11/09/25 A Drop

There is a strange symmetry in this world. You are not given what you wish for, you are given what you can stand to want. Taufiq ba andaaza e himmat hai azal se. Divine help has always been in proportion to human resolve since the beginning of time. It is a frighteningly fair system. The skies are not generous or cruel, they are exact. They do not deny anyone, they only reflect back the intensity of the desire.

I used to think grace was arbitrary. That some people were simply chosen. That some lives were written with gold while others were scribbled in dust. But the older I get, the more I see how much of what we call destiny is quietly shaped by our own hands. You are not refused, you are only met halfway. And most of us stop walking far before that halfway point.

I have carried that thought like a slow ache in my chest. Because if it’s true, then the fault is not in the sky. It is here, in the stillness of my own heart. In the fear that disguised itself as patience. In the endless waiting I called faith.

Ghalib got it right. The drop of water that doesn’t get nurtured into a pearl then flows as a tear of regret from eyes. It has the substance, the salt, the shimmer. It could have become something rare, something whole. But it stayed where it was, resting against the eyelid of someone who mistook longing for effort. It never fell into the sea, never found the dark cradle of an oyster that could have turned it into light.

توفیق بہ اندازۂ ہمت ہے ازل سے

آنکھوں میں ہے وہ قطرہ کہ گوہر نہ ہوا تھا

I keep thinking about that tear. How it glistens even now, sincere but wasted. How many moments of “almost” fill a life. How many pearls never formed because the drop was too proud or too scared to fall.

God doesn’t deny us. He only waits to see how far we’ll go before we stop asking. Maybe the world isn’t heartless after all, only obedient. It gives itself to those who reach, not to those who wonder. Maybe that’s the quiet tragedy of it all. That the grace I begged for was already waiting for me on the other side of courage. That the drop in my eye was never meant to stay there. It was meant to fall.