Life has a way of shifting beneath your feet, before you’re ready.
In January, the world I had built my work around unraveled almost overnight. At first, I stayed hustling as usual, hoping, trying to make my ideas fit. But deep down, I knew I wasn’t meant to contribute to rebuilding what no longer felt like home. I was being asked to return to something more true.
For years, that truth had shown up in quiet conversations. Friends came to me when they needed to be heard. I shared reflections one-on-one, never planning to take them further. But patterns emerged: different lives circling the same questions. Am I worthy? Is it the right time? What if I miss my chance? What if I’m too late, too much, not enough?
Those questions always led back to the notion maktoub which means "what is written", as destiny, and the underlying idea that life is written elsewhere. But I began to see it differently. What if maktoub isn’t a fixed script? What if it’s about choices and how often those choices are shaped by fear? Fear of missing out, of making the wrong move, of being too little or too much, fear of deceiving those we love. That became the seed of Maktoub Studio: reclaiming maktoub not as something heavy and predetermined, but as a living dialogue with life.
Maktoub isn’t some kind of sentence, it’s a conversation. And when you enter that conversation, you discover you already carry the guidance you’ve been seeking. The shift happens when you stop forcing yourself back into old structures and start listening to what’s quietly rising inside you. Resilience doesn’t always mean pushing harder, sometimes it means softening, waiting, ripening in your own time.
During Ramadan, the calling deepened. Each dawn, while the world slept, I wrote in the stillness. In that pre-sunrise light, I was just receiving. That’s how Maktoub in Motion grew out of lived moments, conversations, books, meditations, runs, even the breath of a saxophone tune. What emerged wasn’t a fixed path of course, but a living story that's shaped in the spaces between what life gives us and how we choose to walk it. I share it as reflections and practices to help you listen to your own seasons of motion and stillness, work with resistance rather than against it, and remember that your path is traced by your intention. When I say share, I mean I'm gifting you a copy of Maktoub in Motion on my website (watch for the pop up on the left 😉.)
With Maktoub Studio, I chose to move slowly and with intention crafting spaces for remembering, for deepening, for living closer to the marrow of things. Whether you stand at a beginning, an ending, or somewhere in between; and if something stirs in you as you read this, marehba bik!
Warmly
Ratiba
