I begin in the name of the my caretaker, the most wise, the praiseworthy .
In the silent of the night I lay in my futon, thinking. Another day has passed, what have I done today that contributes to the creation and dissemination of beauty in this world? Maybe I should lower my expectations a little. What were my contributions to the total sum of beauty existing in the people around me?
Now, the question is a little bit easier to be thought of, to be reflected upon. I usually don’t jump into conclusions because what I am interested in most of the times are the right questions-the right answers might follow from a right question, but it is impossible to get the right answer if you start with the wrong question. Therefore when I think, my emphasis is on the question-at least that is what I try to instill in me. It is not my belief that one is entitled to such arrogance, confidence, so the most that I can say is that I tried.
A more accessible question now posed before me; next I should then guess the answer before finding a way to falsify it. When the method to falsify is found, my effort should then go into disproving my guess without any reservations. Should I succeed in falsifying my guess, I will have to make a fresh guess and now learning from the failure, the hope is that I can make a better guess; a guess that will hopefully be more difficult to disprove. If the opposite happens, meaning should my relentless effort to disprove my guess fails every time, my confidence towards my guess will increase. But that doesn’t at all mean that now I posses the truth-far away from that. Allah is all-knowing, we God’s creation can only guess. In essence, all knowledge possessed by the human race from the inception of their species are but guesses.
Saying that, I am not saying that because of that we should give up all that have been thought of, that have been checked against reality time and again. Acquiring knowledge through the method of falsification is the best way of thinking our species have come up with so far. Sure, it doesn’t promise absolute truths, absolute answers, or absolute knowledge, but it provides us with a way to determine how certain we can be that something is true. Truth is no more black and white but is spread throughout a wide spectrum; we now let thoughts to have degrees of truth, of certainty. The more certain we are that something describes nature, the more we can use it to our benefit with confidence. That’s how the spoon is invented, that’s how clothes are, also the mineral water bottle, the television set, the airplane, the nuclear reactor. The things that we do, we use, without even the slightest doubt that it will not yield the result we intended actually came from the relentless effort of trying to disprove a guess, and there is no guarantee that it will not be disproved one day.
I really think that falsification is the best method to find out about the world, and we should push that thought to the limit and see where it will bring us. Nevertheless, we must always remember that in essence they are nothing but guesses. We will never know whether something is true or not, we can never be absolutely confident that something will work out the way we intended it to. Even with our best efforts, our actions, our thoughts should reduce into hopes; prayers.
This is my thought, the fruit of my reflections. I am here in my room staring towards the ceiling, there is no wind outside; still it is very cold. In my heart I yearn for my beloved. I ache for her presence, for her smile, for her voice, for her cries, for her warmth, for the beauty of her companionship. How do I fare in increasing the amount of beauty in this relationship? I can only guess. A voice whispered to me to pray for the success of this relationship after my obligatory prayers. I remember that I replied to the voice saying: if you share my beliefs, you’ll notice that there is no instant when I am not praying for her, for us.
And all praise belongs to the almighty, the creator of beauty, the nurturer of love.
*futon (布団): a Japanese mattress used for bedding
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