Always on my mind.

Somewhere around 6 years old, I was sitting on the flight of stairs with my mom slightly behind me and sitting on a higher step. She pulled through the comb from each strain of hair on my head with gentle touch and gentle gesture; I was feeling the blessing of a mother as she gracefully sweeps through my hair despite the chilly morning breeze. In a calm tone, she said “Angah, when you grow up, you’ll be a memory in people’s head, be a good one”. I was contemplating for a moment, trying to make heads and tails of what she’s saying. As a child, I listen as a child, understood as a child and see things as a child.

But life has its own way of sorting things out, I grew up eventually and family watched me change, because they let me change. I gradually develop understanding towards behaviors and actions; I slowly grasp the meaning of the word when I hark back to them. I guess it’s true what they say, mother does know best. I now know and understand what it feels like, to watch your own son grow up and leave for the very first time, the reluctance of letting him go, and also the throbbing heartbreak when they didn’t turn out the way you wanted them to be. 

Parents will always want the very best for you and that’s why they love you more than they love themselves. I was sad and crying when my father caned me but it wasn’t the bruise that hurts, it was the heart when somebody you love and you trust hurts you. I felt asleep in exhaustion but I managed to catch a glimpse of my father’s word, “Angah, you may not have the best father, but you’ll always have a father that loves you best”. Every time I reminisce that moment, cold tears would spontaneously roll down my check and my heart would grow fonder and the love for my parents would continuously develop with each memories made. Wherever I go and whatever I do, I’ll bring my parent’s name along with me. I don’t care if it’s not mother’s or father’s day, but Mom and Dad, I love you every day. 

Science and faith.

No, it’s not the name of The Script recent album although I do admire the immaculately awe-inspiring Irish band. Just the other day, I was having a contented afternoon lunch by the lake with Sam and Jimmy. It was after Solat Jumaat and the three of us waited for the ambiance to abate from all the hectic crowd. Grasping warily on where we should sit, my eye caught the table on the corner of the diner, just next to the illuminating lake. Jimmy broke the silence as he brought this idea on the contradiction between Science and Faith.

It’s not something new since people have been holding the two ideas since the Renaissance era. Whether it’s about neglecting one another or accentuating one idea, majority sees it as vastly incompatible. He was going on ambitiously, on how science corroborates reasons and cold hard facts while faith is correlated to emotions, feelings and sufficient evidence. Compelled to be heard, I brought on this idea of God’s spot and the simple logic of Science can’t explain everything and Faith is required in certain coincidences. 

God’s spot is believed to be located somewhere in the front hemisphere of the Cerebrum. No matter how much we don’t believe in god and how much an atheist we wish we could be, in the back of our mind, we still believe in a divine power to perform miracle in our life, somewhere we can turn to when everything seems to be gone astray. When you’re at the side of the bed, crying as your father fight for his next breath after a car accident, this would be the time where you would just dropped to your knee, raise your hand, wishing god to help him make it through, wishing for god’s miracle to work its way and make everything’s okay again. That’s how you know that God’s spot exist. All you need is just a little bit of faith.

Or maybe when the time you’re anxiously waiting for your examination results. The result is absolutely significant to you as it determines what you’ll be wearing in the next 20 years. After it’s all set and done, there’s not a single thing that man and all of his technologies can do to change what’s written. At this point, God’s spot play it’s role and the only one you can turn to is just God himself. I can tell you that there’s no scientific explanation or logical reasoning to explain such phenomenon. 

At the end of the day, we realized that science itself requires faith and it will eventually lead you back to Quran. So we settled down the evening chat with the simple statement of some questions are better left unanswered.