Life Increasing Light
My very dear and precious friends, for a long time, I have been sick and tired, but I am trying to watch life from a different window, right beside people whose hearts are enlightened. From this window, which is full of mysteries with various wisdoms, it is very clear that; While many beautiful people are taking their life exams under this roof, I am trying to take the exam of being human and being a child.
Recently, for a seemingly minor ailment, I brought our mother to a private hospital with my siblings to have a cardiac angioplasty. The authorities told us that the angioplasty was now medically very easy and that we could leave the hospital in a few hours. We all waited calmly at the door of the angioplasty room in the hope that it would bring our mother a healthier life. They said it would take twenty minutes, but almost hours passed and there was no movement. As we waited anxiously, faces more anxious and excited than ours opened the door with great haste. They took our mother, who was unconscious on the stretcher and looking very bad, to the intensive care unit with great haste. We were all very surprised. At first the doctors could not understand what had happened. Two days later, as a result of the examinations, they told us that a blood clot, which had jumped out during the angiography, had caused a blockage in the brain vessel.
Our mother, who came to the hospital walking and very cheerful, was now struggling for life in the intensive care unit in a life-threatening situation. The doctors told us that our mother's condition was very serious and that we should be prepared for anything at any time. For this reason, from the first day, I did not leave the intensive care unit, and I was trying to humbly support our mother, who was struggling for life inside, and my brothers and sisters who were waiting in front of the door. It had been five weeks that we were waiting day and night in front of the intensive care unit with my brothers and sisters. As the days slipped away one after another like stars, we had surrendered the very intense emotions in our hearts, the difficulty of waiting without knowing what to expect, our helplessness, to the true owner of all remedies. It was as if the sun was hidden behind mountains of sadness covered in fog even as we waited, painlessly, quietly, calmly, in a corner. Who knows how difficult these nights were, pregnant with various hopes for many patients writhing in pain. In these hours when all dreams were buried in a silent darkness, in which land of dreams the rains of healing were falling, with which dreams the morning was coming.
Said Nurs-i Hz. In a treatise: "Illness is the station of Job. I wonder who heard the voice of Niyazi Misri, who said "Be Job in patience and Jacob in sorrow" from centuries ago. With what emotions, with what impatience the owners of this blessed station were waiting for the morning. What healing news they hoped the dawning day would bring them. Oscar Wilde, when he was in prison, wrote to a friend: "Suffering is a very long moment, we cannot divide it into seasons". I wondered, though, what seasons were going on behind the walls, in which sweet estate of life was all hell breaking loose. How difficult it really was, waiting in the dark nights for an unknown remedy with inexhaustible hopes. How beautifully all this was expressed in a couplet.
"What do the munajjîr and the muvakkit know about the sheb-i yeldây?
Ask the afflicted gama how many hours the nights are."
Yes; indeed, one should have asked the sufferer how many hours the nights were. On the face of it, it was an ordinary, very quiet night, as usual, with various dreams and hopes, sometimes with the bitter cry of ambulances, sometimes with the silent moans of the patients. I was sitting alone in an empty hospital hall at dawn, free from the crowds of people and the tired faces of the patients. I was just thinking deeply and trying to look around me with different eyes in order to hear a sentence of explanation from inside, which would be the psychology of waiting in the same place, in front of the same door, day and night, for five weeks.
It was as if I had escaped from the monotony of my confused thoughts and entered a different dimension. For a moment, I thought of all the years I had spent with so many desires and dreams. It was as if they had never happened. I had no wishes and desires for the days to come. It was as if I had no unfinished business. I tried to look around me as if I was looking into a big void. It was as if my whole life had passed in this hospital hall. Nothing was foreign or new. How quickly I had adapted to this hospital, where I had been spending time in various difficulties for a few weeks. How easily I had adopted living on a chair. All my desires and ideals had suddenly shifted at great speed. I thought for a long time about this psychology of mine, which did not seem to be normal. Then I perceived this transformation of emotions, which I could define as habituation, as the grace of Allah Almighty to His servants and I rejoiced. In this world of trials, anything could happen to us humble servants at an unexpected moment. Wasn't it a grace of our Almighty Lord, who said, "With every difficulty there is ease"[1], that we could adapt to various changes and difficulties, material and spiritual, that we experience as a result of divine manifestations, to the state and environment we are in without much difficulty, and that the things that happen to us are made easier? But while this divine favor made me happy, it also scared and frightened me. Because from another point of view, from a different perspective, this ease that Allah Almighty showed us was a bit like a burning fire. Fire, when used in the right hands, was our greatest helper, which had various benefits and made our lives easier. However, when it was used in the wrong way, it could bring fire into our homes and turn our whole lives into a dungeon.
