There is a joke about a man who has had too much to drink and who on his way home accidently drops his keys in the street.

A passerby comes upon the man, who is on his hands and knees searching under a streetlight. The passerby begins to help look.

After a few minutes without success, the Good Samaritan asks whether our main character can be any more specific about where he might have dropped the key. The man points into the darkness.

Astonished, the passerby asks why, in that case, the two of them aren’t searching over there; and the answer, delivered with a roll of the eyes, as if it ought to be totally obvious, is, “Well, that wouldn’t do any good, would it? It’s dark over there.”

Although often enough we do eventually find what we most need, for long periods we have no idea what that is or even how to recognize it; and it means that we have to learn how to search where we are least able to see; in the dark places.

I would go so far as to say that some of us we have to love the dark places and the recalcitrant meanings that lurk there - to love even the way that those meanings evade us.

Today we focus on certainties – the legislation of fasting. We have to challenge ourselves to derive much greater meaning. During fasting I reacquaint my self with a different notion of time as I watch the passage of the sun. Despite humanities progress and our cock sure attitude we are so much indebted to nature for our survival.

Fasting makes me appreciate this golden orb that powers us. And when I say ‘us’ is means the whole of humanity – muslim and non-muslim.

In these days of atomic clocks and precision – I note an age when the day end was an educated guess – and a human decision. It makes me think of our dissociation from nature and a more natural existence.

Fasting makes me think of how fragile our existence is – how weakly we are soldered as individuals on society and how in turn society is soldered on to nature.

We have farmed out so much of our lives and take for granted water in taps and toilets.

This is not true for all people but sometimes when I sit and listen to the Imam lecture I think he is afraid of the dark. He is afraid of relating the fasting experience to the consumer society. It means putting a distance against the consumption and the waste and I don’t think he knows how.

Fasting is chance to examine the pace of life. It means stepping out of oneself and being part of a greater plan – which is to respect what God has given us and ultimately that to whom we owe our debt.

This is an excerpt from our Daily Ramadhan Diary being featured in the Lancashire Telegraph.