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I Stopped Slamming the Door on My Own Grief
For a long time I treated certain feelings like intruders. If sadness showed up uninvited, I tried to get it out of the house as fast as possible, usually by staying busy until it lost interest and left on its own. It worked, in the sense that I stopped noticing the sadness. It did not work in the sense that nothing underneath it ever actually got resolved.
This song grows out of a passage in Rumi’s Masnavi where he compares every passing thought and feeling to a guest arriving at your door. Not just the easy guests either. Grief, unrest, longing, all of it is described as arriving with a purpose, even when the purpose is not obvious yet.
This human heart is a guest house with an open door,
each day new visitors arrive from the unseen shore.
I like that Rumi does not sort the guests into good ones and bad ones before they even walk in. He treats the arrival itself as neutral. What matters is not which feeling shows up, but whether you let it do whatever work it came to do.
