“I am afraid of dying and I push the thought away.”

If this is your sentence tonight, you are not the first to say it — and you are not being told anything is wrong with your iman. The tradition wrote down, in detail, what a person does about exactly this: not the theory of it, the treatment of it. Named masters, named books, numbered steps, and how long each one takes.

Two rules before any practice, and they are the tradition’s rules, not ours. First: one practice at a time, kept for two weeks, before you consider a second — the rush is the problem, not the cure. Second: do the practice and leave the result alone. Do not take your own spiritual temperature afterwards; the checking is itself a turning away.

The practices the book sends you to

• The ten-minute contemplation 10 min, once a week
  A fixed, bounded ten minutes spent picturing your own death, then stopping. — Section 12 — Remembering Death
• The graveyard visit 15–20 min, once a month
  Going to a Muslim cemetery, alone, and standing there for a quarter of an hour. — Section 12 — Remembering Death
• Writing the will 20 min tonight; a few weeks for the document
  The legal document, the list of your debts, and the two nights the hadith gives you. — Section 12 — Remembering Death
• Praying it as your last 3 seconds before one prayer
  Standing in each prayer as though there will be no other. — Section 1 — Prayer
• One day, held in the hand Five minutes at night, one minute at dawn
  Live inside a single day, on the assumption there may not be another. — Section 3 — The Diseases of the Heart

Where the first one comes from

Al-Tirmidhi, al-Nasa’i and Ibn Maja narrate the instruction to remember often the destroyer of pleasures — death. Al-Ghazali builds Book 40 of the Ihya’ on this and gives a method: empty the heart of everything else for a while, bring to mind those you knew who have already gone, and follow the picture through to your own body. He pairs it throughout with qisar al-amal, the shortening of hope — hope here meaning the long, unspoken assumption of years ahead. He cites the saying transmitted from ’Ali that the two things most feared for people are the following of desire and the stretching out of hope.

Other sentences

• “I have things unpaid and things unsaid, and I do not want to think about them.”
• “I think I have left it too late.”
• “It has been six years of nothing and I have stopped expecting it to end.”