Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
In the second watch of the night, you forgot. Not on purpose — you were picked up and passed around, loved and cooed over, and in all that warmth, something quiet slipped away. Your mother held you and called you hers. And you forgot what you actually are.
O wandering mind — think carefully. In the end, nothing you're holding onto will still be yours. The One who made all of this — get to know that One. Let that knowing live inside you.
Says Nanak: in the second watch of the night, you forgot to stay connected.
The forgetting
The second watch brings the most human of all conditions: visar — forgetting. The soul does not rebel against the divine; it simply forgets. In the warmth of family, in the delight of being loved and held, the interior connection to the Source loosens. This is not a moral failure — it is what the world's beauty and the world's love do to an unguarded mind.
The image Guru Nanak uses is precise and tender: hatho hath nachā'ī'ai ji-o Jasdā ghar Kān — "from hand to hand you are passed around, like Krishna in the house of Yashoda." Krishna — the divine himself — was born into a human home, passed from one set of arms to another, cooed over, named, claimed. Even the divine, in its human form, was subject to this passing. What chance does the ordinary soul have?
"In the end, nothing shall be yours"
Ant nahī kachh terā — at the end, nothing is yours. This is the bluntest line in the pauri, placed in the middle like a wake-up call. It is not said cruelly. It is said with the tone of a friend who loves you enough to tell you the truth. All the warmth of family, all the things you are holding and being held by — these are borrowed. The teaching is not to stop loving them. It is to hold them differently: with open hands.
Wisdom gathered within
The closing instruction — man bhītar dhar giān — "gather spiritual wisdom within your mind" — is where the pauri turns from diagnosis to direction. The antidote to forgetting is not to reject the world's warmth, but to carry something that cannot be displaced by it: an inner knowing, cultivated deliberately, that the Source is always present underneath all the warmth and all the passing.
*When you think about everything you call 'mine' — how does it feel to know that in the end, none of it will be yours to keep?*
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI