Shaykh Waleed Basyouni shared a gem he learned from his skydiving experience. Before he jumped out of the plane, his instructor said to him, (paraphrasing) “Imagine you’re standing in front of your friends boasting about your skydiving experience. Ask yourself, how you would feel if you jumped and landed successfully? And then ask yourself, how would you feel if you didn’t jump and this plane landed?”
There is little doubt that when you land you’d feel regret for not taking advantage of the opportunity. Even though, I don’t like to go on the majority of roller coasters and rides at amusement parks, I try to force myself to ride them with my friends because every time I decline to take the ride, and I wait at the bottom for those in my group to return, I do feel a sense of regret.
Sh. Waleed advised that when we fear or are hesitating to take an action that we should ask ourselves these two questions. This gem was worth the entire weekend seminar for me and there were so many other gems derived from the lives of the scholars of Islam.
There are a few issues I’ve been turning over in my mind so after the istikhara prayer, asking myself these questions helped push me through the mental barriers of fear and hesitation so that I could take meaningful action.
Ify Okoye 
very nice ify
Can’t entirely agree. Not all challenges must be accepted. Unless, of course, you’re Chuck Norris.
LifewithQuran: Thanks, edited the spelling of my name because usually when someone puts in two f’s, it means they’re not pronouncing E-fee correctly, thanks for stopping by 🙂
Bill: True, not all challenges must be accepted and even the Waleed mentioned in the post said, it’s takes a certain level of madness to jump out of a moving plane. But I think pushing ourselves outside of our comfort circle every now and again can be an opportunity for tremendous growth. Glad to see you’re back to an English keyboard!
I have this mental image of the comfort zone and movement beyond it. I suspect most people, if they’re like me, think of a minor change — eating one less bagel a week, for example — as movement beyond the comfort zone, while hard-core thinkers — nutrititionists, in this case — would say “Three less bagels a week plus jogging every other day plus two less visits to Starbucks”. Faced with such dichotomy, it’s helpful to keep in mind the Chinese adage about journeys of a thousand miles.
Yes, back to the US keyboard. I was surprised to see that with the French keyboard, even when I *knew* that the key I’d just tapped wasn’t, for example, the ‘q’ (on theirs, I believe it’s the ‘a’), my brain was still satisfied. No flags went off to say Hey, you just made a typo, go fix it. I had to learn to slow down and verify/correct any words which contained any of the the six or so ‘misplaced’ letters. As you saw, not always successfully!