“Tie your camel first, and then put your trust in Allah”

I have been conditioned to believe in the necessity of prudent planning; to ensure that plans B, C, and D are well thought through and actionable as needed. To take a leap into the unknown, without a safety net, feels utterly mindless. I can hear the voices of those who have so conditioned me saying ‘you just don’t learn’, ‘why can’t you just do as you’re told’, ‘I won’t have any sympathy for you’, ‘it’ll be your own fault’, ‘I warned you’. But maybe for some of us, living within the confines of this conditioning is intolerable. That is why we break.

I have understood that the widely quoted Arab proverb above is meant to encourage us to trust that everything will work out as it should, but at that at the same, do all that we can to ensure a favourable outcome. But what this looks like in practice is very unclear to me. On the face of it ‘tying your camel’ seems to me to encourage taking the ‘safe’ option; ensuring that we have contingencies in place. But can we ever truly ‘trust’ that to which we attach our faith, unless we move towards it without keeping one eye on the escape route?

To take that even further, could it be that the sheer act of ‘tying our camel’, of planning our contingencies, blocks us from ever truly experiencing ‘Allah’ or whatever the object of our faith; love, happiness, success, family, friendship, self-acceptance? I’m not sure, but there’s something about wholeheartedness – that is with complete sincerity and commitment – that seems intuitively true to me, if we want to access anything real.