How I learned about the law of attraction
My mom and I - my 6th birthday at our townhouse in Surrey BC. 1975
After a year living at the back of a gas station in Surrey BC, in 1975 my parents scraped enough money together to buy a small townhouse about 10 minutes away. We have never talked about it, but I imagine this was a tremendous accomplishment for them. They had never owned their own home, not even in Tanzania where they had lived most of their lives.
My brother and I were happy to finally have a neighborhood with friends. There was always someone outside to hang out with and there were birthday parties to go to. My older cousin was doing well enough at work to have bought my brother and me bicycles. Sure there were a few unwelcoming neighbors. It was, after all, Surrey, British Columbia in the 70s. But I was happy.
One day, I walked into the house one afternoon after playing with the kids in the neighborhood. My mom was sitting on the living room floor with her hands held up in prayer. Her eyes were closed and she was clearly in a different world. I was worried, a little bit afraid, and, above all, curious. I sat quietly on the couch. She didn’t know I was there. I waited, and when she came out of her trance, she looked over at me with tears in her eyes.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” I asked to break the silence. She said there was nothing wrong. “This is just how I talk to God,” she said. “What do you talk about?” I asked.
That was a big question. My mom revealed how worried she was about my brother and me. I told her not to worry about us. We were happy. We liked our school and playing with our friends. She said, “I am not worried about you right now. I am worried about your future. And I am worried about your children and their children.”
I didn’t understand. She explained that she felt we were isolated from our community of Ismaili Muslims. There was a mosque (aka Jamatkhana) in Burnaby, but it was too far to get to by bus. My dad had to work from morning until night so couldn’t drive us. She was worried that we would grow up without learning about our faith. Without having friends from our Ismaili community, we wouldn’t develop our understanding of and connection to a big part of our identity.
In Tanzania, she had had the community to support her and her mom had been an active community leader. In these new, unfamiliar surroundings in Canada, she wanted to count on our community and faith to keep us grounded and on the right path, particularly because my dad was working so much. She was imagining terrible consequences not only for our lives, but also for her grandchildren’s lives. Keep in mind, I was 5 years old at the time!
Back to the conversation with God. My mom explained to me that she was begging and pleading for a minor miracle and his influence in shifting our path in this new place to ensure we would have easier access to our community, an opportunity to learn about our faith and friends who shared interests, values and family background.
One afternoon, a few weeks later, I came home and my mom was in a great mood. There was a snack on the table and dinner was ready early. She told my brother and me that we had to go for baths, put on our good clothes and tell our friends that we would not be able to play with them after dinner. She quickly followed with the news that my dad had hired a mechanic at the gas station to help the business grow.
But the really good news was that the mechanic lived in Burnaby and that he worked until 6:00 pm. My dad asked him if he would be willing to drop my mom, my brother, and me at Jamatkhana on his way home. My dad would have to work a little later other nights, but he would close up early on that day and pick us up after services.. The mechanic agreed and this became a weekly routine every Wednesday for several months.
Dressed and waiting for a ride to Jamatkhana
My brother and I made a couple of new friends at Jamatkhana and we started attending religious education classes. After a few more months, my dad hired someone to work one evening every so often and he would come with us. But that wasn’t the end of my mom’s prayers. She was grateful for the one day a week, but she was worried it wasn’t quite enough.
She was right. While my brother and I had made a couple of friends, we couldn’t spend time with them socially. What’s more, the big day of the week at Jamatkhana was Friday and that was much harder for my dad’s business schedule. Her prayers continued with a mix of gratitude and beseechment.
About a year later, Dad came home and told my mom that, for the past several months, the business had stopped growing. We were not able to make ends meet and were running out of cash quickly. He told her he was talking to his cousin in Calgary who said the economy was doing much better there. This cousin had a lead on a business opportunity for my dad and him.
My mom and dad didn’t spend too much time analyzing the decision. They told us the plan, put the house on the market and my brother and I put out flyers listing our furniture for sale. The house sold quickly, with a rapid closing date. My brother and I were not happy to be leaving, but we didn’t give our parents a hard time because we knew they were under so much pressure.
By a twist of fate, about 1 week before the house closing, there was an oil price shock in the US. For the first time in years, the price of gas in Canada was cheaper than in the US. My dad’s gas station was very close to the Canada/US border and, overnight, he had a lineup of Americans coming to get gas from his station. It looked like we were staying. But with no place to live because the house was sold.
