Buyer's Remorse - Portal Gems #33

Est. Read time: 5 min
Edition Number: 33
Adapted from: Heart Softeners: Prophetic Hadith for Our Hardened Hearts
Instructor: Shaykh Abdullah Waheed

Assalamu Alaykum,

Today’s gem is from Shaykh Abdullah Waheed’s course, Heart Softeners: Prophetic Hadith for Our Hardened hearts. In this gem, Shaykh Abdullah shares a personal story as he explains the following hadith:

نِعْمَتَانِ مَغْبُونٌ فِيهِمَا كَثِيرٌ مِنَ النَّاسِ، الصِّحَّةُ وَالْفَرَاغُ
"There are two blessings that many people are deceived into losing: health and free time.” (Bukhari 6412)

Hope you enjoy!

We begin in the Name of Allah ﷻ, the Most Merciful and Compassionate,
We ask that He ﷻ sends Peace and Blessings upon our noble and beloved
Prophet Muhammad ﷺ

Once this actually happened to me. I went to Pakistan in my early teens - like 13, 14. It's one of my first times ever going there, and one day I went for a long walk. I wanted to walk to a well known bakery to get some sweets. 

On the way back, I was carrying a whole bunch of sweets and I said to myself, "There's no way I'm going to walk back with all these sweets." At this point, I’ve never been in a rickshaw before. So, on the way back I decide I’ll take a rickshaw back to my grandmother’s home. The guy takes me to my grandmothers’s home, I’m excited, its my first ever rickshaw ride. I get out and the rickshaw driver says, "that’ll be four hundred rupees." 4 hundred rupees is like four bucks, I didn’t think much of it and gave it to him. 

When I get inside the house my aunt asks me how I got back and I told her that I came back by rickshaw.

She said, “Have you ever taken a rickshaw before?" 

“No.” I replied.

“How much did the driver charge you?”

“I don’t know like 300/400 rupees.”

My aunt bursts out laughing and then runs out the door trying to chase down the rickshaw driver. I was confused, did I do something wrong? She said, "A rickshaw ride to the bakery only costs 40 rupees…” 

So Ghiban is that feeling when you find out that the product that you bought was not even one-tenth of that price and your heart drops. Knowing that you paid way more than what the thing was worth and now there’s nothing you can do. You’re stuck with the decision you made. 

Now, what about a person who spends his entire life on something that they thought they were doing something useful?

"Guess what I was doing this weekend?“

“I made a real estate deal.”

“I made a bunch of money.”

“I did this, I did that…”

The person looks back after all these years and realizes "Man, I just wasted so much time."

As the saying goes: this life is minutes and seconds, it doesn't come back again. If you're able to spend your life correctly once, it's like you live multiple lives. And if you live incorrectly, it's like you never even lived.

How the poet says (translating the Arabic poem):

There's some people that have left us but they're still alive by their work; they've contributed the service they've given to the world. And then some people that are alive and its as if they're dead. They're not useful to the world.

So time is such a valuable asset, health is such a valuable asset. We have to spend our time correctly. May Allah grant us tawfiq. 

أقول قولي هذا وأستغفر الله لي ولكم، فاستغفروه إنه هو الغفور الرحيم

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