A Borrower

"Only the one who sins seeks to repent; only the one who has lost the way cries "Alas"...
The beauty personified in Adam, to which the angels bowed down, is afterward deposed from its former perfection, like Adam, when he fell from Paradise...
The lovely face whose splendor was like the moon, becomes with old age like the back of a Libyan lizard.
And the fair hair and crown of the head that once were radiant, become ugly and bald at the time of being an elder;
And the tall proud figure, piercing the ranks like a spear point, in old age is bent double like a bow.
He that used to grip a man in his arms in the skill of wrestling, they now take hold of his arms to support him at the time of departure.
Truly these are marks of pain and decay: every one of them is a messenger of death...
O God, I wonder what fault did an orchard commit, that these beautiful robes should be stripped from it?
"It paid regard to itself, and self regard is a deadly poison...
The crime is that he put on a borrowed adornment and pretended that these robes were his own property.
We take them back so that he can know that these robes were a loan from the Sun of Being."
All that beauty and power and virtue and knowledge have journeyed here from the Sun of Excellence.
God takes away his lamp, that you may know you are a borrower, not a giver.
If you give thanks to God for what you have received, and make the utmost exertion in doing so, be not grieved at your losses. God will give you a hundred such gifts in return."

Rumi (Vol. 5, 832-973)

Commentary: What I take such pride in, was never mine.