Mental Resilience

Subscribe to the podcast and notes: https://qurantalk.podbean.com/ Quran translation on iOS: https://apple.co/2C1YGXj Additional Resources: http://www.masjidtucson.org Contact: qurantalk (at) gmail (dot) com If I went back two hundred years and I explained to the people back then that life has gotten so easy in our time that we literally have to pay money to go to a facility to lift heavy objects only to put them back where you got them and to run on a machine that doesn’t take you anywhere they would think that we have all gone crazy The reason is because in the past doing hard labor was part of life Let’s suspend disbelief for one second and imagine that reincarnation was real, then statistically there is a +90% chance that in all your past lives you were a farmer. This is what makes people who believe reincarnation so comical is that they were never a farmer in their past lives instead they were some knight or king/queen or general - a very prestigious historical figure, but in reality, most likely they were farmers, they never traveled more than 25 miles from where they were born in their whole life. They probably lost children due to illness or disease, they were probably illiterate, probably got up before dawn every morning and worked all day till sunset and then went to bed only to do the same thing again the next day and the day after that. Life back then was intrinsically hard, and the ones who survived had the same genes of their ancestors but as time progressed things shifted When in the past 90% of the population were famers now only 2% of the population are farmers Rather than doing physically demanding work for a job we now predominately do mentally demanding work And as a society, we quickly came to realize that because our lives have gotten so less physically demanding our health has taken a major impact We now sit more than ever, we sit in our cars as we commute to work, we sit in front of a computer for many hours during the day and then we sit and watch Netflix or YouTube Because of this gap we understood that in order to stay physically fit and healthy we needed to create ARTIFICIAL physical hardship. We started exercising, going to the gym, running, we sign up for exercise classes (yoga, pilates, cardio kickboxing). We go on hikes (not to tend to our flock or to savage for food) but for leisure. And in return, our health and vitality improved, because our physiology was designed to need stress. If our muscles are not used they atrophy, we get weak, we get prone to injury and our health and overall wellness deteriorates. To someone 200 years ago this would seem Now what is interesting is that this change in lifestyle didn’t just impact our physical lives it also affected our mental ones as well. And for some reason despite realizing that we require physical stresses in order to keep our bodies healthy, we somehow came to believe that by eliminating any mental hardships that somehow this will not have a strain on our mental resilience Today we have life easier than ever Anything we want we can pretty much have instantly. Walk into a grocery and year-round you can choose from any variety of fresh meats, fruits, grains etc. Don’t feel like cooking probably within a five-mile radius of where you are there are a whole list of options of different restaurants and food styles you could select to. Spend five minutes and instantly there will be a team of trained professionals ready to serve you. The concept of being bored is no longer possible. We have such an abundance of entertainment that if you spent your whole life just watching Netflix or YouTube you would never even dent a fraction of one percent of the content that is continuously being produced for your personal entertainment. While this is a HUGE blessing there is no doubt that this life of ease and abundance, if not handled correctly, will have severe consequences on our mental resilience - NO DIFFERENT THAN THE CHANGE IN PHYSICAL