You know that feeling you get when you do something really difficult. No, not during the difficult part, but right after.
That amazing feeling. The one where you’re kind of on this high on life, I can accomplish anything feeling (usually it’s the dopamine, but you get the point).
To build muscle, learn a new skill, or whatever else. In most cases we’ll be challenged a little bit…a learning curve.
There’s a book by David Goggins called Can’t Hurt Me where he talks about how our minds are capable of reaching new heights as long as we can “callous the mind”.
Callouses are kind of like blisters that you get after you lift some weights, or do some other strenuous exercise. They’re a result of hard work, persistence, and grit. They’re also the way that your body starts to bulletproof your hands to continue lifting and building up to lift even heavier weights. In other words, they’re built through discomfort.
This idea really had me thinking about my own life and the exercise of waking up for fajr.
No matter how much we prepare the night before to wake up early, the getting up part is always difficult.
I think the cool thing is that although we HAVE to wake up for fajr, it’s the ultimate way that we’ve been prescribed to put our bodies through discomfort, or rather to “callous the mind”. So even before we make our beds, just the fact that we wake up for prayer, we’ve achieved a victory that overcomes our minds and feeds our souls.
And just like how callouses help build up our hands to lift heavier weights, the more consistent we become in waking up for fajr, the better we’ll be at taking on the challenges of the day. Especially with so many distractions that look to divert our attention away from our goals and dreams, isn’t fajr exactly what we need…what our souls need?
Thinking about it further, maybe it’s not our minds that need to be calloused, but rather, our souls.
VASIM KAPADIA 