“I have things unpaid and things unsaid, and I do not want to think about them.”

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 night audit of an unfinished life 15 min, one night a week
  Fifteen minutes with a pen on what is unrepaired — and one action taken tomorrow. — 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
• Apologising first 30 seconds
  Being the one who speaks first, within a day, without conditions. — Section 10 — Adab With People
• Forgiving before sleep 90 sec nightly
  Emptying the chest of rancour every night, whether or not anyone has apologised. — Section 10 — Adab With People
• The practice for a man running out of time Ten minutes tonight for the first act
  For the reader with a diagnosis, or in his seventies, or who simply knows. — Section 12 — Remembering Death

Where the first one comes from

Muhasaba, self-examination, is a discipline the early scholars formalised; al-Harith al-Muhasibi took his name from it and set it out in al-Ri’aya li-Huquq Allah, and al-Ghazali devotes Book 38 of the Ihya’ to vigilance and self-examination. Both build on the verse “let every soul look to what it has sent forward for tomorrow” (al-Hashr 59:18) and on the saying transmitted from ’Umar: take account of yourselves before you are taken to account. Muslim narrates the description of the bankrupt man who arrives with prayer and fasting and leaves with nothing, because his good deeds were paid out to the people he wronged.

Other sentences

• “I think I have left it too late.”
• “It has been six years of nothing and I have stopped expecting it to end.”
• “I felt something once, years ago, and I have been chasing it ever since.”