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| No crescent moon: Hopefully my intentions seem clearer than this blurry photo of rain-soaked Canberra on the eve of Ramadan. |
4 years ago in fact, in a little room nestled just behind the Fontaine Saint Michel - a mere stones throw from the Cathedral de Notre Dame...
But for the moment it's set in Canberra.
Sure, it doesn't sound quite as glamorous, but sometimes you have to go with what life throws at you.
I'm doing the Ramadan again, for the fourth year running, and I guess my intention here is to explain why this would be of any interest to a non-muslim like myself.
The reason why I did Ramadan the first time (yes, the Paris part) was mainly due to circumstance. In subsequent years however, when people heard I was doing Ramadan again they would ask: "But why? You're not Muslim!" I would begin to explain "Well, its just that I learnt so much the first time". This would usually intrigue people "So much?" they would ask, "Like what kind of things did you learn?"
And here's where the trouble started. The few lessons that I had learned turned into five lessons and those into ten lessons and so on until it seemed the only way I could do Ramadan justice was to give a blow-by-blow, day-by-day description of the whole thing as it happened. This was obviously way too difficult to fit into the time-span of an average waiting-for-the-bus type conversation. Rather than risk submitting more hapless friends to my already overly-lengthy monologues, I figured it would make much more sense to try and write it all down instead. 30 Lessons should be enough, even for me - that makes one for every day of Ramadan in 2010.*
Its funny that the purpose of an introduction is usually to explain ones intentions, because that's exactly what Hebbat, the friend who got me into this whole thing, wrote to me about this very morning. It might have been an Imam that she quoted saying: "As we live through the difficulty that abstaining presents, we pause a moment to check our intentions before we decide on the action that will help us get beyond the difficulty."
As Hebbat herself says, this sounds like a bit of philosophical Mumbo-Jumbo, but Muslim or not, I'm certain we could all learn a little by studying the science of "getting beyond difficulties" - so I guess that is also part of the intention in my writings here.
But enough about introductions and intentions you say, we want to hear about Paris!
Yes, well that may have to wait until tomorrow's lesson which may very likely be called, you guessed it, Patience.
*"Mean what you say even if you fall short of what you proclaim". [Bill Drummond]