Hazrat Mevlana had said that when walking on the path of love, be very careful where you step and the steps you take, as if you were walking on thorns. If we could so easily be molded by the environment we were in, we really needed to be very careful where we went and the steps we took. As my feelings deepened, I remembered other relevant Masnavi couplets of our Hazrat Pir: "The shape of every human being is like a bowl. The eye sees, hears and feels the meaning of the inside of that bowl. Wherever you go, you receive a spiritual food, a spiritual state from everyone you meet. You eat something spiritual. You also get something from every friend you meet. A child is born from the meeting of a man and a woman. When flint and iron meet, a spark, a fire is created. From the union of soil with rain, fruits, greens and flowers blossom. "O youth, for this reason, pay attention to the places you go and everyone you talk to."[2] "Even if a person does not talk at all, even if he is not interested, he picks up his bad habits from the bad friend he is with! The heart secretly takes on his bad morals and adopts them without even realizing it; it adopts his bad morals as its own morals." [3]
There is an old saying that white grapes turn black when they look at black grapes. How wisely they fit a big truth into a small sentence. It seems that despite all the difficulties experienced, man adapts very quickly to the situation and environment he is in without even realizing it, and over time, like water, he takes the shape of the container he is in. Clearly, this adaptation of mine was both a great divine help and a burning fire to be very careful with. It was very strange; despite all these feelings and thoughts, sometimes the opposite would happen. It could even lead to suicide with the psychology of not being able to adapt to very important changes in one's life. How was this happening?
The first thing that comes to my mind at this moment is what the famous philosopher Epictetus, a slave in body and free in spirit, said two thousand years ago. "In order that you may make the most of the things that come your way in life by withdrawing into yourself, remember that there will always be a virtue, a good in what you experience. If you are attracted to a beautiful girl or a young man, you will find in yourself a strong virtue called abstinence to protect yourself from sin. If you face difficulties and hardships, you will find courage in you. If you face blasphemy and insult, you will find patience with consent. God has given you various weapons to withstand even the most painful calamities. He has given you greatness of spirit, strength, perseverance, patience. You should be able to make use of them. If you complain about life, at least admit that you have not used the weapons that the divine power has given you and have thrown them on the ground."[4]
In a hospital corner, alone with my thoughts and feelings reflected in the mysterious silence of the night, the door of the intensive care unit suddenly opened. A lady nurse was talking cheerfully with another staff member who was trying to help her, and they were trying to push the stretcher in front of them out of the room. From their cheerful conversation, I thought for a moment that the condition of a patient inside had improved and that he had been admitted to the normal ward. Wondering who this lucky patient was, I looked at the stretcher in front of me with all my attention; it was not at all what I had hoped for. I saw a lifeless body wrapped in a blanket from head to toe. Obviously, later that night, in the morning, someone else's world ordeal was over and he was going back to where he came from. As usual, there was no one waiting in front of the door, crying and shouting with pain in his heart. I immediately stood up, greeted and prayed silently to this friend whom I did not know, whom I did not know at all. As the stretcher slowly made its way to the elevator to be lowered into the morgue, another nurse with a newborn baby in her arms came running from the opposite side of the corridor with great haste. This strange fellow who had just breathed his last breath and was trying to get to the morgue temporarily, and this little baby who had perhaps just opened his eyes to life in the same minutes, came face to face in the corridor as they were trying to get to the incubator room. We didn't notice, but I thought they were greeting each other sincerely with great respect. The nurse paused for a moment next to the stretcher, hugged the baby in her arms a little tighter and quickly walked away.
