Who Said You Can't Live Forever?

Yesterday, I became a year older.

Amid all that comes with a birthday; the prayers, the messages, the photographs, the laughter... I found my thoughts wandering, strangely enough, towards death.

Not dying.

Death.

The death of things. The death of moments. The death of versions of ourselves. The ending of lives we once lived so completely that we could never have imagined becoming someone else.

And then I thought:

Who said you can't live forever?

Years ago, I wrote about oblivion.

I wrote about wanting to disappear so completely that existence itself would forget that I had passed through it. I wrote about pain with the conviction of someone who believed pain was perhaps the only thing incapable of lying. I questioned love. I questioned friendship. I questioned family. I questioned life itself.

I believed in God, fiercely, but I had stopped believing in life.

There is a difference.

I knew Allah existed. I simply wasn't convinced that this strange thing called living was anything more than an elaborate sequence of people arriving, hurting, loving, disappointing, leaving and eventually being forgotten.

I wrote then:

"I'll live on, to die off."

I don't think that anymore.

Or perhaps, more accurately, I now understand what I could not understand then.

I have already died many times.

And somehow, I have lived through every death.

There is a little boy somewhere who still exists.

He doesn't know SDCI. He doesn't know boardrooms, strategies, policy conversations or what it means to build an institution. He doesn't know that people will one day introduce him with titles before his name. He doesn't know what leadership costs. He hasn't met most of the people who will eventually become chapters of his story.

His world is much smaller.

And I envy him sometimes.

Because he is living his forever.

Then there was the boy who became a student.

ATBU.

What an eternity that was.

Seven years is a long time when you are living it and a terribly short time when you are remembering it.

Somewhere, there is still a younger Sulaiman walking those roads. Somewhere, the Eagle is still flying through lecture halls, student politics, friendships, responsibilities, arguments, ambitions and all the beautiful foolishness of being young enough to believe the world can be conquered before breakfast.

He became Financial Secretary.

He became President.

He became the person people called when things needed to be done.

He made mistakes too.

He trusted people he perhaps shouldn't have trusted. He disappointed people. People disappointed him. He loved. He lost. He fought battles that now seem insignificant and survived things that once felt like the end of the world.

He thought university was his life.

And for that moment, it was.

That is the crazy thing about our phases: while we are inside them, they feel permanent.

Until one ordinary day, they aren't.

Eventually, I wrote my final examinations.

Eventually, the place that had consumed such an enormous portion of my existence became somewhere I could just visit.

Imagine that.

A place can once contain your entire life and later become somewhere you drive into, attend an event, smile at familiar buildings, receive an award from another generation of graduating students, congratulate them, take photographs... and leave.

Yet somewhere in time, I never left ATBU.

That Sulaiman is still there.

He will always be there.

And then there was the darker version of me.

I know him well.

The midnight crier.

The failed writer, as he once called himself.

The fool who believed in goodness.

The villain in somebody else's story.

The heartbreaker.

The heartbroken.

The friend betrayed by friendship.

The young man who became so exhausted with trying to understand life that oblivion began to sound peaceful.

He wrote:

"Every soul perishes. Mine is just damaged already, and no therapy can heal it."

I wish I could sit beside him now.

Not to lecture him.

Not to tell him that everything would magically become beautiful.

Because it didn't.

There were more disappointments coming.

More heartbreaks.

More misunderstandings.

More people leaving.

More mistakes.

More nights when the future would look considerably smaller than the past.

I would simply sit beside him and say:

You haven't met all of yourself yet.

That is what he didn't know.

That is what I didn't know.

I thought I was describing the ruins of a finished man when, in truth, I was documenting the construction site of an unfinished one.

Pain has an arrogance about it. It convinces you that because something hurts completely, it will hurt eternally.

But nothing gets to own you forever.

Not even darkness.

Years passed.

I finished university.

I became more deliberate about my writing. My scrawls became more than an escape; they became records of the different men I had been and the different things I had believed.

Ideas that once existed only inside my head began acquiring names.

Some acquired logos.

Some acquired offices.

Some acquired teams.

Some acquired strategies, programmes, meetings and responsibilities.

Some acquired people who believed in them too.

I began to understand that my life was never supposed to be one great pursuit of perfection. Perhaps it was supposed to be an accumulation of attempts.

I once described myself as a doll controlled by the chase for perfection.

Today, I think perfection would have ruined me.

Perfection would have denied me the privilege of becoming.

Because becoming requires embarrassment.

It requires failure.

It requires changing your mind.

It requires looking at something you once wrote with absolute conviction and whispering, I understand why you believed this, but we know better now.

And we do.

I know better now.

I know now that goodness does not become foolish just because someone takes advantage of it.

I know that being betrayed does not make trust meaningless.

I know that a relationship ending does not invalidate the days when it was beautiful.

I know that people can leave you and still have been important.

I know that I can leave people too.

I know that some friendships are seasons.

Some are lessons.

Some become family.

Some become memories you occasionally visit.

And some people stay.

I once wrote that there lives no love in any bond.

Life has humbled me enough to withdraw that certainty.

