Did your love your clocks forward? If not, your phone probably updated itself, so don’t worry too much. I know the change to DST is painful, what with the hour of sleep lost and all that, but this year, with Ramadan a few short weeks away, maybe it’s an opportunity…
Thanks to the time change, Fajr is now at 6:30 or so. If you’re used to getting up at 5:30 or 6 for work (or 4:30, like me…), you now have plenty of time to get in a cup of coffee and some breakfast before opening the fast. Nice! And fasting on Mondays and Thursdays from now until Ramadan will get your mind and body used to the fast and make those first days of Ramadan so much easier.
And speaking of coffee, nows a good time to start weaning yourself off it. Coffee is delicious, and a great pick me up, but it’s awful for fasting, and trying to cold-turkey it that first week, or rushing to fetch a cup as soon as the sun sets, is going to only serve as a distraction.
That’s my Ramadan prep plan, at least in its most basic form, and I hope you’ll join in. A little bit of preparation now, a little bit of extra dhikr, some extra nafl Salat and charitable actions, some sunnah fasts, will get you (and me, InshaAllah), in a better mind set for the arrival of that beautiful guest. And that little bit of extra worship will InshaAllah remove some of the opportunity for sin and forgetfulness, and help us move away from some of the more questionable things we may have been engaged in the past 9 or 10 months, since the last Ramadan.
Productive Muslim has an excellent guide to all things Ramadan Prep. Take this opportunity of an extra hour of darkness in the morning and an extra hour of sunlight in the evening to start working on your Iman and Ihsan before Ramadan arrives, lest we greet it with less than our best.
A reminder to myself first: make this time change a time for change.
