People do not cage the owl or the crow, but the mynah and the parakeet—they lock these away. In crushing beauty by the force of mere strength, in turning the beautiful into the ugly, lies all of people's joy. They spit upon those whom they lack even the froth of spittle to be worthy of. Those whom the Creator loves are constantly wounded by those the Creator does not favor. A heart transparent as still water, trembling with clarity—people delight in fouling such hearts. This senseless, causeless cruelty teaches people to accept the world's ugliness, its pitilessness, as though it were natural; it initiates them into the art of surviving within that cruelty. Through silent endurance, bearing unsought suffering with a smile, people grow strong. That is the true path—the path that tempers a human being. Cleverness or learning cannot accomplish anything in life. If one wishes to accomplish something, one must first seek the true path. In crisis, people may or may not offer wise counsel, yet they hurl arrows of meaningless words with perfect aim. The less one understands the weight of words, the more foolishly one speaks. It is easy to be swayed by such words. They do not diminish problems but multiply them. In that hour, silence can offer people wisdom. A calm heart mysteriously reveals the way out of crisis. No matter what turmoil, conflict, upheaval, or chaos surrounds us, we must move through the circumstances with composure. We must, as much as possible, maintain goodwill with all, pass through this time without wounding anyone. However irritating or irrational others' words may sound, we must hear them with steadiness. Only afterward, with a clear mind, should we reflect on the various matters involved—offering no reply to anyone's words. When we quiet the mind in stillness and meditate upon something, our intuition grows, and with it our intelligence and discernment work without limit. Our mind grows weary bearing the weight of all sorrow and suffering; we console it—all will be well. What our mind is, we are essentially that. Our mind guides us; when it breaks, the mind seeks peace; through the mind's strange chemistry we love or hate. Our body gives a false impression of who we are—people see us and think one thing, but we are not truly that. If people could see our mind, could understand what moves within it, then they would know what we truly are. We think and act precisely as we compose our mind. The mind's capacity determines the measure and nature of all our powers. When the mind fills with love, its capacity expands. If what we must do awakens love within us, then neither fatigue nor tedium touches us in its doing. The work does not feel like a burden; thus its quality deepens. We maintain honesty and focus toward it; learning from the failures of the past, we can perform the task with such astonishing perfection that even when we dissolve into the womb of eternal time, all will remember us for ages and ages for that work.
# Letting Time Pass Time has a way of slipping through our fingers like water, and yet we spend our lives trying to hold it, to measure it, to master it. We mark our days in hours and minutes, as if these divisions could somehow give us control over the great river that carries us forward. But what if the secret to living well is not to grip time tightly, but to let it flow? There is a peculiar paradox in how we relate to time. We say we are "saving" time, as though it were money in a bank—as if we could accumulate it, spend it wisely, or squander it foolishly. Yet time cannot be saved. Every moment that passes is gone forever, irretrievable. The minute that has just elapsed will never return, no matter how carefully we tried to preserve it. And so our very effort to save time becomes a kind of futility, a grasping at smoke. When we are young, time seems infinite. The summer stretches before us like an ocean with no visible shore. We have all the time in the world, or so we believe. We put off the things that matter—a letter to an old friend, a conversation with a parent, a moment of simple joy—because there will always be more time later. But later never quite arrives as we imagined it. Instead, one day we look back and realize that the infinite ocean has somehow become a narrow stream, and some of those moments we postponed are now beyond our reach forever. Yet there is wisdom to be found in acceptance. When we stop fighting against time's passage, when we release our grip on it, something unexpected happens. Time ceases to be our enemy and becomes something else—a medium in which we live, rather than something we must conquer. A single hour spent in genuine presence, in authentic being, becomes richer than a year spent in anxiety and hurry. The art of letting time pass is not laziness or resignation. It is rather an art of attention. It means being fully where we are, in the moment we are in. When you sit with a friend, truly sit—not half your mind already on the next appointment. When you walk, walk—feel the ground beneath your feet, notice the light, hear the sounds around you. When you eat, taste your food. These acts, which require nothing but presence, transform the quality of time itself. There is also something liberating in accepting mortality. Yes, time is finite. Yes, our days are numbered. This knowledge, which we usually try to suppress or deny, is actually an invitation. It invites us to ask: what is truly worth my time? What do I actually care about? When you know that time cannot be indefinitely extended, that your supply is limited, you become more discerning. You begin to distinguish between the urgent and the important, between genuine values and mere distractions. The seasons teach us this lesson. We do not expect the spring to last forever. We know that summer will fade into autumn, that autumn will give way to winter, and that winter will eventually yield to spring again. There is a beauty in this cycle, a completeness. Each season is precious precisely because it is temporary. If spring lasted all year, would we still find it beautiful? Or would we take it for granted? Perhaps the deepest freedom lies in this: to stop measuring our lives in the currency of time, and instead to measure them in the currency of meaning. How much have you loved? How deeply have you lived? How fully have you been present to the people and the world around you? These are questions that do not depend on how many hours or years you have accumulated. There is a Sufi saying: "The only true time is now." Not the past, which we can no longer change; not the future, which has not yet come and may never come. Only this moment, this breath, this heartbeat. If we could truly live in this understanding, we would no longer be running from the tyranny of time. We would be free. And so the practice becomes simple: let time pass. Do not cling to it. Do not waste your present moments worrying about preserving them. Instead, live them fully. Be where you are. Do what you are doing with your whole heart. Love the people who are with you. Notice the world. This is not a way of being passive or defeated. It is, paradoxically, the most active and powerful way of living—because in it, you are finally aligned with reality as it actually is, rather than as your fear and ambition wish it to be.
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