Change yourself, change your life

When a girl starts preparing for the IAS, or a boy for the RAS or IIT, he says, we quietly think it is too hard, and advise them to settle for something smaller. Becoming a patwari or a teacher is not wrong, but lowering someone’s courage is. Trust them instead, whether it is your own child or a neighbour’s.

On a train we are sure a pickpocket is near; why not think that nothing will go wrong? He recalls Robert Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont, on the Hudson in 1807. The crowd on the bank was sure it would sink, or stop, or was the devil’s work. It ran. Within a few decades steamships were crossing the Atlantic. Negativity, he says, harms the people who hold it.

He once read the question: who is your enemy? A neighbour, a friend, a relative? He lay awake thinking about it and concluded that a person’s enemy is himself: his own thinking and attitude. We wait for someone to come and show us the light, to stand us up when we fall ill, fail an exam or lose in business. Nobody will come.

The lock is yours, he says, and the key is in your own heart. Rise early, work late for the purpose of your life, and you can go from average to extraordinary. Start walking, and others will follow, as a flood of people followed Gandhi. Be your own friend, not your own enemy.

Mark Twain, he recalls, said the two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. Find your purpose, and don’t just keep running. Pause your life now and then: listen to music, read a book, play the game you love, hum a tune, walk with a friend, go to a garden. Keep a few moments, as the old song says, just for smiling.

When someone criticises or insults you, don’t react; reaction only gives them strength. When a man heaped abuse on the Buddha, he said nothing, explaining later that he had not accepted the abuse; the man came back the next day to apologise. Make time for your family, and visit your village and your parents.

We fear change and want to stay in our comfort zone, he says, but change is the truth of life; the Buddha taught that nothing is permanent. We learned to carry mobile phones. Even first aid has changed: once, a burn was kept away from water; now doctors say to hold it under cold running water. Blessings have changed too: newly-weds were once wished many children; few would say that today.

If you keep invoking the past, what our forefathers did, how things used to be, you will suffer. Learn new things, live in the present, and you will find energy and happiness.

In his long experience, he says, young people slip into disappointment and depression quickly; a failed exam or low marks and they feel darkness all around. That feeling settles in a corner of the mind and makes a permanent home there. Don’t give it a corner.

Being positive is not a slogan. Remember that spring follows autumn and morning follows night. Even at night there are stars and the moon to find your way by; people once did everything by lantern light. Light a lamp of hope in a corner of the mind, keep a patch of sunlight in a corner of the house, read hopeful books, and keep hopeful company. Every child falls the first time on a bicycle; every failure teaches something.

A farmer who sows a seed does not dig it up every day to see whether it is sprouting, he says; he gives it time. Do the same with your work. Don’t expect results the moment you begin.

Whatever you sow in your inner mind is what grows. When there is tension all around, put good things there, and, like a good seed, they will flower and make your life fragrant. Let your thanks and your apologies come from the heart, too, not as a formality; said sincerely, they change you.