FORTY RULES OF LOVE: A JOURNEY

March 5, 2019

Up, and then down, and then up again.

The rhythm of my life is parallel to my only beating heart. Sometimes, my heart stops beating for a second. And there, follows with a little death that I can hardly grasp. Like candlelight, one little blow can lead you to total darkness.

Let me explain what do I mean by “up and down” in my life. Yesterday afternoon, when I was checking in to a flight I purchased for going to Yangon, Myanmar, I realized that I did not have my passport with me. It was left in my apartment, back in Osaka, and I was in my new apartment in Chiba. I was in a real panic when I found out about this fact, that I have done it again. Again. Like I always do. There’s always something that I forget and then realize before it was too late. So I had no choice but took a bullet train all the way to Osaka to get my passport and returned to Chiba on the same day. The journey was about 9 hours. You are probably thinking: oh, poor Lay! Wasting money and time! At first, I was thinking the same thing. I couldn’t help blaming my own forgetfulness and stupidity. But when my friend told me that “you have a great personality, so don’t worry about a bit of forgetfulness,” I felt relief, as if a warm stream just flew through my spine. That was really sweet.

On the train, I was reading Forty Rules of Love, a novel given by a couch surfer from South America a while ago. I started reading it only a few days ago, but I felt I could stay inside the story forever. I had never read anything about Islamic spirituality, Rumi, Sufi, life back in the 13 century, modern wife’s midlife crisis, and so on. This book enlightened me through its multi-layered storylines and protagonists and its forty rules (Tao) of love. It’s a book about how to see the world we are living in through a different lens. For instance, my current incident can be viewed in this way:

“The past is a whirlpool. If you let it dominate your present moment, it will suck you in…Time is just an illusion. What you need is to live this very moment. That is all that matters” (135).

Another virtue I shall adopt is patience. I noticed that my impatience often block my eyes from many beautiful and amazing things surrounding me. This journey represented not only a lesson of living-at-the-moment but also a lesson about patience:

“Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of the process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn.” (74)

Furthermore, I believe that everything in this universe is somehow interconnected, that for every reason, there’s a cause. Hence, balancing the yin and yang forces in our world:

“Your hand opens and closes all the time. If it did not, you would be paralyzed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding. The two are as beautifully balanced and coordinated as the wings of a bird.”

The money that I spent earned me some precious time reading and thinking about something exciting and fundamental to our lives. In this sense, I did not lose anything as money is not something I can take with me to my grave. It is my own state of mind that follows me.

At last, allow me to end my little memorial with this particular quotation, as it reflects my own feeling toward you, my friend:

“The world is a huge cauldron and something big is cooking in it. We don’t know what yet. Everything we do, feel, or think is an ingredient in that mixture…What ingredients do you think you are putting in the collective stew of humanity? Whenever I think about you, the ingredient I add is a big smile.” (146)

Even though we might not have met each other, please always remember a warm current here that you can jump into. When you get warm, I’m sure that you will return me a smile too 🙂

PS:

“Silk resemble love. [Because] the silkworms destroy the silk they produce as they emerge from their cocoons…the farmers have to make a choice between the silk and the silkworm. More often than not, they kill the silkworm while it is inside the cocoon to pull the silk out intact. It takes the lives of hundred of silkworms to produce one silk scarf.” (81)

Neither am I a silkworm nor farmer. But only after a thousand miles that I begin to make my own silk scarf.