With great courtesy and decency from my heart, I would say to one, "Welcome, sir", and to the other, "Goodbye, sir", "May your path be bright, may you be in the light." Indeed, this world was an inn with two doors. One person would enter through this door and the other would leave through another door. Our Prophet 'Ali had said that every day an angel of Allah shouts to the earth saying: "You are born to die. You collect to be destroyed. You build to be destroyed."[5]
Not long ago someone else was born to die. He must have been a very lucky baby. As soon as he opened his eyes, he was warned from the very first day that he had come to this mortal world for a test, and that he would soon embark on this journey of return, never noticing the time that flew by like water.
Our Prophet said in the Masnavi: "Look at the wisdom and grace of Allah that we have been born at the end of the nations, in the end times. The last of the centuries is better and superior to the first centuries. Because in the hadith, Allah's mercy showed the destruction of the people of Noah and the people of Hûd to our lives, thus warning us. If it had been the other way around, that is, if we had come first and they had taken an example from us, woe to us."[6]
I was very impressed by the meeting of these two travelers. It seemed to me a moment that one cannot easily capture in one's lifetime. I accepted it as the gift of this mysterious night and thanked my beloved. Suddenly, my teacher Şefik Can came to my eyes, loving and caressing a baby with his bright face and eyes full of love and compassion. Whenever they saw a little baby, they would take it in their arms with great care and respect, and while kissing the baby's hands, they would always say: "This is the hand to be kissed; the hand of an immaculate angel who has never been contaminated with the dirt of the world, the dirt of sin." Extending their own blessed hands, they would say, "Look at these hands; they have been involved in many sins until this age. Yet people want to kiss them because they are the hands of an old man." While kissing the hands of the baby in his lap with great kindness: "Tell me, how are the places where you come from? Look, I am quite old, I will go to the places where you come from in a short time. What news will you give me from there? What will you tell me?" The child would start laughing at these compassionate words of our teacher, mumbling something to himself, and our teacher would laugh and laugh with the child, saying excitedly, "See, this baby is laughing, he is very cheerful, so there is nothing to fear on the other side.
The wise men of the heart have attached great importance to the prison and the hospital, they have seen them as very important places where one can contemplate and return to one's own essence. I don't know if I have been able to contemplate enough, if I have been able to learn the necessary lesson, but when our mother was going to come out of the angioplasty room in five or ten minutes and we were hoping that we would all be together again in the evening, and suddenly she was admitted to the intensive care unit with a life-threatening condition, the word "There is no tomorrow", which I had heard many times throughout my life but which had not had enough impact on my soul, was indelibly engraved in my heart at that very moment. I had never experienced so deeply and so intimately that one day there would be no tomorrow, that tomorrow would run out at an unexpected time, that in fact we were moving at great speed towards that extinction at every moment.
Even though Goethe said, "There is enough time for everything, as long as we use it properly," I did not have enough opportunity to share life with my mother, to be with her often. I don't know why, it was as if I always had more important things to do. Now, all of a sudden, when I least expected it, it was too late for everything. All the tomorrows and hopes were gone in an instant. As a dervish lady of fifty years, she had devoted her whole life to her Pir and Murshid to the best of her ability. She knew why she had come to this world and now she was in a hurry to leave. She should have been very pleased with where she was. Unlived emotions, unfinished loves, boredom and sadness were only in me. I was desperately experiencing the pain of postponing many things by relying on tomorrow and the pain of being too late in the depths of my heart. I had waited at the door of the intensive care unit day and night for five weeks. If I had visited him once in his healthy days, if I had spent a night with him, who knows how happy and satisfied he would have been. But now he was not even aware of anything. He was in a deep sleep beyond the walls and doors. But me, in spite of everything, with the unbearable pain of being late, waiting day and night in front of the door, I was hoping that Allah Almighty, and therefore my mother, would forgive me, and I was trying to make up for my irreparable tardiness in this way.
Our teacher Şefik Can would sometimes ask me to do a research on any subject late at night. While I was wondering if we could postpone this work until the morning, without even giving me a chance to think about it, he would say, "Every night when I get ready to go to bed, when I say good night, may Allah give you comfort, I actually say goodbye to you, thinking that I will never wake up in the morning again, even though you are not aware of it." He would try to explain that there is no tomorrow with all his lifestyle and behavior. "Saying that this should happen tomorrow, that it should be left for tomorrow, does not fit the understanding of the sect." [7] and one of his greatest characteristics was that he did not wait for tomorrow. Unfortunately, despite all this, I have not realized enough that there is no tomorrow.
