Rumi Keeps Talking
THE FURNACE AT HOME isn’t working. Fortunately it can be fixed. Unfortunately it won’t be today, because a part needs to be ordered. So I’m sitting here wearing two sweaters, reminded not to take central heating for granted; not to take anything for granted, for that matter: a floor, four walls, a roof that doesn’t leak. Last week, someone told me about wabi-sabi, the Japanese worldview that celebrates impermanence and imperfection: an old window made into a picture frame, an asymmetrical pot, a chipped vase. Norma and I hardly designed this house with wabi-sabi in mind, but since everything is impermanent and imperfect, the truth keeps poking through. The furnace is wabi-sabi. So is the armchair I’m sitting in. So is the man.
IF I REALLY ACKNOWLEDGED how little I know about the future, wouldn’t I live more fully in the present? The truth is that I have absolutely no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. Life could take the most unpredictable turn. Tragedy could befall someone I love, or a tree could fall on my house, or some cherished belief could come crashing. A comet strikes the soft belly of the atmosphere, and the dinosaurs look up, amazed.
WHAT IF WE ACTED as if we had no future— not just because we might be dead tomorrow, but because the future won’t really change anything? There are good days and bad days; they all end. Outer circumstances change, but the fact that outer circumstances change doesn’t change. What life asks of us tomorrow won’t be any different than what life asks of us today: to be here, now.
MY FRIEND DAVE delivers mail— the same route every day. Only the route is never the same. Each day he notices something different. “I want to be in this life,” he says, “not doing something else while I’m doing this.”
I’M STAYING UP LATE tonight, reading Rumi and drinking wine. Rumi is telling me there are hundreds of ways to praise God; what’s important is to kneel and kiss the ground now. Probably, I should brush my teeth, go to bed. I should be like President Bush, who gets a full night’s sleep no matter what. But Rumi is pouring me another glass of wine. Rumi doesn’t care if I’m refreshed in the morning. Rumi keeps talking, and I keep listening, because somewhere a man my age is dying tonight, a man who was fit and healthy until six months ago, who rolled the word forever on his tongue like a grape his wife had peeled for him, as they lay naked beside each other, the night still young.