A scholar is walking through a marketplace, somewhere in the Muslim world, centuries ago. It is hot. There are spice merchants, cloth traders, butchers waving the flies off the meat. And there is one man with a cart of ice, which in that heat is less a product than a countdown.
Every other trader is shouting prices. He is shouting something else.
"Have mercy on the one whose wealth is melting away!"
Everything he owns is sitting in front of him turning into a puddle, and there is nothing he can do about it. He can sell the ice or watch it go, and either way it is leaving him.
The scholar stopped walking. He said afterwards that standing in that market, listening to a man he would never see again, he finally understood a chapter of the Quran he had been reciting his whole life.
Nobody hearing that man would call him irrational. Now look at your own position and tell me what is different.
You insure the house. You lock the car and you probably check twice. You back up the laptop, you change the passwords, you keep an eye on the bank balance closely enough that you would notice forty pounds going missing.
And the one asset that is definitely, measurably, continuously draining, the one you cannot insure, cannot lock, cannot back up, cannot replace, and are spending right now reading this sentence, gets no mechanism at all. No alarm. No monthly statement.
We guard the things that might be taken. We are careless with the only thing guaranteed to go.
The ice-seller had the advantage of being able to see his loss. You cannot see yours. Nothing pools. The days feel identical, which is exactly the problem, because identical days are the most expensive kind.
There is a chapter of the Quran, three verses, fourteen words in Arabic, that says the thing out loud.
By time. Indeed, mankind is in loss. Except those who believe, do righteous deeds, enjoin one another to truth, and enjoin one another to patience.
Most of us assume that a life left alone trends towards neutral. The surah says there is no neutral. Left alone, a life does not idle, it drains. You are not standing still while you decide what to do with yourself. You are already spending.
Have mercy on the one whose wealth is melting away.
He meant the ice. The ice was never the expensive part.