Nasruddin Stories - Humble (retold by Nasruddin)

My beloveds, I remembera time long ago when I was still a Mulla. I
lived in a small town, just big enough for a real mosque, with a
beautifulmosaic wall. I remember one evening, we had finished our
prayers. Thestars were clear and bright, and seemed to fill the sky
solidly with lights. I stood at the window, gazing at the lights so
far away, each one bigger than our world, and so distant from us
across vast reaches of space. I thought of how we walkthis earth,
filled with ourown importance, when we are just specks of dust. If you
walk out to the cliffs outside the town, a walk of half an hour at
most, you look back and you can see the town, but the peopleare too
small to see, even at that meager distance. When I think ofthe
immensity of the universe, I am filled withawe and reverece for power
so great.
I was thinking such thoughts, looking out the window of the mosque,
and I realized I had fallen to my knees."I am nothing, nothing!"I
cried, amazed and awestruck.
There was a certain well-to-do man of the town, a kind man who wished
to be thought very devout. He cared more for what people thought of
him than for what he actually was. Hehappened to walk in and he saw
and heard what passed. My beloveds, I was a little shy at being caught
in such a moment, but he rushed down, looking around in the obvious
hope someone was there to see him. He knelt beside me, and with a
final hopeful glance at the door through which he had just come, he
cried,
"I am nothing! I am nothing!"
It appears that the man who sweeps, a poor manfrom the edge of the
village, had entered the side door with his broom to begin his night's
work. He had seen us, and being a man of true faith and honest
simplicity, his face showed that he entertained some of the same
thoughts that had been laid on me by the hand of Allah (wonderfulis
He). He dropped his broom and fell to his knees up there in a shadowed
corner, and said softly,
"I am nothing...I am nothing!"
The well-to-do man next to me nudged me with his elbow and said out of
the side of his mouth,
"Look who thinks he's nothing!"