My mother told me there would be Nights like this..

Having a tough time falling asleep and it is already 5am., perhaps because of the hungry stomach, not having eaten a decent meal for dinner except for a packet of Maggi Mee, the dried noodles common food among starving artists and students. Compounded with the excruciating pain on my left shoulder and down my left arm while being tormented by a couple of persistent mosquitoes ,  I decided to sit and by sitting i mean meditate. It was not easy to quiet down the mind after all the vexations that was afflicting so much distraction to it, but  in the end through additional stretching and some serious Zikhr of 'Allah' just Allah, Allah, I managed to bring myself to a relatively settled mental state, settled enough to decide to write about it instead of letting it go to waste by taking a walk to the corner coffee shop and have an early 'Nasi kandar'.
From my experience over the years of dealing with these aches and pains and sleepless nights I have come to realize that meditating is the best cure to both the physical and the mental state if not the spiritual state as well. I would normally resist getting into too involved in the spiritual nature of my meditation simply because it gets too heavy and often it leaves me with greater discomfort physically no doubt it is often very awakening and often times revealing. But meditation has seen me through some very rough nights especially having given up just about every so called bad habits including being a self imposed celibate for the past ten or fifteen years on my life. Loneliness, despair, frustrations, worries over the fate of my children and not having a good income to cover all my expenses on the day to day sustenance, all these and whatever else that would be killing me slowly at the moment in time like back ache and toothache and shoulder aches, mosquitoes and the rest of Mara's army of irritators and Iblis and Jins and Shaitans trying to get me to give up and go nuts, nothing is more satisfying than just to sit and look at theses with an accepting mind until they dissipate and miraculously sometimes healed on their own. All it takes is off course to breath in and out and realize that you are breathing in and out with every breath and if you need to just say Allah! Allah! or God! or ram! or Elohim! or Amitabha! pick your choice, just to keep the mind in check.
I can safely say that this practice due to the necessity of it, like needing to stay sane, has become my way of preparing my ultimate face to face with the time of death, before and after and while it occurs; Insha'Allah, God Willing. No, I am not obsessed with death and dying and I enjoy life as much as anyone else, however i find it more a worthwhile thing in my life to focus on at this stage simply because it is the only thing that makes anymore sense in this life as the world spins out of control with so much crap like worse than death itself; madness and insanity. Yes mankind has approached that stage thereby we can safely be said to be living totally insane by any given standards; we practically shit upon our own dinner plate and kill without mercy in order that we may live a better life and what is worse is that the rest of us the silent majority whatever that means lives in abject denial and apathy and we call this a civilized world we live in.I could be masturbating myself till my dick fall off to fall asleep, which sometimes work with the dick still intact but it has become too childish for an old fart like me with death walking along beside me not too far away.

"If one can go into death with eyes open and have somebody help you if necessary to give up before you die, this extrodinary thing can happen to you.So that from your standpoint in that position at that time, you  would say i would not have missed that opportunity for the world. Now I understand why we die! The reason we die is to give us the opportunity to understand what life is all about, by letting go because then we come to a situation that the ego can't deal with. When we are no longer hynotized by that then our natural consciousness can see clearly what all this universe is for.So we have not missed this golden opportunity by institutionalizing death out of the way, instead of having a socially understood acceptence of death and rejoicing in death." -
Alan Watts - The Inevitable Ecstasy - lecture on You Tube.

Downstairs below my window the restaurant employees are arriving and soon the Azan calling of the Subuh prayer will be in the air calling the faithful to their need and me i think i have written enough for the morning and will take that walk to the corner coffeeshop and have me a plate of Nasi Kandar and a cup of hot Nescafe, my usual..