A small steamship sailing from the Malucca islands to the Laccadive islands in the Indian Ocean capsizes in a storm in the middle of the ocean. No one survived except an elderly Swedish passenger and a young Englishman.

Only a little more than half of the small ship remained afloat, but the people on deck were thrown into the ocean by the force of the tremor, while those in the cabins had already drowned.
For five days they struggled to survive on top of the cumbersome ship, certain that at any moment the sea would rise again in a gigantic swell and swallow them up.

The sun rose with a sickly yellow glow and disappeared without giving off a clear light, as if it had been hastily extinguished despite its dull, leaden glow.

The days felt like an endless night, never-ending. They were plunged into pitch darkness, unable to see twenty feet beyond the ship. Instead of the storm abating, they seemed to be in the middle of foam towers.

They were surrounded by terror, an intense dimness and a black, sweaty, dull desert.

Slowly a superstitious fear crept into the old man's soul, and a quiet wonder and hope into the young man's.

They tied themselves as tightly as possible to the mizzen pole and stared bitterly at the ocean.

They had no way of calculating the passage of time, they could not even guess where they were. But the young man was sure they were as far south as any sailor had ever been.
Every moment threatened to be their last, every gigantic wave rushing to engulf them, it was a miracle they were not submerged.

Every minute another section of the jet-black ship was submerged. Despite the Swede, who began to prepare himself in pessimism for death, whose arrival he believed nothing could delay for more than an hour, the young man never lost hope.

Sometimes they were asphyxiated at altitudes too high for albatrosses, sometimes they descended with dizzying speed into a watery hell where nothing disturbed the sleep of the sea monsters...

At the bottom of one of these cliffs, the young man was knocked unconscious by a deafening crash...

When he opened his eyes in a soft bed on a warm day, they told him what had happened. When the last remnants of his ship crashed into the huge passenger liner, he was thrown to the deck in an arc, and they saw no survivors except him. The captain said that they, too, had been blown off course and lost in the storm, that their routine route had never passed through here....

One of my favorite stories by Edgar Allan Poe, whom Charles Baudelaire called "the most powerful writer of our time..." and who won a prize in 1833. A story that praises hope, not doubt, anxiety, despair, not fear, serenity, calmness...

This is related to what I have been constantly and insistently emphasizing in recent articles. Nothing is a coincidence. The holy book says: "There is no event that takes place on earth and befalls you that was not written in a book before We created it". "Say: Nothing happens to us except what Allah has written for us."

Those who think only of the difficult and dark conditions in which they live see nothing but hardship, hardship, distress and misery. They look no further than the wall of the room and the door of the house. They should look at the bigger picture beyond this situation and focus all their thoughts beyond it.

It is impossible for the present situation to continue forever. As the world turns, situations change, nights are always pregnant with day, difficulties with ease...
Even deserts are not endless, they always lead to a green garden or a cool shade; even oceans have a bottom, sailors know it well.

Everything exists in its opposite: a smile with sadness, safety with fear, comfort with worry. A warmth that drives away the cold on mountain tops and in narrow passages. Light that swallows darkness with the speed of lightning.

Only souls who know the impermanence of their situation can find peace. And they know that "What they dislike may be good for them. What they like may be bad for them."....

So...

"Don't look at the tree in front of you, lest it block your horizon! Look at the whole forest!!!"

Mukaddes Pekin Başdil

Researcher-Author

Source: Denizli Haber