The greatest of God’s saints remain hidden. - Shams of Tabriz
There is a bond that I have felt, an unconditional one. It can’t be captured in words. I have forever roamed the corners of the world to find a hint of that belonging. I remain a wanderer. Each day, I expect less. My only regret: that I didn’t cherish it when I had the chance. But we are built this way, aren’t we? We only truly feel once we have lost. Mistaking presence for permanence. Perhaps I continue making that mistake.
The first born is always loved differently, but a bond like this is probably formed only once in a lifetime. There is a natural telepathic connection between a father and son. An unspoken language in silences. The son is an image born of the father, and the father sees in that image everything he hoped he could be.
My father was the silent types really. He spoke only when spoken to. A man of few words, and when he did speak, his words would cut through like a hot knife through butter. Most of the times, he wore a simple smile on his face, one I always doubted: how could a man be so patient in a world full of darkness? What madness drove him to keep a happy face.
I wouldn’t understand till it was too late. It was me. I was the legacy he thought he would leave behind.
He was an ambitious man, in all the wrong places I thought. Money and fame meant very little to him. If he had his way, he would have done away with it all. God and family was his ammunition. He never wanted more than he needed. He accumulated worldly possessions for his family. If I had to truly think of what he really wanted, it was just peace. Simple peace. Many mistook him for merely an activist or a religious man. He was something beyond social rituals though. He deeply cared for kindness and humility.
A calm uprising brewed inside him, he and I lived through the digital transition of the 1990s. He had watched the world change, and change it did for him. From the corners of a small town to the chaos of a city in a foreign land, and back again. He carried with him the burdens of a dark world he had witnessed, an underworld, but chose to show us very little of. Perhaps he thought he was protecting us. Perhaps he was.
From the genocide of Bosnia to the war crimes in Afghanistan, he kept an account of it all. We felt the pain of every soul that suffered, dead or alive. We would talk about the persecution of Muslims throughout history and he would let an occasional sigh slip. I was one of his confidants along with my mother. I don’t know if he saw the effects these conversations had on me, or perhaps he did and thought it would do well for me to know this side of reality, one we were kept far from. The unpleasant one. He held it close to his heart. He wanted change. A revolution.
It killed us both a little inside each time we heard fabricated fables through the mouths of warmongering news anchors. It was not his fault I thought; he was getting paid for it. But my father never saw it that way, worldly riches meant very little to him. He wondered, how a human being could allow another’s suffering, a question he struggled with. His heart spoke a language that was soft and humble, and in those words, there was only one reason for a man’s action, only one force strong enough to explain why we do what we do:
Purpose.
And then he was gone.
In a split second, I lost the light that forever shinned, the one I had so blatantly ignored. He left me with his words, his silences, his example. I am that son, whose heart only opened after the loss.
But here is what I learned, and what I want you to understand: We are made of what we allow ourselves to be.
So I ask: What are you made of? Not what you think you’re made of, not what you wish you were made of, but what you choose, right now, in this moment?
The greatest of men remain hidden not because they seek obscurity, but because their work is quiet. Because force, real momentum, doesn’t announce itself. It simply acts.
This is his story. But it is also yours. And mine.
What we do with it is the only question that matters.