It is the first day in the month of Ramadan in the Muslim year 1429 or 2008 in the Christian calendar. Monday the first of September.
My Worries
Since days and weeks I have been nervous, always asking myself the same question, giving myself the same answers and fighting with fears, probably incomprehensible to outsiders.
What if I get hungry or even worse thirsty? Or what if I’m not strong enough? If I can’t do it? Or if I get sick? Where should I draw the line between bearing the suffering and giving up?
Somebody who has always fasted between dawn and sunset during the fasting month is used to it. He is unable to relate to my confusion that is caused by the inner and outer pressure that affects me. The inner, my personal pressure is probably profounder than the outside one.
Just try, don’t pressure yourself. Those are easy words to say for somebody who has been introduced to the whole fasting thing over a long period of time, basically his whole life. But I’m new, totally new and I feel left alone with this.
Around a year and half ago, I became a Muslim. Fasting during the month of Ramadan was an issue for me from the beginning; the one of the five pillars of Islam, which I would have liked to get around from the beginning.
I wished I could just ignore it. I just could not imagine going a whole day without eating and drinking; especially not being able to drink honestly frightened me.
For me not drinking was closely connected to awful suffering because I was a person taking every possibility to get a sip of water or anything else to drink. I have always been afraid of not getting enough to drink, afraid to get headaches or other strange indispositions.
And now I should not be allowed to drink during daytime over the next four weeks. Impossible!
Anxiety Grows
The pressure I imposed upon myself grew with every day. Adding up to this, I remembered my mother’s words. I was not made to fast.
Didn’t I remember the results, whenever I could not eat on time and had to go hungry for a while? Headaches, attacks of nausea and bad-temper. Was it really necessary to put myself through that, she asked. And honestly, I did not know what to say.
I knew that fasting belongs to one of the five duties of every Muslim, but I also knew that pregnant women and elderly or ill people were exempted of their duty to fast. So, I did not belong to any of these people. I was still young, healthy and not pregnant.
Panic is probably the best word to describe my emotional state of being during these weeks and days before the beginning of Ramadan.
I was a pain for the people around me, always bothering them with the same questions that were supposed to calm my mind: What if? Do I have to? Why? Always getting the same unsatisfying answers.
In the end I surrendered to destiny. No, actually, I decided to just try it, believing that God will stand by me.
Preparing for the First Day of Fasting
Nevertheless, the excitement did not leave me. I was worried to stock enough food and drinks to consume during the hours before dawn – sahur.
I could not think of anything else that I would be able to eat in those early morning hours than rice with egg. Also I bought fresh milk and honey because one of my neighbors had told me that she always drinks milk in the morning during the fasting month.
A few days earlier I had bought a rice cooker to be able to boil rice and keep food warm. This way I was able to cook in the evening and did not have to stand in the kitchen at three o’ clock in the morning.
Read: Ready for Your First Ramadan? 9 Things to Focus on
The night before the first fasting day I was preparing food for the morning, when all of a sudden I was standing in darkness. I was confused, uncertain and desperate and all other words one can think of in such a situation.
I sat on the veranda and starred into the darkness, unable to cry because of such a tiny incident but too desperate to laugh and no other idea how to express my feelings at that moment. Emotional exhaustion, triggered by a power failure.
Luckily I was not alone and after some thinking and trying, my friend came to the conclusion that it was just the fuse.
Unfortunately, there was only this one in the whole house. It has probably been the rice cooker that caused the fuse of lights, but for a few moments I was completely convinced that the electricity provider had cut my electricity the night before the first Ramadan on purpose; revenge because I was often late to pay my bills. Pure paranoia!
Around an hour later we had bought a new fuse and after some trying it actually worked and I was able to continue my preparations for the first Ramadan; cooking rice and frying eggs.
Trying to Adjust
The first day, the second and the third passed and I still fasted. I’m honest, it was especially hard in the first few days, but not really during the fasting but after breaking the fast, when my body without giving any visible warning just switched to emergency power supply and I just wanted to go to sleep instantly, at seven in the evening.
It is the whole adjustment that your body has to go through and the lack of sleep that make the first few fasting days a real challenge. But, I did not have headaches, I was not feeling ill and I was not bad-tempered.
In this regard, I was honestly surprised about myself. I was not even hungry and only in the late afternoon hours, around one hour before breaking the fast did I get thirsty.
I had visualized the fasting in all the gray and black shades that I could find in my conscious. Suffering, pain and suffering again, but none of that happened at least not on the physical level.
The Color Scheme of Fasting
Before I continue, I would like to go back to the color scheme of fasting. I said that my visualization of gray and black shades of suffering and pain had been wrong.
Nevertheless, I do not intend to leave the reader to believe that fasting boasts with bright, loud colors like red, yellow or green; at least not for me.
If one can even talk about colors, they were almost transparent colors as one would find in great heights, in the silence and loneliness of mountains.
Soft, floating beige, a fading ocher shade, a dissolving gray-violet. Colors that are removed from any worldliness. And colors without lust and greed. Colors of pure being.
Through these colors I understood that the fasting month belongs to God.
How can I describe my feelings, my state of my mind during the first two weeks? I felt light, but deeply rooted in myself and in the world; a lightness and openness for the things that lay ahead of me that I have never felt like that before.
Read: Ramadan is Time for Self-Care
Devotion to the present. Closeness to God is the best description but the most difficult one to understand. Abstract.
It was the second half of the fasting month when something radically changed in my mental state of mind. I was quickly irritated, my senses, especially my hearing were oversensitive and the dissatisfaction with myself and my surrounding seemed to grow with every day.
It was like the poison, the bad smell and garbage that had left my body the weeks earlier was now ready to leave my psyche with such force and ruthlessness that did not consider the person behind it all – me.
I saw it coming. I felt it the whole time building up. It was boiling in me. I felt that an explosion and a breakdown came towards me and I could not do anything about it.
It was like a part of me had detached itself and was now being forced to leave my body; like a boil that has been growing, aging and aching for ages, so that one got used to it.
But now, there was a higher force that pocked the boil and made all the stinking, bloody pus flow away. That’s how my breakdown felt. I could only wait until it was over, until all the bitter, poisoned tears had left me, until there were no more.
I still felt weak and incomplete a few days after this event, but then the place, which before was full with the stinking boil, filled itself with something new; a strength, a balance and a bright, glowing love that made me quickly forget the breakdown.
Conclusion
After one month of fasting, I was glad to pick up my regular daily activities, but I do not want to miss this intensive, challenging and spiritual experience that the first fasting was for me. It made me all the more determined in my trust for the truth and for God.
The fasting experience showed me that everything is possible with divine confidence.
(From Discovering Islam’s archive)