ਸਬਰ

sabar ; patience

these days have been so unsteady to me, i cant even put that experience in words. i felt like i was walking in a straight line with some part being lagged behind. it wasn't catastrophic neither tender, just a proof that im changing beneath the surface without knowing, a new shadow growing. and no i wont call it suffering, suffering announces itself. whatever this was, felt stuble and more intrusive - a weird change in mindset with refuses to explain itself.

last year, i found myself leaning towards god more every single day. it wasn’t fearful faith but instead a grounding realizing that only happen once in a lifetime. i believe that everyone gets this choice, to choose the path of the supreme or to write your own. but in my case, it was a compass, which was long ignored but suddenly started to perform perfectly on a random tuesday. i didn't knew this was irreversible, didnt even had an idea of it. you can always pretend that you can do it alone, but the soul who felt peace by bowing to the ground remembers.

its 2026 now nd i prayed with full sincerity for once. one day of undivided pressence, seeing him everywhere and chanting. and that single day unsettled me more than months of routine devotion can ever could. i didn't realize it on that specific day, but after some weeks when i have been busy and exhausted. it made me reconsider life, afterlife and the uneasy space in between, the place where desire masquerades as faith.

when i was thinking about this, a story came up to my mind which was narrated to me by some elder when i was a kid.

there was this girl from a villiage so small that longing has no where to hide. her house was filled with devotion, where “hare krishna” chanting was recited until it lost its edges. it was a house where rituals were being performed every weekend, and the girl used to watch it from a distance, unconvinced. worship, to her felt inherited and singing bhajans to a statue felt like an elaborate avoidance to reality.

but one morning when she went to work, she saw a boy standing beneath a peepal tree. thats all. no promises, no conversation. but something inside her yielded instantly as it waited for her whole life to precise that face. his name was Daksh. from that moment on, her subconscious splintered.

the fields she worked in bore his image. wheat shimmerd with his gaze. dust took on the color of his skin. hery body laboured, but her mind was in some another destination, it was continously circling a single moment like a moth mistaking heat for illumination.

by evening, she was undone. so she went straight to her friend's and confessed everything, breathless and full of shame. her friend listened and offered a solution that felt absurd ; pray.

and you know what? she did. not out of convention but because of urgency. she pronounced god's name with the fervor of someone negotiating with fate. her prayers were not offerings, they were demands painted as devotion. and by this, days turns into months and months into years. two full years of disciplined repetition. and none of her prayers were answerd. daksh never came. and universe didn't bend like her friend told it would.

she decided that god was indifferent. arbitrary and cruel, even. “i asked for one small thing," she said, "and he couldn't even listen." she stopped praying, it wasnt rage that made her stop praying. it was humiliation. the slow vanishing of hope that comes from believing too earnestly for too long.

she dreamt of something that night. there was no landscape, no form, only light, immense and intolerably gentle. and beside it sat a presence that required no introduction. she was not meant to overhear but yet she did. a question hovered between them, whether to grant her request, or to preserve the future designed for her before she learned how to desire.

i dont know what lesson you learnt from this story but for me it meant that god had never ignored her. he was listening very closely enough to refuse.

in daksh, she had located god prematurely, she had mistaken intensity for divinity, attraction for destiny. she had placed the unbearable weight of transcendence onto a human figure and expected him to carry it, to her. what she thought was faith was hunger seeking an altar.

who knew that god sometimes allows us to fall in love, not to reward us, but to expose the shape of our emptiness? who knew that attachment could be a theological lesson? that the first time we kneel is often before the wrong thing, just so we may learn how dangerous devotion can be without discernment?

ਸਬਰ ( sabar ; patience ) revealed itself but as sacred restraint. it was god standing between her and what would have arrived too early and dismantled her. it was mercy disguised as delay, love as refusal.

and in our own lives, sabar is unbearable because it feels so personal and like that girl we also start blaming god, but the doors remain closed long after we have memorized the shape of their handles. prayers echo without response and thats what its suppose to do. we blame the creator but i think that sabar is god trusting . editing our lives with precision we are not capable to comprehend ourselves.