I have been loved.

Imperfectly, certainly.

But profoundly.

By family.

By friends.

By people I have led.

By people who have led me.

By people who disagree with me.

By people whose lives crossed mine only briefly.

And sometimes by complete strangers who somehow found something in my words, my work or my existence worth holding onto.

Perhaps that is another form of forever.

I have also learned that service changes your understanding of existence.

At some point, life stopped being exclusively about what Sulaiman Fanty could become.

The questions became bigger.

What can I build?

Who can I bring together?

What conversation can I start?

What survives me?

And so came another life.

The life of building.

Of seeing something that once existed as an idea become a room filled with hundreds of people.

Of discovering that leadership is significantly less glamorous when you are responsible for salaries, deadlines, strategies, funding, personalities, failures, expectations and the emotional weight of keeping a collective dream alive.

I have learned that sometimes leadership is standing on a stage.

Most times, it is staying behind after everyone leaves.

And somewhere, the student leader I once was looks at the man trying to build institutions today and recognizes him.

Different life.

Same soul.

There are other lives too.

The writer.

The entrepreneur.

The brother.

The son.

The uncle.

The friend.

The lover.

The mentor.

The stubborn man with convictions that occasionally get him into trouble.

The man who still writes when the world becomes too loud.

The man who still believes that words can preserve things time is trying to steal.

They have all been me.

And perhaps none of them completely are anymore.

That is why I have started thinking differently about eternity.

We imagine living forever as one person continuing endlessly.

Maybe we have misunderstood it.

Maybe forever isn't about refusing to end.

Maybe forever is about having existed so completely in a moment that even after you have changed, that version of you remains permanently true.

The child I was lived forever in his childhood.

The student lived forever in those seven years.

The leader lived forever in those struggles.

The broken young man lived forever in those midnight pages.

The people I loved live forever in the versions of me that loved them.

The friendships that ended are still alive somewhere before they broke.

The mistakes remain in the man who made them.

The victories remain in the man who needed them.

The pain remains too.

But it no longer gets to narrate the entire story.

That might be the greatest change of all.

Once, I wanted oblivion.

Today, I want meaning.

Once, I wanted to disappear without leaving a mark.

Today, I understand that leaving marks is unavoidable.

We leave ourselves everywhere.

In people.

In rooms.

In institutions.

In photographs.

In arguments.

In kindnesses we have forgotten but somebody else remembers.

In apologies.

In disappointments.

In ideas.

In things we build.

In people we encourage at exactly the moment they are considering giving up.

In words written at midnight by a young man who has absolutely no idea that years later, an older version of himself will return to them, not to continue his farewell, but to thank him for surviving long enough to become someone else.

And perhaps that is why I cannot hate the person who wrote those words.

I don't pity him either.

I honour him.

He carried me.

He lived through a darkness whose vocabulary I still recognize, even though I no longer live there.

Without him, there is no me.

Without the failures, there is no growth.

Without the heartbreaks, perhaps there is less tenderness.

Without the betrayals, perhaps there is less discernment.

Without the uncertainty, perhaps there is less courage.

Without the years of chasing perfection, perhaps I never discover the freedom of accepting progress.

And without all those endings, perhaps I never understand what it means to begin again.

Yesterday was my birthday.

People wished me long life.

I smiled at that phrase differently this year.

Long life.

What is a long life?

A hundred years?

Ninety?

Seventy?

Maybe length has never been measured properly.

Because I am still young, yet when I look backwards, I see entire civilizations of myself.

Some have risen.

Some have fallen.

Some left monuments.

Some left ruins.

Some I remember fondly.

Some I barely recognize.

But they existed.

God willing, there will be many more.

There will be versions of me that the man writing this cannot presently imagine.

There will be beliefs I will reconsider.

Dreams I will outgrow.

People I haven't met yet who will become important.

Rooms I haven't entered.

Things I haven't built.

Failures waiting patiently to humble me.

Victories waiting somewhere beyond work I haven't begun.

There will be another Sulaiman.

And another.

And another.

Until Allah decides there will be no more.

That no longer frightens me the way it once did.

Because every soul shall taste death.

But before then, what a privilege it is to live.

Not merely breathe.

Live.

To inhabit every version of yourself completely, then have the courage to let him go when his time is finished.

So, to the boy I was:

You lived.

To the student:

You lived.

To the fool who believed in goodness:

You lived.

To the failed writer:

You lived.

To the midnight crier:

You lived.

To the heartbroken:

You lived.

To the leader:

You lived.

To the dreamer:

You are living.

To the man I am today:

Live.

And to whoever I become next:

I'll meet you there.

Perhaps one day another version of me will find this piece and smile at how little I still understood at this age.

I hope he does.

That would mean I kept growing.

Years ago, I wrote:

"I'll live on, to die off."

Today, I would write it differently.

I'll live on. I'll die many times. And I'll live again.

Again.

And again.

And again.

Because I have discovered something the younger me could never have believed:

You don't need one life to last forever.

You only need to have truly lived each one you were given.

So...

Who said you can't live forever?