and enjoy yourselves for a short while; you are indeed evildoers.” [al-Mursalat: 46].

• Once the divinely-guided grasped the real worth of this worldly life and how brief the sojourn in it is, they put their passions to death within it, seeking the life that never ends. When they awoke from the slumber of heedlessness, they won back through earnest striving what the enemy had plundered from them in the days of idleness. And when the road seemed long, they caught sight of the destination, so the distant drew near. Whenever life turned bitter, it became sweet for them to remember: “This is your Day which you were promised.” (103) [al-Anbiya: 103].

A caravan travelled on while night had cast its awning
over every dusty horizon, deep and dark.

They drove such resolute wills that the earth vanished beneath them;
their journey rode upon the backs of determination.

The night stars showed them the object of their quest
on the shoulder of Sirius and the brows of al-Naʿāʾim.

Whenever the battle of earnest striving raged,
they splintered the lances of generosity in the breasts of noble deeds. (1)

Section
Among the strangest of things is that you know Him yet do not love Him; that you hear His caller yet delay in answering; that you recognize how great the profit is in dealing with Him yet you trade with someone else; that you know the magnitude of His anger yet you expose yourself to it; that you taste the pain of estrangement when you disobey Him yet you do not seek the intimacy that lies in obeying Him; that you feel the compression of the heart when you plunge into speech other than about Him or discourse concerning Him, yet you do not yearn for the expansion of the breast that comes with remembering Him and confiding in Him; that you taste the torment that descends when the heart attaches itself to other than Him and yet you do not flee from it to the bliss of turning toward Him and returning to Him! Stranger still is that, while you know you cannot do without Him and that you stand in utmost need of Him, you turn away from Him and crave what only drives you further from Him!!