“If only one day my youth would return, I would tell it of the woes old age has brought me.”

Indeed, elderly people like the above who do not know the true nature of youth, think of their own youth, and weep with regret and longing. But when youth belongs to  believers  with  sound  minds  and  hearts,  it  is  a  most  powerful,  agreeable  and pleasant means of securing  good works and trade for the hereafter, so long as they spend it on worship, and that trade and those good works. For those who know their religious duties and do not misspend their youth, it is a precious and delightful divine bounty.  But when it is  not spent  in moderation,  uprightness, and fear of God, it contains many dangers; it damages eternal happiness and  the  life of this world. In return for the pleasures of one or two years’ youth, in old age it causes many years of grief and sorrow.

Since for most people youth is harmful, we elderly people should thank God that

we have been saved from its dangers and harm. Like everything else, the pleasures of youth depart. If they have been spent on worship and good works, the fruits of such a youth remain perpetually in their place and are the means of gaining youth in eternal life.

Next, I considered the world, with which most people are infatuated and to which they are addicted. Through the light of the Qur’an, I saw that it has three faces, one within the other:

The First looks to the divine names; it is a mirror to them

Its Second Face looks to the hereafter, and is its tillage.

Its Third Face  looks to the worldly; it is the playground of the heedless. Moreover, everyone has his own vast world within this world. Simply, there are

worlds one within  the other to  the  number of human beings.  The pillar of each

person’s private world is his own life. If his body gives way, his world collapses on his head, it is doomsday for him. Since the heedless and neglectful do not realize that their world will be  so quickly destroyed, they suppose it to be permanent like the general world and worship it. I thought to myself: “I too have a private world that will swiftly collapse and be demolished  like the worlds of other people. What value is there in this private world, this brief life of mine?”

Then, through the light of the Qur’an, I saw that both for myself and everyone else, this world is a temporary place of trade, a guesthouse which is every day filled and emptied, a market set up on the road for the passers-by  to  shop  in,  an  ever-renewed  notebook  of  the  Pre-Eternal  Inscriber  which  is constantly written and erased, and every spring is a gilded letter, and every summer a well-composed  ode;  that  it  is  formed  of  mirrors  reflecting  and  renewing  the manifestations of the All-Glorious Maker’s names; is a seed-bed of the hereafter, a flower-bed  of  divine  mercy,  and  a  special,  temporary  workshop  for  producing signboards which will be displayed in the world of eternity.