The ney is a musical instrument made from bamboo (reed flute). But Rumi uses it to explain the human condition. The voice of the ney is the voice of every human soul that has ever felt the ache of longing for home. And that home is Ney-stan. This is how Rumi’s Masnavi (6 books/25,000 verses) starts.

Ney-stan is the country of the ney (ney = the instrument, -stan = place of, like Afghanistan where Rumi was born, which is just so cute that he names a country like that). Ney-stan is the spiritual homeland where the soul originally belonged in unity with Allah (or the universe). It’s where the soul was universal before being cut away into individual existence. A place before separation, where we might live “as if you and I never heard of you and I”, beyond the illusion of dividedness.

The choice of using a reed/ney as the narrator is significant. When we’re born, the reed stalk is separated from the reedbed. Being cut off from Ney-stan, from the universal company, is a sad experience. It dulls our soul to be separated from its core. We forget who we really are. Our hearts fill up with ego, attachments, fears, the constant noise of “I, me, mine.”

For a reed flute to produce music, it must first go through a surgery. A surgery of emptying the stalk, punching holes in it, to transform it into a ney that creates music, an instrument that allows breath to move through it. This is in the same way that Sufis believe you must empty yourself of all egocentric tendencies before you can experience the divine. That transformation can be painful. But don’t let your heart break; instead, let it break open.

One of my favorite philosophers, Iris Murdoch, referred to this as “unselfing”:

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. “Good is a transcendent reality” means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.

Another quote from Bertrand Russell:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

All three of them understood the same truth: the self, with all its grasping and defending, is the primary obstacle to clarity and connection.

For the journey back to Ney-stan, we need to empty ourselves so the music of the universe can flow through and guide us home.

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Art by Ramesh Pachpande

We tend to locate innovation in the output, the new product, or the finished piece of art. This is sometimes called revolutionary, breakthrough, or disruptive!

But long-term value lives elsewhere. Long-term value is endurance. It comes from what we keep doing: the craft, the process, the maintenance. It’s evolutionary!

A simple analogy (from the book Breakneck by Dan Wang): the dish isn’t the innovation; it’s the outcome. The innovation is the input: the kitchen tools, the recipe, and the practice of cooking well every time.

You see this product/process concept in other places beyond the kitchen. Below are some related thoughts:

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China’s Factory vs. Silicon Valley’s Lab

The same book, Breakneck, mentions that Andy Grove once warned the United States must “focus less on the mythical moment of creation” and more on scaling because when invention is separated from production, technology ecosystems rust.

In Silicon Valley, innovation is a novelty, a moment (we all remember the iPhone launch). That is the dish.

In China, it’s a process, a system of reproducibility. The dense network of engineers, suppliers, and factories? Those are the recipes and the kitchen tools.

Single innovation in a lab without a learning loop from the production process goes nowhere.

When Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, it was a breakthrough. What changed the world wasn’t Fleming’s Petri dish; it was the process that came later. During World War II, scientists and engineers learned how to mass-produce penicillin, turning a fragile mold into an industrial medicine. The discovery was the spark. But the process, scaling, refining, and reproducing, was the revolution (where the value happened).

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“Low-road” vs. “High-road” Buildings

Just like technologies must learn production, buildings must learn construction. From Breakneck to Simon Leys’s The Hall of Uselessness to Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, a similar idea surfaces.

Builders everywhere have attempted to overcome the erosion of time. Ancient Egypt and medieval Europe built great pyramids and cathedrals out of stone: the “high road.” These buildings were designed to project permanence, to stand against time itself. But rigidity is a kind of fragility. When Notre-Dame burned in 2019, the world realized how little of the medieval process survived. Western permanence preserved the object but lost the method.

The “low road,” as Brand describes it, is the opposite approach: modest, flexible, easy to repair or rebuild. It prizes adaptability over monumentality. Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine has been rebuilt every twenty years for over a millennium, a structure that survives precisely because it is dismantled.

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Another way to think about this is in terms of development vs. maintenance.

In her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles drew a clean line between: “development,” the high-status work of creation, and “maintenance,” the repetitive, sustaining work that keeps things alive.

“Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning? Development: pure individual creation; the new; change; progress, advance, excitement, flight or fleeing. Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight.”

Maintenance, construction, and production aren’t glamorous. It doesn’t have a launch date or a press release. But it’s the reason I have electricity, listen to Bach, and type on a QWERTY keyboard.

Readings that inspired me:

1. Breakneck by Dan Wang

2. Simon Leys’s The Hall of Uselessness, which Dan Wang references in his book (mainly this essay)

3. Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn

4. 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Among the many things I track in my reading are extraordinary things described in extraordinary ways. I have a collection of them, which I’ll share in three or four quotes at a time.

But I’m starting with just one today because it’s so stunning. The reason I’m sharing this alone is that the more I read it, the more I realize it’s a Godly paragraph.

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Ladies and gentlemen, here comes the paragraph by Halldor Laxness from Independent People

SLowly, slowly winter day opens his arctic eye.

From the moment when he gives his first drowsy blink to the time when his leaden lids have finally opened wide, there passes not merely hour after hour; no, age follows age through the immeasurable expanses of the morning, world follows world, as in the visions of a blind man; reality follows reality and is no more– the light grows brighter. So distant is winter day on his own morning. Even his morning is distant from itself. The first faint gleam on the horizon and the full brightness on the window at breakfast-time are like two different beginnings, two starting-points. And since at dawn even his morning is distant, what must his evening ber Forenoon, noon, and afternoon are as far off as the countries we hope to see when we grow up; evening as remote and unreal as death, which the youngest son was told about yesterday, death which takes little children away from their mothers and makes the minister bury them in the Bailiff’s garden, death from which no one returns, as in grandmother’s stories, death which will call for you, too, when you have grown so old that you have become a child again.

Today, while chatting with my friend Andri, I confirmed what I’d been sensing: this is actually a paragraph that describes day, life, death, childhood, and old age (and there’s probably much more). So it’s one paragraph that describes all of humanity, which is anything but ordinary, despite what some people might believe.

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I also learned another thing about Laxness. He initially moved to Hollywood and wrote Salka Valka (another favorite of mine) for a silent movie. For an extraordinary writer to write for a silent movie is also so beautiful in its own way.