Thoughts and Lessons from Ramadan 2021

The goals set and achieved, the limits of body, the last ten days, and a Ramadan detox

Many of us set goals to achieve in Ramadan. They often take the form of doing more Ibadah in one way or another.

The thing is, how often do we achieve these goals? And which of them endure beyond Ramadan?

I’d personally never managed to achieve all the goals I set for Ramadan. Although I still achieved a lot compared to if I had set no goals at all, the fact that I hadn’t been as successful as I imagined sure put a damper on my successes.

I’d learned in the past year or so that this was not because I was unable to achieve these things, but it was a simple matter of me expecting too much of myself. And it was not unique to my Ramadan goals either.

I had already started having more realistic expectations from myself in my other goals, so this time around I decided to apply the same approach to my Ramadan goals as well.

The result was that I have been a lot more successful with my Ramadan goals, I am still able to maintain at least some of them, and I could do all this without sacrificing on other aspects of my life or forcing myself to keep going despite what my body feels like.

So how did I do it? Here are a few ideas and approaches I tried in Ramadan 2021, along with the things I need to improve in:

The marathon

Ramadan comes for just one month, but brings immense rewards with it. For this reason, we have a tendency to set our vision way higher than we normally would, often something that’s bordering on the impossible.

With my new idea of being realistic, however, I decided to do something different. I decided to focus on building, continuing, or enhancing the habits that I was doing for the rest of the year anyway.

That way, I didn’t set a goal to finish Quran in Ramadan, which had been a staple for me the past few years. I also didn’t set a huge amount of voluntary prayers to perform.

Instead, I started work on a much overlooked aspect in my life: Having better Salah. This was already a goal to achieve in 2021 for me, so Ramadan acted as a perfect starting point. I also set other goals that would help me with bettering my Salah, like doing Islamic meditation to improve my focus.

My other goals included praying full Taraweeh everyday, which could be called a basic for Ramadan yet was something that I had never done before, taking care of my health in general, and staying mindful of my inner limits while fasting, both physically and mentally.

Apart from this, I just decided to focus on my intentions and to have Taqwa (awareness of Allah) as much as possible. I won’t say that I succeeded in this, but it sure made me pay attention to some subtle things that we don’t usually notice, like my manners of speech and my day to day habits.

Because these were my only major goals, I could focus on them exclusively. Combined with the fact that and I’d also started somewhat doing or researching them before Ramadan, the result was that I could achieve, and maintain, a lot more than I could have otherwise. I also got some unexpectedly huge wins, but more on those later.

The sprint (the last 10 days)

Of course, with Ramadan, also comes the search for Lailatul Qadr. This can be quite a challenging time for those who are observing the fasts, because on the one hand, you are supposed to do your very best in these last 10 days, but on the other, you are probably tired and nearing the end of your endurance.

As for me, I hadn’t set any special goals for these days at all. I guess I was probably going by my overall vision of developing things that I want to keep doing even after Ramadan, but I realized with a start that this isn’t enough!

I scrambled to put together a new plan for worshipping in the last 10 days. As might be expected, a plan put together in a hurry isn’t as likely to succeed, and this plan of mine was a mixture of my earlier, unrealistic goals and me trying to balance them with my newer, more gradual goals.

All in all, I wasn’t as successful in all of my ideas for the last 10 days as I was for the ones I’d set before Ramadan started. However, I did manage a few things in the last 10 days — things that involved trying some new ideas that I had never done before. This included trying out a basic course in Tafsir and Hadith, learning in a lot more detail about Lailatul Qadr, and learning some of the basic Surahs with or without their meanings.

Taking care of the body

One thing that we often overlook in our modern, productivity focused world is our own limitations in getting things done. And I am not talking about the kind of limitations that you gotta overcome, rather, I am talking about the very reasonable limitations which we as humans should expect of our body and mind.

This has its effects in our limitations regarding Ramadan goals too. Back in the day, I’d expect myself to perform flawlessly in all of my normal goals in addition to my Ramadan goals. If anything, I expected myself to achieve even more than usual, now that I didn’t need to spend so much time eating food during the day.

However, the past two or three years had made me painfully aware of the limitations of my own fasting body, with the Ramadan coming in the middle of summer and me feeling exhausted, tired and lethargic just a few hours into my fast.

