Run from what’s comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on I’ll be mad. — Rumi

I’ve been called mad for changing my life for poetry.

Mad for dreaming that the arts could sit at the heart of business, not serve at its edges.

Mad for standing up and saying no when silence was expected.

Each time, the word mad landed like an accusation. And each time I felt the sanest I’d ever been.

Rumi, and many other mystics before and after him, were called mad because they loved in ways that didn’t fit the moral or economic order of their time.

His “madness” was devotion that crossed the lines of orthodoxy, poetry that dissolved hierarchy, joy that ignored status.

When he said “from now on I’ll be mad,” he wasn’t announcing chaos; he was naming a deeper coherence that only looked irrational to those who’d traded wonder for control.

Across history, “mad” has been the label we attach when someone:

chooses aliveness over obedience,
trusts experience over doctrine,
values relationship over reputation,
or listens to mystery instead of the market.

The word becomes a cage built by those who fear what can’t be measured.

So to reframe madness as compass is to say:

My sensitivity, my refusal, my creativity, my ecstatic grief, these aren’t defects. They are my instruments of navigation.

Rumi was “mad” enough to let poetry replace dogma, mad enough to whirl until the self dissolved.

And through that madness, he remembered what sanity really meant: to be in love with life.

Next time you hear mad, listen for what it might actually be pointing toward: the pulse of an uncolonised mind, the first tremor of freedom, the beginning of art.

This is a poem for Madness as Compass:

They call it madness

when you dance while they deliberate,

when you trust the invisible,

when you build where there’s no plan.

But the so-called mad

are often just those

whose inner compass still points to wonder.

They say mad,

what they mean is uncontrollable,

someone who refuses the script of productivity and reputation,

who listens to something older, quieter, more truthful.

Madness is what the orderly call it

when a person follows aliveness instead of approval.

Every era needs its “mad ones”:

the poets who speak to what cannot be quantified,

the leaders who say no when compliance is safer,

the artists who remind us that tenderness and mystery

are not liabilities but navigation tools.

Madness is not chaos; it’s compass.

It points toward what’s still sacred

in a world obsessed with control.

You can download more poems in defiance of what rules us, to lit up our souls here. A renewal of old myths, old narratives and obsolete systems.

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