Rumi: When sorrow visits your heart
Rumi offers a beautiful way to think about sadness
When we're feeling down, Jalaluddin Rumi offers a comforting thought:
When sorrow visits your heart
It is preparing you for happiness;
A violent storm of despair
Clears space for new joy
In Persian:
فکر غم گر راه شادی می زند
کارساز های شادی می کتد
خانه می روبد به تندی او زیر
تا در آید شادی نو ز اصل خیر
Thoughts as guests of the heart
In the lines before this, Rumi describes the heart as an inn, with thoughts coming and going as guests:
Each day, in every moment, a thought makes its way to your heart;
It reaches you as an honored guest,
So think of each thought as if it were a person, O soul…
In Persian:
هر دمی فکری چو مهمان عزیز
آید اندر سینهات هر روز نیز
فکر را ای جان به جای شخص دان
...
Notes
- This is from Rumi's great poem, the Masnavi. The translation is my own.
- I adjusted the wording a bit in the translation, but the meaning is consistent. In the Persian, Rumi describes sadness as a guest who furiously clears out a house so that a new visitor - happiness - can enter. I replaced this with a metaphor from later in the text, where Rumi describes sorrow as a force that scatters the old leaves from the heart's branch, so new leaves can grow:
می فشاند برگ زرد از شاخ دل
تا بروید برگ سبز متصل - (This post is about daily emotional highs and lows, and is not meant as advice for dealing with mental illness.)