Al-Kahf · Makki · ayah 62 of 110

Al-Kahf 18:62

فَلَمَّا جَاوَزَا قَالَ لِفَتَىٰهُ ءَاتِنَا غَدَآءَنَا لَقَدْ لَقِينَا مِن سَفَرِنَا هَـٰذَا نَصَبًا

“So when they had passed beyond it, [Moses] said to his boy, "Bring us our morning meal. We have certainly suffered in this, our journey, [much] fatigue."”

Saheeh International

Essence

The word for his fatigue belongs to a family of planted spears and raised waymarks: tiredness as a stone set up in the ground.

A reflection

The tiredness was issued

Sahih al-Bukhari puts one clause into this verse that changes it completely. Musa did not feel the fatigue until he had passed the place Allah had commanded.

One commentary says the same thing more bluntly. Fatigue and hunger were cast upon him when he went past the appointed spot. Before that he had felt neither.

So the tiredness did not accumulate. It arrived.

And it arrived with timing, which is the part the ego cannot absorb. Everyone believes they own their own stamina. It is the most private thing a person has, and the one we most often congratulate ourselves on.

He had been walking for a long while with a basket, a young man and no map. He was not tired. He then stepped past one rock, and he was.

A ringer in a tower will tell you that during a long peal the arms are not really there. There is the rope, the stroke and the count, and nothing else. The arms turn up afterwards, all at once, at the bottom of the stairs.

That is a glimpse of the thing and it is still not the thing, because the ringer's relief comes when the work stops. Here the work did not stop. The relief turned into its opposite the moment he left the path.

The pride worth losing here is not pride in strength. It is the quieter vanity of thinking your own capacity explains your good stretches. You were not tired because you are strong. You were not tired because you were being carried, on that road, for that errand.

And the moment the errand was behind him, the carrying was withdrawn. He felt what any man ought to feel after a day and a night on foot.

Nothing was broken. Something was simply handed back.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.