 Allah says, Surely man has been created anxious and impatient. When evil afflicts him, he worries, and when good afflicts him, he withholds, except for those who pray, and those who are constant in their prayer, and those who give the right of their wealth to the beggars and the needy, and those who believe in the day of reckoning, and those who are fearful of the punishments of their Lord, for none should be secure from the punishment of their Lord. And those who guard their chastity, except from their spouses or bondswoman, for whoever seeks more has transgressed. And those who are faithful to their trusts and their promises, and those who are honest in their testimony, and those who are steadfast in their prayers, they will be in gardens honored. So look here in these verses at the variety of acts that Allah has given us, things that we can do, things that we can restrain ourselves from, things that all we need is an intention to make into an act of worship. But also note that he begins and ends with prayer, an act that brings together many of these forms of remembrance, and we will return to this. So therefore, depending on our state at any given time, we can be praying, we can be making dua, we can be reciting Quran, we can be feeding the hungry, we can be helping the needy, we can be fasting, we can be earning to support our families, we can simply be honest. These are all things that we can do and that we should do based on how engaged we are in that moment in what we are trying to do. The Prophet ﷺ said, Do what you are able for Allah does not disengage until you do, until you disengage. And therefore we have this variety of acts of worship, so that when we feel ourselves disengaging from one and becoming bored with one, we can move to do something else and reawaken our hearts. But one of the great tragedies of the modern world is that we have lost track of ourselves and of the world. And so we don't often sense this disengagement. Allah says, Don't be like those who forget Allah. So Allah made them forget themselves. They are the disobedient. And there are a number of ways of understanding this, but what I want to look at and what I want to focus on is how we view our relationship with time. In the modern world, we have a very linear view of time. We start at one place and we get to another and there are steps along the way from the beginning to the end. So in our lives generally, if we look, we want to do good in school so we get into a good college. And we want to do well there so we get into a good job. And we want to do well there so we can get a promotion and make more money so then we can retire early and vacation our lives away. And perhaps this is a breakdown of 50 years, but we can break our day down each and every day of ours in the same way. And we can break our weeks down in the same way. There's a starting point and there's an ending point. But this is not the Quranic view of the world. Allah says He is the one who made the day and the night and the day follow each other for whoever wants to remember will be grateful. The Quran therefore is calling us to an astoundingly cyclical view of the world. The day follows the night, follows the day, follows the night. Our religion is based on cycles and so is the world around us and so is the body that we are in. We are creatures of the moment beings that respond to what's going on around us. So when the sun rises, this is the beginning of the cycle. This is the beginning of the cycle of the day. And our circadian rhythm also wakes us up and we are spiritually awakened by pleasure. These are all come together. This is the Islamic vision of the Muslim life. We are radically in tune with our own bodies and with the world around us. And there's no other way to practice Islam as Allah wants us to. The Prophet said O Allah, we seek refuge with you from anxiety and from grief, meaning anxiety over the future and grief over what is past. Instead, the Muslim lives in the moment, aware in every moment, in reminded by the world around him that Allah is present and that Allah is watching. And the moment that we turn from this world view and we turn instead to the world, we forget O Allah and we start worrying about things far in the future that we have no control over whatsoever. And in doing so, Allah causes us to lose touch with ourselves. So we get progressively sicker and sicker because we live lives so foreign to how our own bodies were designed by Allah. And it's this disconnection from the roots of anxiety and depression with the Prophet sallallahu alayhi wa sallam that we seek refuge from in the du'a. And our scholars have said that Atoba is the very essence of all that we do in this religion. And one of the reasons for it is because of its repetitive nature, it is a return. We're turning again and again and again back to Allah. It is turning the monotony of our lives into something more, into something meaningful by imbuing it with the sacred, the recognition of the Divine that's concealed behind the mundane world. Our solution, therefore, is to perform Atoba in the truest sense of the word. To return to acting within cyclical time, to organizing our time around our prayers, to the movements of the heavens and to our own internal systems. And by doing that with time we will return to thinking in that way again. I ask for Allah's forgiveness. Praise be to Allah. We testify that there is no God but Allah alone and without partner. May peace and prayers be upon His chosen messenger, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam. Our scholars have consistently and unanimously stressed the importance of certain practices within the spiritual life of all Muslims. More importantly than any single practice what they encouraged and what they themselves did was to take our time seriously and to do so by scheduling it, by creating a schedule and a routine that we all follow each and every day. One of the saints of the religion said, man anfaqa zamanuhu fiddiaa khunima barakatul jiddi wal intifaa Whoever spends his time wastefully