Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa
Your Word — the Bani — is beyond what any comparison can reach. Infinite. I hold it the way the Saints hold it: as the very ground they stand on.
I remember with every breath. With every bite of food. I carry this so completely that I cannot imagine forgetting. How could I? He is my life itself.
The Lord knows every ache of the soul, every emptiness it has tried to fill with the wrong things. He gives the fruit the soul was actually thirsting for. He is the Patron of those who are lost — the one who stays with you precisely when everything else has left.
Do not gamble away your life — meditate on the Companion of all, the one who stays.
Nanak's prayer, offered with everything: carry me across. This world-ocean is terrifying. Be my crossing.
"Remembering with every breath and every morsel"
Simrat sās girās — "remembering with every breath and every morsel of food." The two units here are precisely chosen: the breath (involuntary, constant, present even in sleep) and the meal (voluntary, rhythmic, marking the structure of the day). Together they cover the entire texture of ordinary life. The remembrance Guru Arjan describes is not a scheduled event or a special practice session. It is woven into the minimum conditions of being alive: you breathe, you remember; you eat, you remember.
This is not an achievement of exceptional discipline. It is the natural state of a mind that has been genuinely absorbed in the Lord — the way you might naturally, effortlessly, think of someone you deeply love throughout the day without deciding to.
"Patron of lost souls"
Anāth ke nāthe — "the Patron of those who have no patron." Anāth means without a protector, orphaned, unclaimed. The Lord specifically seeks the ones nobody else is looking after. This is one of the most comforting theological claims in all of Gurbani: the divine's particular care is for those who are most lost. Not the ones who have everything arranged and going well — the ones who have nothing and no one.
"Don't gamble away your life"
Jap jū'ai janam na hārī'ai — "meditating on the Lord, don't lose your life in the gamble." The life is a dice game (jū'a). The stakes are total — the whole life on the table. But the one who meditates on the Patron of the lost, the Companion of all, is playing with a steadied hand. The gamble does not go against you when the Lord is your support.
*What is the one thing in your life, right now, that you are most afraid of losing — and what would it mean to trust the Lord with that?*
Translation by Dr. Sant Singh Khalsa·How we use AI