The Guest House

Jalal al-Din Rumi was a 13th-century Islamic scholar and teacher in Konya, in what is now Turkey. In 1244 he met Shams of Tabriz, a wandering mystic, and the friendship turned his life over. The respected scholar became a poet of divine love, one of the great voices of Sufism, Islam's mystical tradition.

His long poem, the Masnavi, runs to tens of thousands of verses. One short passage became famous in English as "The Guest House", through the American poet Coleman Barks. His versions are loose renderings rather than close translations, and they drop much of the Islamic framing: for Rumi, what arrives at the door ultimately comes from God. Even so, the image has helped a great many people.

Every morning, the poem says, someone new arrives: a joy, a sadness, a flash of meanness. Welcome them all, even a crowd of sorrows that sweeps the house bare of its furniture. Treat each one with respect. It may be clearing you out for something new.

Think about how you treat an unexpected visitor you'd rather not see. You might bar the door, pretend you aren't home, or let them in and then give them the run of the place. None of these is good hosting.

A good host opens the door, offers a seat, and asks what brings them. They don't have to like the guest or agree with everything it says. And they know the visit will end.

Feelings work much the same way. Turned away, they tend to wait outside and knock louder. Given the run of the house, they start to feel like who you are. Greeted, they tend to settle, say what they came to say, and go.

Omar snapped at his mother on the phone this afternoon, over something small. All evening he has felt ashamed. He keeps telling himself to stop dwelling on it, turns the TV up to drown it out, and when that fails, decides he is "just a terrible son".