If a tree falls in a forest...
Rizwan Alladin, Long Island, NY
If a tree falls in the middle of a forest, does it still make a sound? Western philosophers have presumably argued on this concept for decades. The point of contention being: if something significant happens, but no one is there to witness the event, then can we definitively say it happened?
Well, on April 3, 2016 at 8 A.M. on a lazy Sunday morning, during a windstorm, a huge tree fell in our backyard. The sound of the tree hitting the ground was so loud, it woke the entire family up, including my sister-in-law and her husband, who had stayed the night. The vibrations were so strong, that my 12-year old son fell off the bed.
Thinking a bomb went off, I checked to make sure all of my family members were indeed all right. Once that was confirmed, we then proceeded to try to figure out what happened. Finally, looking out my son’s bedroom window, we visually confirmed—a tree had indeed fallen.
I ran outside, and realized the full extent of how Almighty Allah demonstrated His full Power, Mercy, and Love to us. The tree fell directly between my home and my next door neighbor’s. It merely clipped the corner of my home. Had it fallen just 5 feet more to the left, it would have landed squarely on top of my sister-in-law and her husband. Alhamdulillah, the only inconvenience we experienced in the end was an interrupted sleep. The house next door is vacant—and thus, no bodily harm to anyone. Alhamdulillah, thumma Alhamdulillah.
To get a better sense of the enormity of the tree, one of its branches (note: not the main trunk) crushed the next-door neighbor’s two steel air conditioning units. The force of the trunk falling on the cement walkway between our homes has rendered the walkway unusable.
For the philosophically-challenged like myself, I do not know about the middle of the forest, but in our 1000 sq ft backyard, not only can my family attest that the tree made a sound, but that, as dead as the tree may now be, our Lord is Ever-Living, Omnipresent, and the Protector (even for His least-deserving of servants).
