The Forty Rules of Love

by Elif Shafak

Let us choose one another as companions! Let us sit at each other’s feet! Inwardly we have many harmonies—think not That we are only what we see.

Choose Love, Love! Without the sweet life of Love, living is a burden—as you have seen.

Even a speck of love should not go unappreciated, because, as Rumi said, love is the water of life.

Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience

Painfully delicate and surprisingly strong, silk resembles love.

East, west, south, or north makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey a journey within.

The quest for Love changes us. There is no seeker among those who search for Love who has not matured on the way. The moment you start looking for Love, you start to change within and without.”

Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?

“Fret not where the road will take you. Instead concentrate on the first step. That’s the hardest part and that’s what you are responsible for. Once you take that step let everything do what it naturally does and the rest will follow. Do not go with the flow. Be the flow.”

“We do, and doubts are good. It means you are alive and searching.”

How could I possibly make my family and friends see what I see? How could I describe the indescribable? Shams is my Sea of Mercy and Grace. He is my Sun of Truth and Faith. I call him the King of Kings of Spirit. He is my fountain of life and my tall cypress tree, majestic and evergreen. His companionship is like the fourth reading of the Qur’an—a journey that can only be experienced from within but never grasped from the outside.

The emperor did not hide his disappointment. “Are you the one Majnun has been crazy about? Why, you look so ordinary. What is so special about you?” Layla broke into a smile. “Yes, I am Layla. But you are not Majnun,” she answered. “You have to see me with the eyes of Majnun. Otherwise you could never solve this mystery called love.”

Love cannot be explained. It can only be experienced. Love cannot be explained, yet it explains all.

The past is an interpretation. The future is an illusion. The world does not move through time as if it were a straight line, proceeding from the past to the future. Instead time moves through and within us, in endless spirals. Eternity does not mean infinite time, but simply timelessness.

Destiny doesn’t mean that your life has been strictly predetermined. Therefore, to leave everything to fate and to not actively contribute to the music of the universe is a sign of sheer ignorance. “The music of the universe is all-pervading and it is composed on forty different levels. “Your destiny is the level where you will play your tune. You might not change your instrument but how well to play is entirely in your hands.”

Shams of Tabriz had said that faith and love turned human beings into heroes because they removed all the fear and anxiety from their hearts. I was beginning to understand what he meant.

“If you want to strengthen your faith, you will need to soften inside. For your faith to be rock solid, your heart needs to be as soft as a feather. Through an illness, accident, loss, or fright, one way or another, we all are faced with incidents that teach us how to become less selfish and judgmental, and more compassionate and generous. Yet some of us learn the lesson and manage to become milder, while some others end up becoming even harsher than before. The only way to get closer to Truth is to expand your heart so that it will encompass all humanity and still have room for more Love.”

“Tell him his absence is killing me.”

Barren is the world, devoid of sun, since Shams is gone. This city is a sad, cold place, and my soul is empty. I can’t sleep at night, and during the day I only wander around. I am here and I am not here—a ghost among people. I can’t help feeling cross at everyone. How can they go on living their lives as if nothing has changed? How can life be the same without Shams of Tabriz?

“I didn’t come to you because of the first wind, nor would I leave you because of the last.”

Whatever you see as profitable, flee from it! Drink poison and pour away the water of life! Abandon security and stay in frightful places! Throw away reputation, become disgraced and shameless!

“This is what losing your beloved does to you,” my father says. “It dissolves your king-self into dust and brings out your dervish-self. Now that Shams is gone forever, I am gone, too. I am not a scholar or a preacher anymore. I am the embodiment of nothingness. Here is my fana, herein my baqa.”

You think you cannot live anymore. You think that the light of your soul has been put out and that you will stay in the dark forever. But when you are engulfed by such solid darkness, when you have both eyes closed to the world, a third eye opens in your heart. And only then do you come to realize that eyesight conflicts with inner knowledge. No eye sees so clear and sharp as the eye of love. After grief comes another season, another valley, another you. And the lover who is nowhere to be found, you start to see everywhere.

You see him in the drop of water that falls into the ocean, in the high tide that follows the waxing of the moon, or in the morning wind that spreads its fresh smell; you see him in the geomancy symbols in the sand, in the tiny particles of rock glittering under the sun, in the smile of a newborn baby, or in your throbbing vein. How can you say Shams is gone when he is everywhere and in everything?

Deep in the slow whirling of sorrow and longing, I am with Shams every day, every minute. My chest is a cave where Shams is resting. Just as a mountain keeps an echo inside itself, I hold the voice of Shams within. Of the scholar and preacher I once was, not even the smallest speck remains. Love has taken away all of my practices and habits. Instead it has filled me with poetry. And though I know that the...