“I think I have left it too late.”

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 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
• Setting the minimum floor The prayers you already pray, plus ~90 seconds
  One absolute minimum you do not go below, for as many years as it takes. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works
• Staying as a station in itself Years
  Constancy is not the consolation prize. In this tradition it outranks the prize. — Section 13 — When Nothing Works
• Returning to it after you have forgotten it for a month 2 min, tonight
  How to start again, without shame and without a ceremony. — Section 2 — Dhikr
• The hundred istighfar About 4 minutes, in pieces
  Seeking forgiveness a hundred times a day, in three words, spread across the day. — Section 2 — Dhikr

Where the first one comes from

Al-Tirmidhi narrates that Allah accepts the repentance of a servant as long as the soul has not reached the throat. The Qur’an is direct: “Say: O My servants who have transgressed against themselves, do not despair of the mercy of Allah. Indeed Allah forgives all sins” (al-Zumar 39:53). Muslim narrates the instruction that none of you should die except while holding a good opinion of Allah. Al-Ghazali, in Book 33 of the Ihya’, holds that fear and hope are kept in balance in health, but that at the end hope is to be given the upper hand — and Book 40 closes the whole work on the vastness of Allah’s mercy.

Other sentences

• “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.”
• “I want to stop entirely.”