Every time I head south on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, get on a plane for meetings in New York, speak to a group of college students in the Midwest, meet with philanthropists in Texas, I cannot help but think to myself – what an absolute blessing it is to be a part of the world.

It’s not that I don’t want to achieve things. It’s not that I don’t think seriously of goals and objectives. It’s just that I don’t derive my ultimate happiness from the finish line. What I love more than anything else is to be part of the jazz and war of these times, to play a role, to be a citizen of a historical moment. And most recently, I am astonished by the blessings of being a father.

Gratitude evokes two traditions in my head – Muslim prayer and Western literature.

One of the clearest pieces of guidance in Islam – as in all religions – is the sense that the action is up to the person, but the outcome is up to God. Gwendolyn Brooks says it like this:

Live not for Battles Won
Live not for The-End-of-the-Song
Live in the along

My wife and I had our first child recently, and after whispering the Shahada (There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God) into his ear, I sang to him the blessings of Paul Simon:

Never been lonely
Never been lied to
Never had to scuffle in fear
Nothing denied to
Born at the instant
Church bells chime
The whole world whispering
Born at the right time

I wish for my child the love of life that Colonel Green, from Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, had. In his final years, as he was being cared for by a nurse in rural Illinois, he would call his friend in Mexico City and have him put the phone’s receiver out the window so he could listen to the bustle of that metropolis. He wanted to be near the noise of life, even if it ultimately killed him.

Perhaps Robert Frost said it best:

Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

It reminds me of what I believe is a core quality of Islam: that it is a religion for the world. It does not shy away from the messiness of life, or the possibilities and perils of being human.

After the Prophet received his initial revelations in solitude on Mount Hira, he never returned back up the mountain for an extended period of time. He lived his life and tried to bring his faith into the realities of the world – with all its traumas and triumphs. He loved his wives and his children, argued with his friends, settled disputes, occasionally went to war, and ultimately forged a remarkably creative peace in the Hijaz. (This is why suicide – especially suicide bombing – is so profoundly prohibited by Islam, because it is a faith that holds life in this world as deeply holy).

In those moments when a series of defeats competes with my love for the world, I think of Joseph Brodsky’s poem about being imprisoned in and ultimately exiled from his homeland, and the beatings, dismissals and abuses he endured along the way. Brodsky ends it with the line:

Until brown clay is crammed down my larynx,
only gratitude will be gushing from it.