The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?
When you encounter seemingly good advice that contradicts other seemingly good advice, ignore them both.
Art thou a man? thy form cries out thou art: Thy tears are womanish; thy wild acts denote The unreasonable fury of a beast: Unseemly woman in a seeming man! Or ill-beseeming beast in seeming both!
Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music, perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath.
Tis the witching hour of night, Or bed is the moon and bright, And the stars they glisten, glisten, Seeming with bright eyes to listen For what listen they?
A woman mov'd is like a fountain troubled, muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty.
When we seek for connection, we restore the world to wholeness. Our seemingly separate lives become meaningful as we discover how truly necessary we are to each other.
Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.
It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living. . . Our lives are, in reality, the sum total of our seemingly unimportant decisions and of our capacity to live by those decisions.
It is the function of creative men to perceive the relations between thoughts, or things, or forms of expression that may seem utterly different, and to be able to combine them into some new forms-the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.