While I was in various thoughts, waiting for new hopes that would come with the new day, I was awakened by the morning call to prayer coming from the Fatih Mosque, rising like the sun to all the darkness. This divine sound that suddenly illuminated me was like a magical rope suspended at the bottom of the well. I immediately got up with great excitement and opened the window in order to catch this rose-scented rope. I wanted to breathe in the call to prayer, the silence that enveloped the whole body, the many things that I could not see or hear but felt very close to me. It was so quiet, there were neither crowds of people running around nor the ear-splitting noise of honking horns. While the sounds of the call to prayer blending one after the other brought tranquility to my soul, our teacher Şefik Can read the poem with great attention to every measure, meter, meter, accentuation, all the harmony of the poem, and with a better command of the spirit of the poem than the poet; Tevfik Fikret's "At the Morning Call to Prayer" was ringing in my ears with the impressive, dynamic and exciting voice of our teacher, who is a great lover of poetry, mixing with the sounds of the call to prayer coming from outside and echoing over and over again in all the streets of Istanbul together with my heart.
Allāh-u Akbar ....Allāh-u Akbar
A samt-i ulvi: Supposed nature
Hâmûş does ibâdet
Allāh Akbar.. Allāh Akbar..
A samt-ı nâlan: Gûyâ avâlim
Pinhan-ü peydâ, nevvâr-ü muzlim
He is always dhikr-i Hallâk
Allāh-u Akbar... Allāh-u Akbar....
Yes, dear friends; the day dawned with the cries of Allâh-u Akbar, Allâh-u Akbar in the midst of various thoughts and reckonings. With the first light of the morning, people were already running around again. It was strange, as if everyone was sick. Every day the halls of this hospital were filled and emptied with new faces. As the hours ticked by, sick people with small packages and bouquets of flowers came to see their relatives and visit them. Some were climbing the stairs excitedly with cheerful smiling faces, while others were walking through the door with anxious faces. While I was slowly trying to get up from the chair I had been sitting on for hours, I was running left and right excitedly, looking for the room where the patients were staying, and I was presenting the couplets of our Prophet Pir in the Masnavi about visiting the sick, like bouquets of roses in their hands, to this crowd of people, to these beautiful people I had never met, with great gratitude to everyone from the heart.
"There are countless benefits for you in going to the sick person to ask how he is doing. Those benefits will come back to you. The first benefit I will tell you is this: It may happen that that sick man becomes the pole of time and a great spiritual sultan. Even if the person you go to visit is your enemy, it is still very beneficial for you to visit him by doing good deeds. Even if that enemy does not become your friend, do not worry, at least his hatred towards you will decrease. Because goodness is the best ointment against hatred. There are many other benefits of visiting the sick. But, O friend, I am afraid of prolonging the word. The bottom line is briefly this: Be a friend to the society. If you cannot find a friend, make a stone friend for yourself like those who make statues."[8] In another Masnavi couplet, our Prophet said: "Sickness, aches and pains are a great treasure that contains mercies." [9] He had said. But we are weak and impatient servants, I don't know if we will have the courage and patience to find this treasure.
"There is no object like the state
There is no state in the world like a breath of health"
With these lines written in a hospital room, I first of all wish health, well-being and peace to all KEŞKÜL readers, and I wish a speedy recovery from Allah Almighty to my mother, who has been lying in this hospital for fourteen months, having lost almost all her vital functions, and who, despite all the pain and suffering she has endured, has always thanked and consented to her situation, even if only in signs, and to all sick bodies.
[1] Surah Inshirah verse 6
[2] Şefik Can. Mes.vol.2.1089.
[3] Şefik Can Mes. Vol.5.2636.
[4] Epictetus thoughts and conversations. Translation, Burhan Toprak. No:XV1-XXV
[5] Nehj al-Balagha, Translated by Abdulbaki Arberry. Page 409.
[6]Şefik Can.Mes.Cilt.2.3055.
[7]Şefik Can Mes.Cilt.1.133.
[8] Şefik Can.Mes. Clt. 2.2143.
[9] Şefik Can.Mes.clt.2.2261.
This article was published in the fifth issue of KEŞKÜL magazine.
