The Joy of Doing Things Slowly

We all try to reach beyond our limits and doing things in the shortest time possible.Big results fast if you like to say it that way.

When my friend bought me a book last week, I get the rush to finish it as soon as possible. That was not the first time that I finished half of a book within one night. I finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers in just half a day because I liked it so much. 

It is an advantage to me that when I was in secondary school, my sister bought me a book. It was Speed Reading by Tony Buzan. Although I cannot recall what did I do with the lessons given in the book, I must tell you that they really work. I practised hard on the exercises and got a little improvement. With the cumulative reading of books, I managed to improve my speed. And now, I can finish a 271-pages book in just one day. A RM35.90 book finished and probably have no place in my memories if it is not so good within one day. I know with that speed, it is still slow compared to other speed readers.

However, I have lost the same sense of connectedness that I had when reading Goosebumps slowly when I was in Form 1. I still remember reading them so slow to really understand it as my English was (and still, is) bad. I managed to finish them and still remember the stories of the haunted dummies, werewolves who happen to be the character's uncle and so on.  

Then,for the whole last week, I tried doing things slowly, not procrastinating okay . I was not like gadoh or rushing into doing things. I read my book slowly. An indescribable feelings came to me. It was a joyful contentment. Cewah!

Try reading newspaper slowly, try to talk slowly and try to finish your work slowly if you have time to do so. You will get a sense that you are doing something with meanings. When you do so, you will surely concentrate on the things you are working on and begin to think about the purpose behind your action. Actually, most of us know about this but have never tried doing it before and lack of courage to do so.

Going back to what Islam teaches us, everything that we do must be with the right intention (niat). For muslims, our niat is simply doing everything for Allah. However, we must think why is that so and not simply doing it because we have to do so. One way to look at it is to remember that Allah loves us, and how He wants us to do things (takdir or fate) is because it is the best for us. Simply put, Allah knows best. So, when we do things it must be in the name of Allah because things we do bring benefits to us. And without Allah's permission, we don't have the opportunity to do so. That's why it must be in the name of Allah.

The way we perceive things are different like this niat concept. I'm in a learning process to understand why we should do things in the name of Allah. Yes, we may do so many good things before but never think of why we did so. I encourage you to think and reflect again on why should we do things in the name of Allah. It sounds simple, but actually if you really really think about this before, there will be no wrongdoings committed and no time would be wasted in your life. The root behind so many dosa in our life is our wrong intentions in doing things which means that to think about why we should do it in the name of Allah is the fundamental question for all of our deeds. Of course there is action for our intention, but more about it later (Robin Hood-good intention, wrong action). 

Bye. We are all in a learning process and will never stop doing so. Feel free to share.-The Chukai Insider.


Thank you Abang Miqdad-dy for your brilliant words to make me think about this kind of stuff.