After the high of cleaning up, organising your space, creating epic journals, managing your finances, you’ll find the routine may become a little difficult to sustain. Old habits do die hard, and the minute a life circumstance hits you hard in the stomach, at 100 mp/h, all those plates you were juggling come tumbling down, one by one. See the problem is, you’re still too distracted with the 10 plates you’re spinning, and the more you focus on them  to ensure they don’t smash, the more they ultimately come crashing down. Good, you now realise you’re only human and not very good at juggling. That is totally ok, something has to give,  your health, social life, relationships,  job, if one thing in your life is off balance, it will impact all of the other components.

A wise woman once said to me, “why are we worrying about keeping all the plates spinning, when we are only told to focus on one plate, Allah, when you focus on Him He will fix all of your affairs and keep the other plates spinning.”

The Heart’s Intelligence

So remember that neuroscientist guy I mentioned before, Daniel Levitin? He believed that one key ingredient to an organised mind, is a zen one, he could understand the value of spiritual composure being in favour of a clearer mind. He stressed the idea that meditation and mindfulness practices will bring us to the present. This is to prevent anxieties from developing, as a result of our minds being either stuck on all of the unfinished tasks we have or some of the experiences of the past that may be impacting our ability to be productive. We are given a commandment to do this five times a day, nothing new, practicing mindfulness as we pray is supposed to counter symptoms of anxiety, as it helps us gather our thoughts, reflect, take a step back, and breathe.

The heart’s intelligence transcends beyond the act of mindfulness, our hearts can become sealed, tainted, interrupted, and not at peace as a result of our actions. One key ingredient to keeping the soul in harmony with the body is by trusting the intelligence of the heart, this is the gatekeeper. The heart knows what action will lead to its discomfort.

Have you ever done something that you shouldn’t have, and went to sleep and your whole day was just a chain of chaos from the moment you woke up? You missed your fajr alarm, you couldn’t find your keys, you left late, the train was delayed, everything in your path was just going wrong. You never really linked the two ideas, that our sins and ability to be productive, go hand in hand. Just as our memory fails us when seeking to learn the Quran after we sin. The heart’s intelligence can guide you through, however,  but it cannot navigate, and you won’t trust it’s navigation without it being cleaned.

All this inside work is continuously bubbling beneath the surface whilst you’re fixing and organising your external world. I know, it’s a lot for one human. Listen to your body when it tells you-you are off balance, that something is wrong. Sometimes the key to an organised mind is a content soul and clean heart, this sounds ambiguous and a little happy-clappy, but I’m pushing forward my argument that our souls,  mind, and heart are all interlinked.

What does it take to have a clean heart? For different people, it can mean different things, but it can be aided through your relationship with God as he has the keys to unlock your full potential, by giving you Barakah of time and allowing you to feel motivated and content with the work you are doing. According to scientist Jospeh Pearce, when we find ourselves in deep spiritual contemplation, “we are drawing from our spiritual universal heart”  which communicates with our brain and influences our cognitive activities, shaping neural behaviour.

When something feels off, that’s normally because it is, ways we are told to remedy this is through prayer, Dhikr, Quran and seeking Allah’s forgiveness. Filling yourself up with things that bring you closer to the creator is a way of healing for the created. Your job is to figure out what it is you need to refuel and fill up your internal cup.

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 What next?

One of the key ingredients to a distracted heart is procrastination, wasting time with things that will not and does not sustain you. Shaytans ability to distract is his weapon of choice, he very quickly latches on to your weakness, for many our weakness take shape in the form of anxiety. Anxiety may be triggered by the amount of time we spend on making a subjectively ‘difficult’ decision. Decisions are hard, I get it, but we are constantly making them daily, without even realising, what direction am I going to walk? What will I have for lunch today? How many emails shall I delete? `The internal processes are occurring subconsciously at a high speed, it is only when we are faced with the ones we deem to carry more weight, that they are pushed to the forefront of our conscience and become difficult. We lament on them, it happens in levels:

(shallow) “I don’t know which phone to get”

(little deeper) “I really don’t want to go to this family gathering tonight, but it’s my duty”

(bed of the ocean) “Do I choose him over my family?”

(hot water) “Do I remove my hijab to get this job?”

All of these questions require thinking, Daniel Levitin argues, thinking, and deliberating is fine, as long as you are equating the amount of time you spend thinking about this decision, to how worthy the decision is of your time. The smaller things should take less time. This is where he introduced Satisficing.

“Satisficing [is] a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing. Simon wanted a word to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. For things that don’t matter critically, we make a choice that satisfies us and is deemed sufficient. You don’t really know if your dry cleaner is the best—you only know that they’re good enough. And that’s what helps you get by. You don’t have time to sample all the dry cleaners within a twenty-four-block radius of your home. … Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behavior; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately, when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction. … Recent research in social psychology has shown that happy people are not people who have more; rather, they are people who are happy with what they already have. Happy people engage in satisficing all of the time, even if they don’t know it.”

Indecisiveness can become a sin once we waste too much time as a result of its presence. Want a clear mind? Be more assertive with decisions you can get through easily. This week is all about navigating with your heart, which will help you make quick impactful decisions, after consulting Allah (swt) try it out and journal about it!