On 15 November 1244, in the city of Konya, a respected scholar met a wandering stranger.
The scholar was Jalal al-Din Rumi, then in his late thirties, a teacher with students and standing. The stranger was Shams of Tabriz. What passed between them over the next few years changed Rumi entirely. And then, on 5 December 1248, Shams disappeared, and was never seen again.
What came out of Rumi after that loss was poetry, an extraordinary amount of it. Some of it was gathered as the Divan-e Shams. And over the following years he dictated a vast work, the Masnavi, to his companion Husam al-Din Chalabi. He died in Konya on 17 December 1273.
The Masnavi begins not with a teaching, but with a sound: a reed flute, crying.
What does Rumi teach about longing?
Rumi's Masnavi opens with a reed flute lamenting that it was cut from its reed-bed. Its song is the song of everyone separated from their source. In Rumi, longing isn't a flaw or a lack to be fixed. It's a memory of where you belong, and the ache itself points the way back.
I come to Rumi with reverence. He was a scholar and a mystic of a living faith, and his words mean a great deal to many people, including many in the region where I live and work. What I offer here is a reader's reflection, not an interpretation of his faith.
What does the reed flute say?
In R. A. Nicholson's translation, the poem begins: "Listen to this reed how it complains, telling a tale of separations".
A reed flute is made by cutting a reed from the bed where it grew, hollowing it out, and piercing it. Its music comes from that emptiness. And in Rumi's opening, what the reed sings about is the separation itself. Everyone who hears it, he says, recognises the sound, because they carry something like it too.
A few lines later comes the line I return to most: "Every one who is left far from his source wishes back the time when he was united with it."
Read it slowly. It doesn't say the longing is wrong. It doesn't say the answer is to stop wanting. It says that the wanting is, itself, a kind of remembering.
That's a very different way to relate to an ache. Instead of asking how to get rid of it, you can ask what it remembers. What was the reed-bed, for you? What did you know about yourself before the cutting, before the hollowing out, before the life that shaped you into a flute?
Why do so many of us feel a longing we can't name?
Because many of us are living at some distance from ourselves.
I meet a great many people who have good lives by any outside measure, and still feel an ache they can't explain. They long for something, but when they try to name it, the names don't fit. A new relationship. A different career. A move to the sea. They try some of those things, and the ache remains, because the ache was never about any of them.
In my own work, I understand that ache as the part of a person that remembers who they were before the world told them who to be. Somewhere along the way, most of us were cut from our own reed-bed. We learned to be what was needed, to perform, to cope, to get through. And a part of us has been singing about that separation ever since, quietly, under everything.
That isn't Rumi's teaching. It's mine. But when I read the song of the reed, I recognise the sound.
Is the answer to stop longing?
No, and this is where Rumi turns the ordinary advice upside down.
Most of us treat longing as a problem. We try to satisfy it with things, fix it with achievements, or quiet it with distraction. When none of that works, we conclude something is wrong with us.
But the reed's song suggests that the longing is the truest thing in us. It remembers the source. It won't be fooled by substitutes. It keeps pointing, patiently, toward home. If you follow it rather than silence it, it leads somewhere. Not to something new, but back to something you already knew.
That's the turn in this story, as I read it. The ache isn't the wound. It's the compass.
How can I listen to my own longing?
This practice is a letter, and it takes about twenty minutes. Do it by hand if you can.
Write a letter whose first words are "What I've been missing is", and don't stop writing for ten minutes. Don't reread as you go. Let it be messy. People often start with outer things, a place, a person, a way of life, and then, somewhere in the middle, something else appears. A quality. A feeling. A way of being they remember from long ago.
When the ten minutes are up, read the letter once, and underline anything that isn't a thing you could buy, achieve or find somewhere else. Those underlined words usually aren't about the future at all. They're about you, as you were before the separation.
Keep the letter somewhere private. It's the reed's song, in your own handwriting.
Why does loss so often open something in us?
Rumi's story makes the question hard to avoid. The poetry the world knows came, in large part, after he lost the companion who had changed his life.
I want to be careful here. Loss is loss, and nobody should be told their grief is secretly a gift. That kind of talk does real harm. What I've noticed, though, in many people over many years, is that loss sometimes breaks open a longing that had been buried under ordinary life. The routines stop working. The roles feel thin. And underneath, something that had been waiting a long time starts to sing.
That longing isn't the loss itself. It's what the loss uncovers: the part of a person that wants to come home to what's real. If you're in grief right now, please be gentle with yourself, and lean on the people who love you. The song will still be there when you're ready to hear it.
What happens when you follow the longing home?
The ache changes its tone. It doesn't always vanish. But it stops feeling like emptiness and starts feeling like direction.
I've watched this in people over many years. When what's covering them is removed, the old conditioning, the survival roles, the charge from old hurts, the longing often transforms into something like love, a wish to give rather than to fill. On our stories page, there's Divya Kaur's story: she helped her mother out of two years of depression with a single tool, before she'd even completed the full course. Where health is involved, that's the outcome as the people involved reported it, and anyone in clinical care should keep working with their professional. I think of her story here because it shows what can happen when what's inside a person turns outward, into care for someone they love.
If this reflection speaks to you, the question underneath it is explored in who am I, and the feeling of emptiness that sometimes comes before the longing is named in feeling empty despite having everything.
And if you'd like somewhere to begin that isn't another substitute, there's Who Am I?, the free masterclass I made for people who have been hearing that song for a long time.
So let me ask you what the reed asks. What were you cut from, and what would it mean to go home?
Robert Simic, guiding the remembering.