I dropped out of school during my first year of high school. I simply didn’t want to study or exhaust myself. In fact, I even skipped the math exam.
When my friend Umm Hassan found out, she laughed and said,
“If you don’t want your high school diploma, give it to me—I'll hang it in my house.”
That wasn’t her original saying—it was something her father used to tell his children when they considered giving up on education. And, as it turns out, all of them went on to achieve the highest academic degrees.
At the time, I didn’t grasp the weight of her words. But life has a way of teaching us gently—and sometimes not so gently. Over the years, I went back to school. I earned my high school diploma, then a bachelor’s degree, a master’s, and finally a doctorate.
Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with books.
At first, I thought I was pursuing knowledge to reach a goal—a degree, a job, a stable income. But over time, I discovered something deeper: the real value of knowledge is not just in what it gives us, but in what it reveals to us.
Knowledge opens up entire worlds—within us and around us. And these discoveries bring richness and meaning to life. In fact, they are life.
A person who doesn’t read still lives, of course. But a person who reads lives differently.
The one who doesn’t read moves through life like a traveler on a flat, uneventful road. They may witness scenes, events, even beauty—but without the tools to understand their deeper meaning, they arrive at the end of the journey much the same as they began: unchanged.
But the reader? They are like a bee—flying here and there, up and down, sampling from every flower. With every encounter, every page, they gather something sweet. And slowly, without realizing it, they begin to produce honey—honey that heals.
Because true knowledge is a remedy: for the soul, the body, and the heart.
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