A crown of compassion

Freelance journalist Aina Khan, currently with Al Jazeera, bravely reflects on what happens when the rat-race comes to a halt and we have nowhere left to hide.With Kingston shimmering thousands of feet below shaped like an angel unfurling its wings, and a lop-sided crescent moon grinning at me as it floated in a carpet of stars, I reached the blue mountain peak in Jamaica after five hours of hiking in the dead of night.Heartbroken, burned out, and awaiting the test results of a potentially life-threatening lump hiding in my armpit, I found myself at the crosshairs of the unholiest of unholy trinities. I spontaneously resolved to make a ‘pilgrimage’ to the summit to watch the sun rise, so that its rays would spill inside me and disperse the darkness there.Several months later in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, I find myself sitting in the summit of a different mountain-top altogether: the sixth-floor concrete balcony of my flat in south London.In the months that followed the mountain climb, I disastrously leapt into busying myself with work, a subconscious attempt to anaesthetise the grief and bitter loneliness I was feeling. Then the pandemic crept into London, forcing the rat-race to come to a shuddering halt and my avoidance tactics with it. Unable to run from my emotions any longer, for the first time in 28 years, I was left completely alone with only my thoughts as company.As someone who always considered themselves to be fiercely independent, I always wore stoicism and my ability not to rely on others as a badge of honour. I shouldered the burdens of my past and present like the Greek God Atlas who carried the earth on his shoulders. And so every time the tears came, disdainfully I would question myself, how could I allow myself to diminish and become so weak?But in spending so much time alone, in being forced to stop and stand still, I have had to become comfortable with my own company. Not in the moments that I feel ebullient and ready to take on the world but in those turbulent moments I have felt worthless, unworthy, unproductive, and bitterly, bitterly alone.Vulnerability I learned the hard way, is not some kind of weakness or pathology we need to shed in a reptilian-like manner. It is a crown of compassion that empowers us to extend an understanding for the grief of others, and to ourselves most of all.When the very first words of the Qur’an were revealed by the angel Jibra’eel in the inaugural Ramadan, the prophet Muhammad too was in a self-imposed isolation inside a mountain cave in Saudi Arabia.Over fourteen hundred years later, as I use the time to look inwards in my own urban cave, this Ramadan unlike any other I’ve experienced before, my hope is to find myself and accept who I am in all my richness and complexity, broken or not.

 To read all '30 reflections for our times', please follow the Facebook page '30 days 30 deeds', Instagram @salmahasanali, or subscribe to the newsletter at www.salmahasanali.com.