Principle Forty-One: Restricting one’s focus to the present situation
Allah guides His servants in His Book, first, with respect to action, to confine their attention to the circumstance in which they presently stand; second, with respect to encouragement and deterrence, to consider the benefits that will flow from it; and third, with respect to blessings, to reflect upon their opposites.
This noble principle is affirmed in many Qur’anic verses. It is among the greatest proofs of Allah’s wisdom and one of the most effective means of elevating those who act to every form of religious and worldly good. When a person busies himself with the deed that constitutes the duty of his moment—confining his thought, outward behavior, and inner state to it—he succeeds, and his affair is completed according to his condition.
If, however, he turns his gaze toward other deeds whose appointed time has not yet come, and his soul begins to crave them, his resolve slackens, his ambition unravels, and his concern for those other deeds diminishes both the excellence of the work at hand and the concentration he devotes to it.
Then, when the time for the next duty finally arrives, it finds him with weakened determination and diminished vigor. In many cases the second task even depends on the first for its realization or completion, so he forfeits both the first and the second. By contrast, whoever gathers heart and body together and makes his greatest concern the fulfillment of the deed required at that moment—when the second task presents itself, he meets it prepared, energetic, and eager; his performance of the first becomes an aid to his performance of the second.
An illustration is Allah’s statement, which speaks plainly to this point: “Have you not seen those who were told, ‘Hold back your hands, establish the prayer, and give zakah’? Yet when fighting was prescribed for them, a party of them feared people as they fear Allah, or with even greater fear” (An-Nisaʾ 4:77).
So observe their initial state and the wish they once cherished