That week my dad had to go to Burnaby to pick up an order from the auto parts supplier for a rush job at the shop. As he was driving down Canada Way, he looked to his right and a small ‘For Rent’ sign in a duplex window caught his eye. He pulled over, talked to the owner and found out the place was available. He was excited to tell my mom because this place was in Burnaby, which was closer to Jamatkhana.
My dad’s commute would be longer, but business was good, so he would be able to hire some help soon and at least get home by 8:00 pm. He thought surely there would be easy bus access for us to get to Jamatkhana all the time and he would pick us up on his way home. This was working out just fine. If my dad had been a member of the A-Team, this is about the time he would have said, “I love it when a plan comes together!”
Except there was no plan. My mom was 100% sure this series of events was a result of her prayers. My dad was a bit more skeptical in those days. He and my mom had only been married for 9 years by that point, so he had yet to experience the full range of my mom’s miracles of prayer. Still even he was having a tough time arguing against her theory. It sure seemed likely to me. What other explanation could there be?
Here’s the kicker. We moved into the duplex a week later. On the first night, my brother was in the bathroom with the window open around 7:00 pm. When he came out, he called down to my mom, “I can hear ginan (devotional hymns sung in Jamatkhana) in the bathroom!” Even my mom found that hard to believe. One by one, we all went into the bathroom and, sure enough, you could hear ginan. It was faint, but we all heard it. It was eerie.
The mystery was solved the next morning when a friend of my parents called and said that a friend of her brother’s had commented (the grapevine was very active in our community) how lucky we were to move to a place just around the corner from Jamatkhana. My mom almost dropped the receiver. She shouted to my dad, “We live around the corner from Jamatkhana!” as she fought to hold back tears of combined joy and divine devotion.
I swear I am not making up any of this. A year after my mom prayed for us to be closer to Jamatkhana and a community connection, we had moved within a 5-minute walk to the place without planning it. I will let that sit with you for a moment. I recognize that some of my readers won’t believe any of this. I admit it seems far-fetched. But just let it sit with you for a moment.
A year later, when my dad was working late. There was a fire in the rented basement suite of the house that had come up into our back porch and into our kitchen. We ran out into the street in our pyjamas and fortunately no one was hurt. While we waited at a neighbors house for my dad to arrive, my mom held my brother and I close while she prayed. The house had significant damage so we were homeless. Eventually we found respite in a discount motel about 15 km away.
I don’t remember my mom being angry or upset that she lost the perfect home in the perfect location. I only remember her praying. And by the end of the following week my dad told us that the identical home right next door to our old place had come up for rent. We moved in later that week and life was back to normal. How lucky was that? Was it really luck?
Fast forward with me about 30 years to 2006. Rhonda Byrne publishes a self-help book called ‘The Secret’ about the power of positive thinking. The book is based on the pseudo-scientific theory called the law of attraction. The basic premise of the theory is that like attracts like. Positive thinking about particular desires will attract those positive things. At the same time, negative thoughts will attract negative events to manifest in your life.
As of this writing, the book has sold 30 million copies, grossed $300 million in sales and been translated into 44 languages. A whole lot of people believe in the law of attraction.
Put another way, our life today is a result of our thoughts in the past. Based on this theory, my mom’s thoughts while she was praying and her stimulation of my dad’s thoughts through late night conversations set off the course of events that led to the desired outcome.
I’m not at all trying to persuade you to believe in the power of prayer or the law of attraction. Personally, I believe in some combination of these two mixed with conscious and unconscious action and a bit of luck. But that is beside the point.
My point, and in fact the point of all of my blog posts up until now, is that our early experiences have an influence on how we behave and make decisions in our adult years. That early experience of witnessing my mom in prayer, the following conversation I had with her, the series of subsequent decisions she and my dad made and the events that transpired afterwards imprinted something on my brain.
That imprint is this: If you work hard, seek the best for your family, make rational decisions based on the available information, have clarity about your hopes and ambitions and yes, pray, what is meant to be will be but you will be okay. These beliefs have indeed affected how I deal with decision-making and how I perceive the events of my life in retrospect.
I believe my life has been a series of interconnected events that have led me to the place I am supposed to be. I believe that nothing is random. Whether that is true or not doesn’t matter, because it helps me be at peace with my life without feeling remorse for things that I wanted to happen but didn't.
Do you have a story of a particular hope or prayer for your life or career that came true? I would be interested to hear about it. Comment below or send me an email at shakeelbharmal@icloud.com. If you would like to subscribe to my weekly email please click here.
I was fortunate enough to be a guest on a podcast called This Feels Right where the host, Joel Silverstone, and I talked about emotional intelligence and leadership. If you are interested, you can find it here on the Voice America Network. It is also available on Apple podcast and Spotify.