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Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds' wings.
Rumi
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Balance in life is essential; we must engage in both openness and closing to thrive.

This quote by Rumi emphasizes the importance of balance in our lives. The act of opening and closing, whether in relationships, experiences, or emotions, represents the dualities we must navigate. Just as our hands cannot remain permanently closed or open without consequence, our lives require a harmony between giving and receiving, action and stillness, which is crucial for personal and spiritual growth.

Themes

BalanceLifeGrowthDualityOpennessClosing

In practice

Example use cases

During a motivational speech about resilience and adaptability.

More from Rumi

My dear heart, never think you are better than others. Listen to their sorrows with compassion. If you want peace, don't harbor bad thoughts, do not gossip and don't teach what you do not know.
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Every fragile beauty, every perfect forgotten sentence, you grieve their going away, but that is not how it is. Where they come from never goes dry. It is an always flowing spring.
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Whatever you keep hidden in your heart, God _x000D_ manifests in you outwardly. Whatever the root of _x000D_ the tree feeds on in secret, affects the bough and _x000D_ the leaf.
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Come on sweetheart let's adore one another before there is no more of you and me
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Quote by Rumi | QuoteProject