The first week of medical school did not feel like a beginning. It felt like stepping back into the storm I once begged to escape, only this time the storm bore my name. The calendar said I had arrived. My badge said I belonged. My body said otherwise. Between lectures, labs, and a mind that kept sprinting when it should have walked, I realized the myth I had carried for years: once I got here, I would finally be happy. As if joy were a door that only opens when a single number appears on a screen or a single acceptance email lands in an inbox.

Life did not bend to that story. It never does. It turns out the meaning of life is rarely found in the fireworks at the edge of a finish line. It lives in the intervals. It hides in the ache between efforts, in the quiet after a long night, in the small, steady acts that nobody claps for. I used to believe happiness sits just ahead of me, a reward waiting for a future version of me who has finally earned it. Then another test appears. Another hill rises. The target shifts, and I start waiting again. Waiting, then waning. Highs flare and fade. Lows teach and pass. The heart thinks it is chasing certainty, but really it is learning endurance.

I used to name this feeling lack. Now I am learning to call it becoming — that subtle, sacred work of being shaped while I’m too distracted to notice it happening.

Arrivals often disappoint because we mistake thresholds for destinations. You can cross a threshold and still be the same person who walked up to it. That is why repetition matters. The discipline of showing up recalibrates the soul. Anatomy readings, histology slides, a thousand questions that do not care about how poetic I feel today. Faith teaches the same lesson through different means. Stand. Bow. Prostrate. Repeat. Not to perform, but to be reshaped by the pattern. Cellular life follows its own rehearsal. Division, fatigue, repair. Mitochondria hum. DNA uncoils and recoils. Scar tissue forms where damage once lived. The body remembers, and then it builds.

Meaning sits in that choreography. Growth looks ordinary from the outside. Inside, it is fierce.

This year has already asked me to make peace with what might have been. The phrase haunts me, not as regret, but as an unlit hallway I keep turning toward. What might have been if the last exam had gone differently. What might have been if certain doors had opened earlier. What might have been if I had met certain people in a different season. I hold that question up to the light and I see its twin: what happened in its stead. A roommate I did not choose. A conversation I did not plan. A network that slowly, almost stubbornly, became a kind of shelter.

And maybe that’s how God teaches us. Through the quiet, the mundane, the daily mirrors. A few weeks ago, I gave a khatirah at the mosque here in Grenada, scratching only the surface of what my studies have been showing me: that medicine and meaning move in parallel lines. Both demand observation, patience, and humility.

And so, God can test you with a bad roommate or a good one. Both are curriculum. A difficult one teaches you spine, patience, boundaries, and the grace to hold your tongue. A generous one teaches you to receive ease without guilt and to offer ease back without keeping score. Both are lessons. Both are mercy, just written in different ink. The ease and belonging I feel right now did not descend from the sky. They grew out of unlikely arrangements, the kind that make you admit that khair often travels the back roads while you are staring at the highway.

We are all students — of medicine, of patience, of one another. If you refuse to bring ease to a household because you are busy, remember that we all are. Everyone’s fighting their own deadlines, their own exhaustion, their own mind. Yet it’s within that exhaustion that the real test lies: to care anyway. To choose empathy when apathy is easier. It’s the same with relationships. You can feel 100% while the other is in the gutter, like I am whilst writing this, and still choose to show up. Medical school tempts you to hoard your energy. But the true measure of a physician isn’t how much they memorize, it’s how deeply they can still feel when everything else in them is tired. The selfishness of others once tempted me to be selfish in return. In that mirror, I found my answer: to continue being myself. To keep serving, even through silence, even through unappreciated effort. That, I think, is where the heart of a doctor begins to glow — through the act of conversation, understanding, and service. And besides, science backs it up: caring releases oxytocin. In other words, it feels good.

I am learning to narrate my own life with more humility. Maybe the question is not “Am I finally happy now that I have arrived,” but “Can I be faithful inside the waiting.” Waiting does not mean passivity. It means practicing presence while the outcome stays hidden. It means learning to live inside a day without mortgaging it to a fantasy of permanent ease. It means training the heart to stop bargaining with the future.

The old me measured progress by milestones. The new me is learning to measure it by maintenance — by learning to show up, study, pray, cook as a treat for myself, sleep, call home, and keep doing so with gentleness instead of pressure. The task is not to escape the cycle but to sanctify it. The Prophet’s tradition is a rhythm of small consistent deeds. Biology agrees. Small signals, repeated enough, change expression. Genes turn on and off. Tissues adapt. What the heart rehearses, it becomes.

There is a different kind of happiness available when you stop demanding that life prove itself. It is quieter, but it holds. It comes when you accept that longing will always live here. Longing for mastery. Longing for companionship. Longing for impact that lasts longer than a semester. None of that disappears when you cross a threshold. But longing can be harnessed. It can be yoked to service. It can be trained to bow.

I think of Ramadan again, the heat, the fatigue, the prayers that felt like whispers lost in a big sky. I think of suhoor in the dark and the taste of water at iftar. Spiritual growth rarely announces itself with trumpets. It grows the way muscle grows. Tear, repair, repeat. It grows the way memory grows. Recall, forget, recall again. It grows the way faith grows. Ask, wait, receive, then keep asking because receiving is not the end.

So here is my working definition of arrival. Arrival is not relief. Arrival is responsibility. Arrival is the privilege of carrying what you asked for without breaking the promise you made while you were asking. It is walking into the same storm with a different posture. You bow your head in humility, but you lift your eyes in trust. There are dually innervated answers here: the only real asset a human has is his promises — the ability to make them, to keep them, to stand by the oath of arrival even when the weight of it begins to press down.

I do not know how long this storm will last. I do not know what the next threshold will cost. I do know what I want to become while I walk toward it. Someone who holds his longing without letting it hollow him out. Someone who studies the body and remembers the soul. Someone who recognizes khair when it arrives dressed like inconvenience. Someone who learns to say thank You for the good roommate and the difficult one, because both teach me how to build a home inside myself. And oh, how hollowing it is, to see the lesson past the what-might-have-been and into what has been given instead, whether through a good roommate, a bad one, or the roommates of my own heart, brain, and soul.

O Allah, write for me a heart that is steady in the waiting. Teach me to carry what I asked You for with grace. Let my work be worship and my worship be light. Make the unseen khair clear when I am too tired to notice it. Allow me to belong first to You, so that I can belong gently to others. And when the next threshold comes, let me step through it with a soul that remembers why it had to hurt first.