection,

So why shoulder any of the blame when it’s easier to choose projection?

With each passing day, the irony becomes even clearer.

We live in a world ruled by selfies, yet people are afraid to look in the mirror.

Aiktimal Alqamar

When you appear, I have no worry.

I am at endless ease.

Your luminescent glow is the remedy for any cortisol within me.

Your presence universally fulfills, as evidenced by how the ocean tide swells.

While your absence conspicuously creates an abyss of emptiness.

Dark nights are not the same without you.

Q. A.

New Year State of Mind

Life is about learning and growing, both of which are accomplished through overcoming resistance. Learning requires acquiring knowledge. Growing requires accumulating experiences. As much as pop culture would like for you to believe otherwise, the Calendar year is not solely correlated to the tribulations faced by you or even the world for that matter. The main contributing factor to your assessment of how good, bad, or successful your year has gone is your state of mind.

For me, 2019 was a tougher year than 2020. All things considered, 2020 was probably the best year of my life thus far. Opportunities and doors opened for me that never have previously, both externally and internally. I gained firsthand experience in dealing with real-world misfortune on an unprecedented scale. I strengthened my connection with my inner self. I learned to deeply empathize with those who may be experiencing life in a more strenuous lane than I am. I learned to understand that, no matter the circumstances, someone always has it worse than I do and that I should be grateful and appreciate the blessings that have been bestowed upon me rather than dwell on the things that I am lacking or the things that do not go my way. I also learned that making sound decisions is impossible without having all the pieces to the puzzle. Furthermore, it is the search for those missing puzzle pieces that inspires unparalleled growth within you and me— a direct result of the experiences we accumulate along our quest.

I emerged from the calendar year 2020 as a better man and human-being than I was when I entered it. I did this through consciously being aware of how I perceive the experiences and situations that life hands to me. I did this by not immediately classifying any of these experiences or situations as “good” or “bad,” but rather observing and embracing the life lessons that they were teaching me. What greater wisdom can one pass down to his or her offspring than the importance of learning what something means prior to judging it?

Moral of this post: Yesterday is history. Tomorrow does not exist yet. The year 2021 has all the potential to be exactly like the year 2020 was. Whether it will or won’t depends not on the happenings of the world or anything external. It only depends on the happenings within your mind and how you have trained it to perceive the knowledge it has been presented with, which you have full control over. The year 2020 has presented us all with an abundance of knowledge. Applied knowledge is power. Acquired knowledge is liberation.

Happy New Year.

Q.A.

Perfect Imperfection

Looking for love in all the wrong areas.

Probably staring you in the face, but its imperfections are scaring ya.

Waiting for perfection is waiting to be taught a lesson. 

Nothing will ever be good enough, and you will continue to throw away heaven-sent blessings.

Social media is filled with ungrateful, scorned peasants.

Heeding advice from them will lead to a reality that is unpleasant.

Follow your mind and heart, don’t veer from your destined direction.

Because inside each and everyone of us lies perfect imperfection. 

Hiatus.

My main reason for using social media is to share uplifting content. Unbiased positivity. Whether through music that I enjoy and feel others may enjoy also, or through words of wisdom that may help guide someone along their journey, I always post with purpose. I always try to post and share from a full cup, as opposed to a cup that needs filling. If I cannot first help and encourage myself, how can I expect to do the same for anyone else? When I see someone going through it, I reach out. I make an attempt to be as good of a human online as I am offline, across all platforms. Social media, for me, is a tool to reach and impact people in a positive way, from an enlightened perspective. But as with all things in this life, too much of any good or bad thing is poisonous. A tool intended for, or that has the potential to do, good can easily be turned into a weapon used to divide, disrupt, and ultimately destroy. Though accessed through physical apparatuses, the damage that obsessive social media usage can cause is rarely physical. Instead, it is primarily mental, emotional, and spiritual. I, as well as many others, would argue that this type of damage results in far worse long-term consequences.