I don’t know if it’s just the heat or a combination of factors like the heat and me simply not being aware of my reduced output in the previous years because I didn’t have much goals to work on in the first place or my body ageing already, but the fact remains that my fasting body has limits that I need to reckon with.

I had already made this better in the past years by focusing on my Sehri and drinking more water and scheduling my most important, energy consuming tasks towards either the beginning of the fast or after the fasting period is over. I stayed mindful of all these ideas this time and tried bettering them by setting goals that are more doable with the fasting.

Unexpected achievements

So, I have always had this huge, insurmountable goal of starting to wake up early, and the only thing that has ever succeeded to make me stay awake is to not sleep after Fajr. But that comes with its own problems in that I could never figure out what all I will do if I wake that early, not to mention I had a phobia of getting less sleep, so the result was that I was always stuck in a place of wanting to get up earlier but not being able to.

This year had waking early as a serious goal of mine. I’d dedicated the whole of second quarter to achieving this goal once and for all. There was only one problem: Ramadan was coming in the middle of the second quarter.

My cue of waking from Fajr wasn’t going to work as we stay awake until Fajr and then go to sleep in Ramadan, and there was no way in which I was going to be able to stay awake from Sehri itself. It would be way too less sleep, and with the Taraweeh and everything else, I couldn’t even go to sleep earlier than usual. So I’d decided to sort of put this on hold and considered it a win as long as I managed to stay awake for some time after Fajr.

But after spending about a week waking way too late and yet feeling sleepy all day, I got fed up of not achieving anything at all, and decided on a drastic course of action: I decided to stay awake from Sehri itself.

As crazy and impossible as this sounded, it felt surprisingly doable in the Ramadan, and besides it was the only reasonable course of action I had left if I were to achieve anything in Ramadan.

The first few days I alternated between being fully awake one day, and being unable to get up the next. This did make me worry that maybe I am just forcing myself to stay awake and not genuinely developing a habit of waking early.

However, I could also see that on the days I did stay awake, I felt fully refreshed and could go on working for all those long morning hours.

Eventually, I also settled into this schedule and didn’t sleep on the alternate days either. I actually developed a really nice morning schedule where I would pray Fajr prayer and do some extra worship, then I’d begin to transition into my work mode by reading an Islamic self help book, and finally, get to the actual work.

So waking early went from something that, for all intents and purposes, seemed like a lost case for me to something that I regularly did and that too in a much better way than I could have otherwise imagined. It also became something that I could actually imagine myself continuing after Ramadan, and it was no longer a scary, overwhelming prospect the way it used to be.

As for the work part, I could also achieve so much in the mornings. I worked and brainstormed and planned and started a lot more ventures than I had before. I also had huge bursts of inspiration every single morning, the kind I only experience once in a while outside of Ramadan.

Future ideas and a Ramadan detox

Okay, so this was all about what I managed to achieve this Ramadan. It also gave me ideas about what goals to set for the next one, Insha Allah.

I will be working towards having better intentions and having Taqwa during the year, and I will be reinforcing it further in the coming Ramadan. I will definitely be planning in advance for the last ten days as well. Also, I will be paying attention to my diet (I am a sucker for oily food in Iftar!).

I would like to treat Ramadan as a kind of detox month, which I have termed as my Ramadan detox. Basically, I learned that Ramadan is a great time to develop a new habit or remove a bad habit from your life. The additional blessings of Ramadan coupled with the drastically changed schedule acts as a good way to shake things up and start afresh. I have already experienced the benefits and possibilities of this by developing an extremely hard habit like waking early, and would like to take this further.

Last but not the least, I’d like to keep more voluntary fasts during the year, so that my detox (and not to mention the spiritual reward) is not limited to just once in a whole year.

And that’s it! All of my thoughts regarding how I spent this Ramadan, setting better Ramadan goals, and what I intend to do the next time around. Of course, you will hear in more detail about my future goals and the techniques I will be using to achieve them as the next Ramadan approaches, Insha Allah.

Do tell me what tips you use to stay productive, healthy, and attract blessings during the holy month.

P.S. The idea of a Ramadan detox is partly derived from the self help book I was reading during Ramadan, called The Productive Muslim. This book also helped me allay my fears regarding the consequences of getting less sleep, and was the first time I came to know about the special kind of alertness you feel when you are in the fasting state, to which I attribute my achievements in the morning hours.