will be deprived of the blessings of hard work and benefit. And this is because these scholars understood the words of Allah, jaza'un wi faqaa. God promises us a commensurate recompense. And this applies to this world just as much as applies to the next. So a moment in which we are connected with Allah, that we are remembering Him in this world will be rewarded by another moment of connection and another moment of remembrance. But a moment in which we are heedless in which we are disconnected will be recompensed with a further moment of disconnection. So therefore if we do not schedule our time we will inevitably start wasting it and that will inevitably lead us to waste even more time and more and more and more until all of our time is gone and we have forgotten Allah. And then it becomes all that much harder at that point to keep up those acts of worship that we want to do and when we try to start them. So we have to reframe our lives and not just try to add one prayer here or one prayer there. And this is one of the reasons why the prayer is so important in our religion. It is meant to be an automatic reset so that we are remembering God at least five times a day before we are too far gone in our heedlessness and are not remembering. So this is the first thing that we should do to help ourselves, to create a schedule for ourselves. When is it that we want to wake up? When is it that we are going to do our work? When will we pray? When can we set a time to read the Quran for remembering Allah, for listening to a scholar teach? If we don't set up that time for ourselves no one else will set up that time for us and we will consistently fail every time we try. These things have to be our daily wards, our daily wadifahs. And look at these two words that our scholars have used for these daily practices. A wadifah, a duty, something we owe to ourselves and to Allah to do. But also a wadid, a watering hole, a spring, a place to give our souls something to drink and to be refreshed, something we must constantly do and return to to keep our souls alive. So this is the first thing, we should create a schedule. The second thing that we should do is to look out for those times which we have been told have special blessings and to seek them out. If there's a night of blessings and these are especially important because at night our minds are generally free from the worries of this world so we can focus better. So if we have one of those nights we should get up just five minutes before Fajr begins or stay up just five minutes after we pray our aisha and pray just two rakahs so we have performed something of Qiyamul Layl and there are many such nights for us. There's Layat al Qadr which is likely in Ramadan likely on the 27th night. There's the first night in Muharram the night of Ashura the first and 15th nights of Rajah the 15th and 27th nights of Shaaban the night of Arafah the two nights of Eid. These are all times and places that we can be adding to what we are doing. And then there are special days as well Arafah and Ashura on the 27th of Rajah on the 17th of Ramadan and every Friday and then there are special times that we can seek out every day right before the sun rises the time of Maghrib between the Adhan and the Aqama there are many compilations of these things and we should especially focus some extra devotions to those times every day and every week and every year or however often they come about but in doing so we must keep one thing in mind we should never forget to keep ourselves in line with the sunnah to keep our priorities straight so none of this extra worship is worth missing something that is obligatory for our prayer or missing of our fast. To conclude in all of this we must keep in mind what the Prophet SAW said when two of the companions Hanlara and Abu Bakr claimed that they were hypocrites for the inconsistency of their remembrance. The Prophet SAW told them when he was confronted he said The Prophet SAW said by the one whose hand is my soul if you were to stay constant upon the state you are at with me in remembrance the angels would greet you on your beds and in the streets but it is hour by hour hour by hour meaning here that we devote some time to Allah and we devote some time to our worldly life and then we return and we go back Islam is not asking us for perfection at our very first step it is only asking us that we make that first step and once that first step has been made every step thereafter becomes that much easier We ask Allah to grace us with that which he loves and is pleased with Allahumma salli wa sallim wa barik ala Sayyidina Muhammad Allahumma wa arda an saadatina Abi Bakr, Mu'umra, Wa Thman, Wa Ali wa arda Allahumma an al-Hassani, Wa al-Hussain Wa an Ummih, Ma Fatiha, Al-Zahra Wa an Al-Sahabati, Al-Ajma'een Wa an Al-Zwajinabi, Al-Ummahat, Al-Mu'mineen Wa an Al-Tabi'een Wa an Al-Tabi'een Wa Al-Ihsan, Al-Illa, Al-Yummideen Wa alayna ma ahum bi rahmatika ya'a Al-Rahman, Al-Rahmeen May Allah send prayers and peace among our Prophet Muhammad SAW May Allah be pleased with our Masters Abu Bakr, Umar, Othman and Ali as well as upon Al-Hassan and Al-Hussain and their mother Fatima Al-Zahra and the rest of the companions and the mothers of the believers and those that follow them in goodness until the Day of Reckoning and we ask that Allah be pleased with us as well out of His vast mercy Allahumma inna na'udubika min aadabi jahannam min aadabi al-qabr min fitnita al-mahya wa al-mumat min shabi fitnita al-Masih Al-Dajjal may Allah give us refuge with Him from the punishment of the fire from the torments of the grave from the trials of life and death and from the evil tribulation of the Dajjal wa ba'aduf inna allaha ta'ali yakul inna allaha ya'amurub al-adli wa al-ahsani wa ita'id al-kurba wa yannha inna al-fahshai wa al-munkari wa al-baghri ya'idukum al-alakum tadakkarun To conclude, Allah says surely Allah commands justice excellence and charity to relatives and He forbids indecency vice and injustice He warns you so that you may take heed Welcome, As-Salaam