As the story has been told by generations of Persians, when one day the twelfth century poet Farid ud-Din Attar was tending to the aromatic spices he sold in his tidy shop in Nishapaur, a wandering fakir asked him, "How are you, with all of this, planning to leave?"

     It is an invitation akin to Jesus' calls to some of his disciples, seemingly on the spur of the moment (although these men had clearly been thinking about Jesus for some time), to leave everything and follow him.  It is asking a person who seems reasonably satisfied and content with his life to, without much further ado, leave it.

     So the question before us is, why would anyone leave a life of satisfaction?  From almost every standpoint, such a departure defies common sense.  But that's the point.  Any person who seeks genuine greatness, be it in the heights of material achievement or the depths of interiority, realizes that she must let go, often without knowing what comes next, of the present moment.  To depart, abruptly and immediately from the known:  to abandon what she sees.

     Attar and Jesus' disciples were being called to pursue interior greatness.  Although we can disagree about whether pursuing interior greatness or exterior achievement is the better choice, it seems that the latter will not be whole without the former.  Until Attar left what he had materially, he did not discover who he was spiritually.

     Not to say that the material is bad.  Not at all:  we need the goods of the material to stay alive.  Absent interiority, however, we will never understand why we  even need to live.