Yesterday I deleted all social media apps from my phone in an effort to free myself from the mental whirlwind these platforms subject myself, and most of society, to. “Clusterfuck” would be the perfect term to describe Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as a collective. With all the happenings of the world in front of your eyes with the scroll of a thumb, all the opinions of idiots and peers alike bombarding you daily, how can one even think it’s possible to find or maintain inner peace? Facebook, nor Instagram, have any concern for the mental well-being of any of its users. In fact, much of its algorithm is in place for the sole purpose of disrupting and sabotaging mental stability. Whether it’s videos of Black men being executed, blatant displays of racism and division, or even just the normalized viewing of your peers’ life highlight reel, nothing presented on social media is intended to promote inner peace, rather it is intended to destroy it. I have seen this happen to many people. The person they see when they look in the mirror becomes foreign to them. No longer are they who they’ve known themselves to be. Instead, the person they see on their timeline or explore page is all they think about when staring into a reflection of themselves. All they see is what they are not, in comparison to what social media shows them on a daily basis. All they see is where they are not in life. The life purpose becomes blurred in an attempt to run someone else’s race.

I recently experienced an eye opening realization that a vast majority of the content displayed on our social news “feeds” are not even of our own choosing. In actuality, we are being fed content at the hands of algorithms at their discretion to what is appropriate for us. Instagram and its social media relatives are all in on a game of which platform can use and manipulate our data most effectively. Every post we like, every word we speak, every topic we search, are all funneled into machine learning algorithms that seek to create an environment that they deem appropriate to nourish our habits, obsessions, and insecurities. I find this alarming. For one, it presents the question: Who is really in control of how you think or what you feel? If you jump into a pool, you will inevitably get wet. You have no control over how the water interacts with your exposed body. Similarly, when you engage with social media platforms and the subsequent content and discussions from myriads of users, you can be certain that you will be affected mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. How does it make you feel to know that the emotion you feel when you see a post was predetermined by an algorithm that sees you merely as data, not a human being? Humans have complex emotions and feelings; algorithms and robots do not.

Granted, the day in age we live in is filled with algorithms that are in control of our daily lives. Hell, we even have our faces scanned every day in order to unlock our cell phones and access countless filters to distort our self-image. Who knows where that information is being used… But at the same time, while this is technological evolution on display, mental warfare is not a part of the deal. Having your psyche toyed with by companies who are only concerned with revenue and your dependence on their platforms is far from a recipe for a healthy life.

Aside from the technical arguments for indefinitely deleting my social media apps, the majority of my reason stems from time. Social media is powerful, beyond description. An idea, a picture, a video has the capability to spread like a wildfire. This has many, many possibilities to end with a positive result. But with much of the control not being in human hands of good intent, but rather that of binary algorithms, the result tends to be, more often than not, negative. This is due to the fact that the goal for social media companies is optimize user interaction and usage, by any means. At the end of the day, the reward system for using these platforms ultimately leads to an addictive cycle that derails peace and wastes valuable time. Casinos are playgrounds for the rich, places where people go and spend their time when they have money to waste. When people are poor and visit casinos with the little money that they have available, they rarely exit in better financial shape than which they enter. I have been a social media user since the age of 14, and over the years I have come to realize that it runs analogous to casinos. Social media platforms are playgrounds for people who have time to waste. In contrast to the casino analogy, time is much more valuable than money. Money can be replenished, while time is non renewable. As young adults, we have more time on our hands than we realize; however, none of us have time to waste. This holds especially true if you are currently living a life that you are not content with living for the rest of your life. All the time in the world is at your disposal during your youth to accomplish and achieve anything you desire or yearn for in life. But that time is worthless if it is spent on activities that will bear no fruit. Spending hours scrolling through a timeline or tapping through stories filled with people who hold no value to my life journey has proved to be useless. Most of the time, the scrolling that we do is not even done consciously. Zombie-like interactions with social media are more frightening than anything. It’s second nature for us to unlock our phone and open an app as a crutch for distraction from social interaction; we are operating on autopilot. I have caught myself doing this more often than I’d like to admit, but it has become a normalized pastime in this generation.

Last year I took an extended break from Instagram, totaling about 5 months. In that time I noticed a return to my inner self. I vividly remember remembering what it is to be alive. Without all the external noises and sources of constant anxiety in front of my eyes on a daily basis, I was able to ground myself in the present gift of life. I am making it a purpose to return to this state of mind, as I have found that my relapse into the social media crack house has led me to losing myself again. I must reconnect with me. I need to refill my cup, and I believe that a hiatus from social platforms will enable me to do just that. The road less traveled is often the most difficult to take and for good reason. This is the road that tends to lead to treasures that the crowd likely doesn’t even know exists.

Peace and love.

Q. A.