A stone's destiny can also be improved, provided it is carved with skill.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــIf the vastness of life is observed carefully, it becomes abundantly clear that nothing in this world is perfect in its initial state. Every existence begins its journey in a raw form, and it attains its true identity by passing through stages of time, circumstances, and training. An ordinary stone, as long as it lies on the ground, has no value. People kick it, ignore it as a stumbling block, but when the same stone comes into the hands of a skilled and meticulous craftsman, its status changes completely. Then it is no longer worthless, but is recognized as part of a great construction, an adornment of a sacred place, or a precious gem. The same scenario is repeated again and again in human life. At the time of birth, a human being is merely a collection of possibilities. He is neither completely good nor completely bad, but the potential for both paths is placed within him. The real decision depends on how he is viewed, in what environment he is kept, and in what manner he is reformed and trained. Undue strictness breaks a person, while guidance with wisdom and prudence brings out the hidden essence within him.ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــExperience shows that whatever is subjected to neglect and indifference fades away, and whatever is given attention, effort, and skill, is refined. That is why failure in life is not considered an end but a beginning, because failure is actually the link from where the carving process begins. Trials do not come to destroy a person, but to give him a better shape, provided he sees them in the right perspective. The ups and downs of this world and the elevation of an ordinary person to a position of authority draw our attention to the same reality that destiny is not a closed door, but an open field where new paths can be carved out with hard work, patience, and correct guidance. When a person understands that difficult circumstances are actually a means of refining him, his thinking changes, his morale is boosted, and instead of considering himself inferior, he begins to consider himself a part of the construction process.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــWhen this same thing comes to the fore in the form of a practical example, it does not remain just an idea but becomes a living reality. There are characters in human history who have interpreted this saying with their existence that *a stone's destiny can also be improved, provided it is carved with skill*. Take a look at the life of a person whose birth itself became a trial. When he was born, his mother turned away from him because he was deprived of both hands and feet, rather his arms and legs were not there at all. An existence that the world had declared incomplete from the very beginning, today this person is 37 years old, just think, how would he have spent these 37 years without hands, without feet, without arms and legs? And also think about where he stands today. This person was born in Australia, but his thinking and struggle made him a citizen of the whole world. If his life is studied, all human complaints, all excuses and all grievances become meaningless. With shame, the feeling awakens that even with a complete body, we curse our life by calling it incomplete, while he, despite his half-incomplete body, is living a complete, fulfilling and dignified life, he not only learned the art of living himself but also lit the light of hope in millions of extinguished eyes and the fire of courage in disappointed hearts.

This person is the author of seven books, most of which have been part of the New York Best Seller list. The popularity of his writings can be gauged from the fact that his books have been translated into more than forty languages of the world. He is a global motivational speaker, who has been the cause of changing millions of lives through his voice on every notable forum in the world, including TED. In 2005, he founded training institutes called Life Without Limbs and in 2007 Attitude Is Altitude, where he teaches individuals, business organizations and even officials of various governments of the world the principles of success and positive thinking. He has a close relationship with the media, major channels of the world such as BBC, CNN and CNBC broadcast his interviews, while he has millions of followers on social media who learn a new perspective on life from his words.

ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــHe also loved, got married, and today he is living a happy and contented life in the city of California, USA, with his beautiful Australian model wife and four laughing children. This person's name is Nick Vujicic. Nick Vujicic's life is actually a living picture of the truth that deficiency does not make a person weak, but wrong thinking and wrong attitude break a person. If circumstances are accepted with skill, one is carved in the right direction and the purpose is clear, then big challenges seem to fade away. If the hand of the stone carver is skilled, then the stone does not become a stumbling block but becomes a gem of the crown.

When I read about him, I was amazed that Allah, a human being with half a body who cannot eat himself, cannot drink, cannot walk, but is so educated and holds such a high position, and we are healthy and whole and still cannot do anything. It became known that success does not look at a person's existence, but at his mentor and his thinking. Today, people cry after listening to the words of this same person, but he is so happy that you can see his happiness on every social media platform. That is why I arranged the article and wrote that a stone's destiny can also be improved, provided it is carved with skill. Sheikh Saadi (may Allah have mercy on him) writes, "Take advice even if it is written on the wall."

May Allah Almighty grant us the ability to think and understand. Ameen Ya Rabb Al-Alameen, by the grace of the Holy Prophet ﷺ.

*✍️Student of Al-Jamiatul Ashrafia✍️*