Sometimes, it feels like we are living in distant future. Sometimes, it happens to be so strange and surreal to write the year 2-0-2-6 on paper, we are now even one year past the quarter of the millennium.
And guess what, this year I will be graduating, inshaa Allah. It’s like standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down at the vast ocean of possibilities, excited, and daunted at the same time, grappling with the weight of the past years and the uncertainty of the future. Someone told me to treat my final year as the last subsidized time to think and learn deeply as for after graduation, learning will be fragmented, and expensive.
When I was in my freshman year, I remember a senior bhai quoting a faculty member: right now you scheme you’ll do this, achieve that, and master everything, but by your senior year, you’ll realize how little you know. I thought to myself, Meh, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. At least, I am passionate about CS. But here I am. It’s not that I know nothing. Even after prodigally spending generous hours into nothing, I’ve wandered some fields, touched some ideas, but depth, that is a different league altogether. And all my life, I have carried a quiet resistance to shallowness, a longing to understand things not just on the surface, but in their full, intricate meaning. And I believe, that is essential. Not because it’s some kind of intellectual snobbery, or it does bring the “grand success” to you, but rather depth itself is self-rewarding just by itself.
In 2026, I want to pick one or two areas, and go unreasonbly deep into them. I want to go beyond the buzzwords and borrowed languages. When I talk, I want to speak like I know the shit I am talking about. And that implies I have to discard many fandoms I used to have, leaving them unexplored, unwatched. And that’s okay, for the feeling that I am finally beginning to belong to the work that I pursue.
On this verge between drifting and depth, I want to remind me (and you, the honorable reader) the stuffs I have learnt from the past couple of years of my life.
Days are Continuous Vessel
The results that you’ll see in two to three years won’t come from big, sweeping actions that you intend on taking. They’ll come from the things you do every day. They’ll come from the way you think and the way you act every single day. We see the present as a constant, but it’s never a constant. We don’t think things are going to change, and that’s why we underestimate the likelihood of change actually occurring. As a result of that, we are left unprepared. Unprepared for events that we could have been prepared for. And the preparation wouldn’t happen in one day. The preparation wouldn’t be tomorrow. I say that I’m going to start a business. I’m going to read a hundred books. No preparation would happen through reading 20 pages a day, reading 50 pages a day. Preparation would come from learning the skills to grow, operate, and start a business. Preparation would come through observing when you’re on the train or when you’re on a walk, instead of listening to music or listening to a podcast. The tiny little things, those tiny incremental changes that we don’t think will do much, are the things that do the most.
Quoted from this dude, with only couple of hundreds of views.
Days are Incompensable
What you couldn’t secure today, there is no compensation for that. You might secure it tomorrow, awaking late hours or waking up early, eitherway it will cost you tomorrow, not today, and this cascade ends only at the edge of an abyss.
And there is no predictability what will happen tomorrow.
Days are Recorded For Eternity
So maintain these two invariants throughout your life.
- Are you honest with Allah SWT?
- Salah is the key invarinat, if not the only one. Attend to it in a happy, relaxed, chilled day, or in a stressed, busy, grumpy day. In the sun, snow and rain. And the stack piles up one step forward at a time, with memories and memoirs of moments between us and our Rabb Allah SWT.
- Are you at your limit?
