Q4DailyFive-2025 #6

12/21/25 #December
Aim: 17mins/1000words
4:53PM-5:14PM: #21mins

1100words

[[And There Was Light]]
[[Rethinking Diabetes]]
[[Muhammad, the World-Changer]]
[[Jon Meacham]]
[[Abraham Lincoln]]
[[Gary Taubes]]
[[Mohamad Jebara]]
[[Yuval Noah Harari]]
[[Sapians]]

[[ChatGPT- Slow Books that Gradually Change Us]]
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I’ve had an interesting life thus far, as I am now 34 years old. It’s been a journey, and I think it’s a miracle that I’m still alive (I’ve had my share of trauma in life). Today, I will be talking about several books that I am reading, one I was able to finish, one almost finished, and one that is still ongoing. These books are slow simmering books that I’ve had in the backlog, or topics that I have been very curious about over the years, but because of its denseness, or because they are topics that have too much anxiety, or I just haven’t really gotten to investigating them. The three books that I will be mentioning are [[And There Was Light]] by [[Jon Meacham]], [[Rethinking Diabetes]] by [[Gary Taubes]], and [[Muhammad, the World-Changer]] by [[Mohamad Jebara]]. These genuinely are three books this quarter, and some I have started even before this, that I am slowly reading, that will slowly change and widen how I perceive reality.

The first book I will be talking about is [[And There Was Light]], which is a book about [[Abraham Lincoln]]. The president during America’s civil war, and the president who signed the abolishment of slavery in America. It’s a book that’s just a biography, though it’s a biography that I’m always been super curious about, because Abraham Lincoln has always been an enigma of sorts to me. I was always curious, and am still curious, in regards to how some individuals tick. And this book explores that well, especially for me, since I don’t personally know too much about Abraham Lincoln, besides the general American history information. And every event always has a lot of people, that actually contributes to it. So for slavery abolishment, I was curious to see what Abraham Lincoln’s role was.

Similarly, I am almost finished with a book, that I bumped into on audible, while I was trying to figure out the history of Islam. As I am from the faith of Islam, my family originates from Bangladesh, and I grew up praying the Salah. I left Bangladesh when I was 8 years old, but I always resisted the religion, because 9/11 happened right after I got to America, and I came to America in the year 2000. Thus, I was happy to learn some history, since I actually never read the Quran word for word, or if I did, I was really young, and I didn’t really take much information in. Though, reading this book, this year, I have gained a level of insight, on Muhammad’s history, and how the religion of Islam came to be. At least, to the extent that I understand, and just curious to learn more about Muhammad’s philosophy, and just some history of how his life was, from 570-632 CE.

These books are pretty dense books for me, not because they are hard to get through, but because they have a lot of baggage in them, at least for me. Talking about the topic of slavery, and talking about religion, I feel like, that’s pretty deep. And getting to this level of discussion, with a very open mind is super tough. I genuinely think there is a huge defense mechanism in us human beings, when we talk about these issues, because these are dividing points, between race, and between cultures. Though it is important that we learn from them, because these are genuinely some very important events, that has defined how we live in our contemporary world.

I am genuinely super curious about these topics nowadays, because I genuinely want to know how these individuals lived their lives, and how their minds actually ticked. At the end of the day, from my understanding, and when I read [[Sapians]], by [[Yuval Noah Harari]], I recall the human species, in our current evolutionary form (behavioral modernity), to be only around 100,000. I genuinely think [[Yuval Noah Harari]] makes a very strong case, for why that is the case. And it was really cool to learn about the different types of initial (hominin species) homo-sapians, and just how they traveled around the world over time.

As I reflect on these moments, where I also became more aware of how I see the world, nowadays though, I just want to understand, how do we actually keep ourselves healthy. As diabetes has become so prevalent, and with my dad’s UTI earlier this year, because of his diabetes, I genuinely want to understand more about how the nature of reality, and the function of the human body works. The last book I will mention is [[Rethinking Diabetes]] by [[Gary Taubes]], although I am still in the beginning phase of this book. What I want mention is, a lot of things can be reversed (or understood more accurately), as we are an organism that has been thriving for as long as Earth has had life forms. Lifeforms that started relying on oxygen around 2.4 billion years ago, when oxygen-rich atmosphere first started developing. Furthermore, our universe is 13.4 billions years old, and our Earth is 4.54 billions years old. These are based on the stats that I have referenced (with the help of ChatGPT), and comparatively, the understanding of diabetes is a very recent thing.

It’s a lot of information, that I am talking about. But I do like discussing these different avenues, as there are potentials, especially when a lot of different perspectives are mixed. Because this is how new ideas form, as when we look back, and we compare, and we see similarities, and see differences, and see what works, and what doesn’t work. And I genuinely think this is science (experimentation of different ideas) at work (at least for me) and it’s just questioning, so we can come to a better answer, and not just live with a given answer, because it’s already there. Because, at the end of the day, written language has only been around for 3000 years (5200 years, first written language), and there is a lot of limitation to what we actually know about reality, when we’re talking about numbers. And 3,000 years is nothing compared to the age of the human species, as well as the age of the Earth, and of course the age of our solar system. And I’m not even talking about the other solar systems yet, nor the universe as a whole, which in itself is a magnitude, which is totally out of my comprehension.