You Were Created With What You Need

 By Alaa Suleiman

There is another way of understanding awareness—one we rarely stop to consider.

Perhaps there are things you already know without ever having consciously learned them. Things you understand without having contributed even the smallest effort to the making of that understanding.

Perhaps some forms of awareness are simply original to us.

And perhaps, in certain parts of life, what we need is not to expand that awareness or endlessly reshape it, but to trust what was already placed within us.

This may sound contrary to almost everything we are taught today. We are constantly encouraged to become “more aware,” to improve ourselves, examine our emotions, and rethink our beliefs.

But what if some things were sound before we began correcting them?

What if our intervention sometimes becomes the very thing that distorts them?

We are born with features chosen for us: the colour of our eyes, our hair, the shape of our faces. Later, if we decide to alter those features, some outside intervention becomes necessary.

The appearance may change, but underneath the alteration, we remain ourselves.

Awareness can sometimes be much the same.

We may change the way we interpret something or adopt new explanations for it, yet somewhere beneath those layers, something in us continues to hold its first understanding—the understanding that existed before all the outside voices arrived.

God created us upon fitrah and blessed us with Islam. A sound fitrah is not a defect waiting to be repaired; it is a gift.

To say that we were created upon fitrah is not merely to speak of our outward form. It speaks to something deeper: an original inclination toward goodness, peace, mercy, love, and truth.

There is something within us that recognizes certain things before we even learn their names.

So I often wonder: why are we so determined to decorate the self?

We layer our thoughts with concepts, terminology, and other people’s interpretations of life. We borrow ways of understanding ourselves from books, articles, experts, and movements.

But rarely do we stop to ask: Who are we borrowing these ideas from? How did we become certain that what we are adding is wiser than what already exists within us?

Not every change is development.

And not every addition is an elevation.

Perhaps we do not always need more awareness.

Some forms of “awareness” may enter our minds simply because they make us feel more sophisticated or more informed. Yet sometimes they take us farther away from what we genuinely feel and from what we might naturally have done had we simply trusted our fitrah.

This is where the inner conflict begins.

Something inside you tells you one thing, while everything you have learned tells you another.

Your first instinct pulls you in one direction; excessive analysis pulls you in another.

And suddenly you find yourself suspended between who you are and who you believe you ought to be.

Perhaps true awareness sometimes means becoming aware that you were already aware.

It may mean understanding that you can distort something healthy within yourself by decorating it too much or dressing your thoughts in language that does not belong to their nature.

In some moments, the better choice is simply to remain yourself.

To trust what is already there.

To allow yourself, when you fall into the mud, to search for a way out using what God placed within you, rather than relying only on phrases you memorized from others.

There is a vast difference between saying, “I survived through what my Lord gave me,” and saying, “I survived because I was more aware.”

One contains gratitude.

The other can quietly nourish the ego.

None of us began from nothing. We did not create our own souls. We did not place within ourselves the first capacity for compassion, love, forgiveness, or peace.

Love may be the clearest example.

We are born knowing something about love before we even know the word for it.

A child loves a mother and father without reading about attachment theory, family psychology, or emotional development.

The love exists before the explanation.

Then we grow older.

We read books and articles explaining the psychological meaning of being criticized by a parent or raised in a certain way. We learn new terminology and begin revisiting childhood through the lens of those concepts.

Some of this knowledge can certainly be valuable. It can help us understand harm, establish boundaries, and recognize patterns that need to change.

The danger begins when knowledge becomes the only lens through which we interpret everything.

We can absorb an idea so completely that our reactions begin to follow what we have read rather than what we genuinely feel.

We call this awareness.

Yet had we allowed some space for the original person within us, we might sometimes have been more forgiving, more inclined to consider context, and calmer in our judgment.

Not because every wrong must be excused.

Not because every wound should be denied.

But because fitrah can sometimes preserve love even while recognizing wrongdoing.

Excessive analysis, on the other hand, can make our reaction larger than the event itself. Later, we may discover that we have entered another maze entirely: regret.

The awareness we sought in order to protect ourselves can then become the source of our confusion.

Awareness already exists within us.

Perhaps one of its highest forms is simply recognizing that it is there without constantly trying to manufacture it.

We need to learn the difference between knowledge that illuminates the road and knowledge that makes us doubt every step we take.

We do not have to reconstruct ourselves every time the world offers us a new explanation of life.

Sometimes, all we need is to listen carefully to what was already within us before all those voices arrived.

Because on certain roads, our fitrah may be wiser than we are when we are trying so hard to become wise.