https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/09/30/rigorous-grace-a-conversation-between-leslie-jamison-and-kaveh-akbar/

You talk about breakups as useful, if not altogether happy, opportunities to celebrate what was gathered over the course of a relationship. Most of my breakups have been dominated by the sense that I’d never be loved so well again, that I had fucked up with the one person who’d ever be capable of loving me. And I think that sense springs from a misunderstanding of love as a static reservoir instead of as a practice—as a well bucket instead of the hands lowering it into water.

This is part of what has always appealed to me about Islam, since I was old enough to be able to understand it. It seems to me to be a spiritual practice rooted in action—proactively helping those who need it—often in the form of zakat—is one of the five pillars of the faith, right up there with prayer. There’s something in that that feels so simpatico with the vibrations of my own soul. Action, action, action. Maybe it’s that I don’t trust my own idleness. My friend Tommy Orange told me a story recently about a scared starving person alone in the desert who prays to God for help, and so God sends the scared starving person a scared starving child to protect. That’s how God answered the prayer. I wanted to melt. It was everything.