A Poem Rumi Forgot To Complete

They ask me who am I. Should this question be asked? Of course not. Sadly, I have no name, it ruins the beauty of mystery. The name does not matter, does it? Many people died without anyone remembering their names. They were incomplete stories, unwritten words, and undiscovered thoughts. I want to remain like that too because I am a poem Rumi forgot to complete. Today, I choose to write about that incomplete poem. But why I am the poem of Rumi? And not of Shakespeare, Shah Latif, or Bullhe Shah? Because Rumi had Shams. 

Shams acted as a muse for Rumi. When he started that poem, he lost his muse; thus an incomplete poem was born. An incomplete chaos, an unsolved puzzle, and everything that is lost on the way.

We all are someone's Rumi and someone's Shams - doesn't it sound amazing? But in reality, neither you are a Shams nor I am a Rumi. We are those words that were never said loudly. Words that were only thought. 

So, starting from this, I finally tried to write about my blog name. Why would I not explain something that my blog suggests? I am at a loss of words but I'll give it a shot. 

Some years ago, I had the chance to read "The Forty Love of Rules". With every rule, this poem kept on becoming more and more complex and complicated. With each word, the art began to turn into chaos. And I became no longer a poem, a prose, a story, a fiction, a novel, or anything.  In search of myself, I just turned into ashes. 

So why the poem is still incomplete?

Like the seven stages of love, this poem too went through multiple stages, in the hope of being complete, searching for a rhythm and a last line that would just define it perfectly. Perhaps, this poem will be moving in circles for the whole life because who can complete a poem by someone else than its poet. The poem moved post to pillars to find its Rumi, the poem became Shams and sought for Rumi in the twenty-first century but it was a wild goose chase. The poem was lost in entangled thoughts and a cruel world.

Childhood and the ideal world

You must be wondering, why a nihilist calls herself Rumi's incomplete poem? The reason for this is simple. Like anything that goes through multiple stages before getting a finished product, humans too experience life in different phases. 

With each phase, we label ourselves with some ideas, some identity, some self, and some love. Being a Pakistani and born into a conservative family, I was taught about the things that have no basis in real life. During my childhood, they taught me about idealism, a list of dos and don'ts. They told me that I'd get everything I wanted. I just have to try harder. I'd be the luckiest girl out there. Everything would come too easily and I could do it with my eyes shut and that life was so beautiful. But, they were wrong. 

The first experience of real-world

Then I grew up, and during my teenage, I saw the cruel world out there. It had no empathy, no sympathy, no idealism, no love, no kindness. It was nasty and brutish as Hobbes said. It was horrible. People concealed their true intentions behind a mask of deception. Teenage is a time when everyone goes through a deep shit. But, the reality hits differently when you just step outside, thinking that it's all sunshine and roses. I saw reality with my own eyes. Reality that was never taught to me. At that time, I became the theory of the allegory of the cave. The stories that mythmakers told us were nowhere to be found. The reality was different.  But they kept on telling me to keep my eyes shut. It is just a phase of life - it will pass. And yes, it passed but at what cost? I lost myself. The poem lost its first line. So they told me about spiritualism to get back my initial thoughts. 

The stage of silence

Again, with no hope left in me, I listened to them. I became silent. The immense beauty and tranquility of silence and submission just took me over. I stopped arguing and protected my peace. Silence brought me some peace because even in the start, they never heard me. Screaming did not help. Thus, I chose silence, and it gave birth to contradictions. When people go silent, they think. And no sane mind would want people to think. Once again, they were here to put limitations on my thoughts, and my thinking process. Hence, they came up with another restriction. They said mysticism is not allowed. Mystics mislead people. I submitted to them and forgot everything about Shams and Rumi. They told me to be practical and be more optimistic. They led me towards another flawed ideology of optimism. 

The Mess in My Mind

With each passing stage, it became worse

Hope is a dangerous thing. I knew from the start but I had no option. Thus, I kept my hope alive for years, thinking that it would get better. I used to wake up every day and pray that everything was going to be okay eventually, if not today, someday or one day. It would get better. I told myself. I blindly followed them. But it never did. It kept on getting worse. The poem remained incomplete with its missing stanzas. There was no Man o To (You and I). There was only one. It was me against me. 

So I stopped believing in everything

So I stopped believing in everything because I could not go against myself. The war against me was a tough battle. I could never win it without ending myself. I desperately needed a companion, but not in the form of a human. So I looked at books, to find something relatable. At that time, Kafka was the only person I could fall back on. And that's what I did.  

Now, when I think about nihilism, the differences arise. Because, nihilism is also a theory, accepted by some people with mental health issues like you and me so I declare to stop believing in that too. But then again who cares what we think? They understand only when it's too late.  

That incomplete poem should be completed at any cost. But who would do that? Now when the world is ending, time is flying, and people are losing hope in everything, who'd care and who'd have the time to complete the unfinished poems except those who think the same. 

Let's find something new

Thus, we have to find something - something more concrete and solid - something infallible, something that's beyond the concept of contradictions. Something that is the Telos of Aristotle and Sa'ada of Al-Farabi. Let's find that together, and no, I am not pointing here towards God. Do let me know in the comments what is that something.