The Art of Choosing Love Over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy
What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious. To become precious — that is the work of love, the task of love, the great reward of love. The recompense of death. The human miracle that makes the transience of life not only bearable but beautiful.
It is heartbreaking enough that we do lose everything that exists, everything and everyone we love, until we lose life itself — for we are a function of a universe in which it cannot be otherwise. But it is our singular human-made heartbreak that we often cope with our terror of loss — that deepest awareness of our own mortality — by losing sight of just how precious we are to each other, squandering in less-than-love the chance-miracle of our time alive together, only to recover our vision when entropy has taken its toll, when it is too late. We write poems and pop songs about our self-made tragedy — “The art of losing isn’t hard to master“; “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” — and we go on living it.
Once upon a time, an impassioned invitation to transcend our self-made tragedy took shape in another short, stunning poem by another poet of uncommon contact with the deepest strata of life-truth: Rumi (September 30, 1207–December 17, 1273), who believed that you must “gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.” Rumi, ancient and eternal. Magnetic in his eloquent devotion and his soulful intelligence. Majestic in his whirling silk robe and his defiant disdain for his culture’s worship of status. Volcanic with poetry.
LET’S LOVE EACH OTHER
by Rumi (translated by Haleh Liza Gafori)Let’s love each other,
let’s cherish each other, my friend,
before we lose each other.You’ll long for me when I’m gone.
You’ll make a truce with me.
So why put me on trial while I’m alive?Why adore the dead but battle the living?
You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave.
Look, I’m lying here still as a corpse,
dead as a stone. Kiss my face instead!
Complement this fragment of Gold with James Baldwin on how separation illuminates the power of love and Thich Nhat Hanh on the art of deep listening — a practice also central to Rumi’s life — as the root of loving relationship, then revisit poet Jane Hirshfield’s timeless hymn to love and loss.
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.
In learning this afresh — as we must learn all the great and obvious truths, over and over — I was reminded of a passage by James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) from Nothing Personal (public library) — his 1964 collaboration with the photographer Richard Avedon, his high school classmate and lifelong friend, which contains some of Baldwin’s least-known yet most intimate writings, including his antidote to dog-hour despair and his counterforce to entropy.
In the final of the book’s four essays, Baldwin writes:
““One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light. It is necessary, while in darkness, to know that there is a light somewhere, to know that in oneself, waiting to be found, there is a light.””
This light, Baldwin intimates, is most often and most readily found in love — that great and choiceless gift of chance.
Love becomes a lens on the world, on space and on time — a pinhole through which a new light enters to project onto the cave wall of our consciousness landscapes of intimate importance from territories of being we would have never otherwise known.
All love bridges the immense expanse between lonelinesses, becomes the telescope that brings another life closer and, in consequence, also magnifies the significance of their entire world.
All love is light’s battle against the entropy continually inclining spacetime toward nothingness, against the hard fact that you will die, and I will die, and everyone we love will die, and what will survive of us are only shoreless seeds and stardust.