Veering Off Course

Imagine you're on a plane crossing the Pacific Ocean. The screen above you on the panel up front shows the route the plane is supposed to take, but as you approach your destination, the plane suddenly veers off course, away from the planned route. That was what happened to hubby's flight recently, as we kept track of his 9 hour flight on the internet, real time.

I had begun reading the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families a few days prior to hubby's departure, and in the introduction, Covey spoke of how airplanes go off course all the time. He used it as a metaphor for how families function.

There is no perfect family that is without conflicts. Every family is different, and every family has its own problems and struggle. We lose tempers, we say things we don't mean, we don't say things we mean, and these are all the things that can get us off course. Just like those airplanes have their destinations and determined routes to get to those destinations, families should also have destinations, and a path to get there. The fact that we sometimes veer off course is normal, but the point he wanted to make is that there needs to be effort to keep families on those paths.

Applying it to a Muslim family, it's basically remaining on the straight path to Jannah. Each family member should have the same vision, so that getting back on track would be easier. Imagine if the pilot and co pilot have different destinations in mind. The flight would be a disaster!

Reflecting on that, I thought to myself, does our family have this vision? I mean, we always talk about Jannah, about finally being there, about getting to do what we want when we get there, and whenever we encounter any battles with our desires, I always bring Jannah up to the kids, and even to myself, whenever I have inner conflicts with hubby. Thinking back, it does truly help to focus on the end of the road when you're stuck in a rut on the way. You need to zoom out, refocus, and zoom back in and do what you need to do.

During the TDC, I attended the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Muslim Families workshop, conducted by Rose Ashraf. It was really eye opening and refreshing. Needless to say, that was the catalyst to my reading the Stephen Covey books. I used to loathe self help books, and would never even approach the shelves they're residing on if I was at a bookstore. However, parenting has driven me to actually seek self help books, because parenting is very much about self discovery and self improvement as much as it is about raising little people. I find myself pondering back upon my childhood, analyzing it, ad trying to make sense of it. My relationships with my parents are essential for retrospection in order for me to develop good relationships with my own children. They say you never truly value your mother until you are a mother yourself, and I do believe that is true, at least for me. But then again, there are aspects of my childhood that requires me to figure some things out, things that are atypical of a normal family.

All my adult life I have been observing other people's interactions within their families in order to get a model for my own. I'm basically trying to figure things out from scratch, because I don't have a model from which to take from, not one that I want to take from anyway. So it has been really hard, but it has been enlightening too.

There is a reason behind everything, and I am very grateful that Allah has sent me to a place where I am able to experience life from many perspectives, and meet people I wouldn't normally meet in my typical expected hometown. It has really been a great learning experience alhamdulillah.


All day yesterday, we constantly refreshed the page of hubby's flight status. It was a 9 hour flight, so you can guess how many times we hit the reload button.

"I wanna see where Abi is now!" H would exclaim, and up the stairs he bounded.

"Where is he now?" we would ask the person who had just refreshed the page.

"Over Colorado."

"He's over Utah now!"

"Oh, he's over the ocean!"

"He's almost there!"

And suddenly, his plane went off course as it neared its destination.

"Look, they went off track!"

"Ooh, there must have been some storm or wind or something."

"He landed! He landed!"

When I went to the screen, I could no longer see the real time map showing the flight path because he had landed. In a way I was relieved, but I missed seeing it too.

"When can we call Abi?" they kept asking right after he landed.

"Oh, he's probably trying to get a bus to get to the hotel now," I said.

"You can leave him a message on Yahoo Messenger," I suggested.

So they did. It wasn't until later that hubby replied, and because of the time difference, the kids had already gone to bed by then.

The foremost message they sent him was that his plane went off track. Hubby said it was due to the wind.

There has been quite a lot of 'wind' all these years, and some of them have really almost blown us off course altogether, but by the Grace of Allah, we were guided back on track. I don't know for how many legs of the journey we've been through, and if one leg is defined as a decade, then we have passed through one leg of the journey. It's a long way away, and as of now, we are struggling to stay on course as we straggle off of it from time to time.

May Allah continue to bestow on us guidance to keep us on this road to Jannah. Ameen.