A collapsed heart arrives one postponed prayer at a time.
On that typical summer morning, when you woke, the bright sun seemed not to have moved since the day before. Everyone else still dreamed. With half-shut eyes, you floated barefoot to the restroom. The unfamiliar reflection in the mirror shocked you—you were losing the “you” that had always been a trusted companion. You squinted to absolve the trick of sight, but vision held steady; the disappointment was not optical—it was inward. What you saw was true. A dispiriting weight held you in place. Time had turned traitor. You had believed otherwise. The key to your quests was still missing, and the clarity of how things ought to be now seemed worthless. Your breathing grew labored.
A knock trembled faintly at your door. For a moment, sound and sight blurred together like mist before memory faded away. Time is not always linear, you reasoned. You had been here not long ago—perhaps yesterday, perhaps an eternity past. Silence gathered, thick and maddening, a pressure on the heart. The mind throbbed; a lonely soliloquy began. You questioned your assumptions yet could not fathom where, or when, you were. Exhaustion settled like dusk. Within moments, you surrendered your eyes to the dark, as though answers might bloom there. Then, from that darkness, came a voice—almost yours, yet strangely distant: Why does it matter where you are? You longed to argue that place and time are anchors of the mind, but your voice would not rise to meet the thought.
A city-dweller of routines and respectability, you collapsed that morning from severe dehydration. How could such a thing be? The question circled endlessly, like a Ferris wheel turning in fog. A bruised elbow throbbed, a gash and blood masked your eyebrow, and your body’s muffled cry dissolved into ache. You were lucky, the experts assured you. It could have been worse at your age. Yet their words drifted past. Wounds were mere whispers; your concern ran deeper. The body endures tsunamis of neglect—it is the Qalb, the heart, that grows too barren yet heavy to carry. You had spent every last reserve of energy resisting a fall into a private black hole of ebb. That was your last clear recollection.
Your crisis was not born of wandering, but of precision—too narrow a search within too small a cage. To search is to believe you know what to seek; most never do, and neither did you. Such is the human blemish.
Drained and trembling, you asked softly for any guidance. The voice answered: You were once a single cell, a zygote—no bigger than hope, resting for a brief held breath of time after conception in your mother’s fallopian tube. In that solitary moment, all that you are—your form, your leanings, your desires, the blueprint of your becoming—was etched in that one cell, in the oneness of a single point of life. Everything was conjoined together on a delicate surface solely by hopes and prayers from beloved ones.
Your lungs formed as fluid-filled organs, waiting in the dark for the first command of air. A miracle—the instant transformation of the lung into an air pump to sustain your life. In that flash, your clock no longer counted upward as you grew; it turned and began its measured descent toward the inevitable end. Age is merely the quiet unraveling of time. You are the sum of your past, carried forward in the residue of your caring for others, for this world. There is no greater counsel, no greater guidance, than this: listen to what the sun and the moon have been whispering to you. Have you not postponed enough?
When the sun withdraws to bless a far horizon with dawn, the moon steps forward, beginning its play, tugging at the waves of the sea. The shore yields, the sea retreats—each moves in perfect obedience, part of the precise dance of sun, moon, and earth. The sea itself remains uninvolved; the tide never imagines there are better possibilities somewhere deeper in the ocean. Only the inevitable awaits.
All things move in their choreographed rhythm toward an ordained conclusion—the one you have long resisted. You, a lover of books and reason, now surrender to pule, to a single, honest prayer. So it must be. One tear drop, carrying the weight of genuine remorse, could mark the beginning of your pilgrimage to heal your barren Qalb.
What, if anything, should change now—in measure, or in heart?
Making of:
This piece began with a real physical collapse, but the deeper question was not medical; it was whether the Qalb, the inner heart, can quietly fail long before the body does. [Qalb: In Islamic philosophy, “the heart” – the center of the human personality. The Quran mentions “qalb” 132 times!]
The shift from bathroom mirror to zygote to sun and moon grew from a desire to zoom out—linking one dehydrated morning to the entire arc of a life that has been postponing a necessary inner turning.
The title “Age Is a Clock in Reverse” and the epigraph about a collapsed heart arriving one postponed prayer at a time crystallize the central realization: that spiritual exhaustion accumulates slowly, decision by decision, until crisis becomes an unexpected but inevitable reckoning.