From the Book SO BE IT: By Latika Tripathi - who is a certified holistic therapist and conducts workshops on behalf of Illuminations
How I found myself in this Crazy World – Based on a True Story of a Single Indian WomanWho we are is primarily defined for us by our caregivers and parents. Despite the best of intentions, they sometimes get it wrong. In my opinion, aspiring parents should be put through compulsory counseling together to ensure they realize and agree on what parenting entails before they create a new life.
In earlier times, children had more siblings, and parents enjoyed the support of extended family nearby. Problems were solved with the input of uncles, aunts, and grandparents, and even sibling rivalry helped to give a clearer sense of identity. In odd cases of incompetent parenting, a child could look up to a better role model within the family.
In these days of nuclear families and single parenting, it is imperative to prepare for this role with utmost caution. It would be a safer and better world if we made our children our priority. Most certainly we would not see so many kids go astray in these disturbed times with its overexposure to everything. In this imperfect world, we often have kids first and realize the gravity of what we have done later. This chapter talks about my identity crisis and how I learnt from it. I am trapped in it even today. Some skins are not so easy to shed.
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It was a deep and dark December in a small Indian town called Dehradun, close to the Ganges and far away from any major city. A smiling, crying bundle of joy arrived to her proud parents. They rejoiced at the first child that they had been blessed with. They counted the fingers and the toes of the plump, healthy baby and were full of gratitude. They promised to take good care of this perfect creation. They didn’t know then that some promises made are impossible to keep. The next decades would try them and the baby in every way possible. This is the story of that child.
I was born a Brahmin girl in a typically vegetarian, non-drinking, non-smoking, non-violent, and extremely religious extended family of farmers. My dad nicknamed me ‘Beta’, which translates to ‘son’. It was his way of feeling he had a son, when he really only had two daughters. He hardly ever called me by my real name, and he never realized that that word made me more of a man than any other experience in my life. My identity crisis started then.
I was gifted with The Ugly Duckling storybook when I was seven, and it only added to my confusion. I went about my entire life thinking that that was me. I did sometimes believe that the ugly duckling would one day grow into a beautiful swan, but that idea was usually forgotten amidst the many challenges life presented. The addition of braces to my protruding teeth at age twelve only intensified these feelings.
My dad, who had chosen to be an officer in the Indian Army and move away from his farming future, had suffered when he was forced to change his habits entirely and live the typical Armed Forces lifestyle. As part of his training, he had to learn to subsist on things like quail, partridges, and sometimes snakes. As children, my sister and I grew up eating practically everything, so that a day should not come when we would have to suffer and be forced to adjust our diets. So the Brahmin girls went about life eating mutton do pyaza and chicken biryani and relishing the partridge pickle and other delicacies unheard of in our farmer uncles’ lives.
Westernized to the hilt, never thinking about the Brahmanism that I was born into, I moved on, happy with whatever I saw and enjoying it all. During summer holidays when all the cousins would meet at our grandparents’ house, I developed an unusual feeling of superiority over them.
They ate only vegetables and did not know that gin, which I had once accidentally imbibed from my dad’s glass at lunch, looked just like water but tasted like fire. They said ‘yuck’ when we spoke about how mouthwateringly delicious chicken tandoori was.
I enjoyed their obvious discomfort when I showed off with tales of touching fish in the fish market or watching the blood spill from a chicken’s freshly split throat. As we grew, they still didn’t know any basic knowledge, like that beer makes an excellent conditioner for hair that was limp and had no body. My superiority complex crept in without anyone knowing any better.
I would fight the boys in the officers’ mess while other girls my age acted shy and coy when the boys were around. I was always one of the guys and often spoke and sat and behaved like them. The boys saw me as a buddy too, as I didn’t do all those girly things. I was always part of the gang, which was good for me, but there were times when they were at the receiving end of my antics.
One incident occurred at a formal farewell dinner for an outgoing officer of the regiment. All the children were expected to stay out of sight in a room far away from the main hall where the adults partied on. It was after eleven o’ clock, and all the kids were sleepy but no one would be the first to admit feeling tired. It was an unannounced competition.
At that point, my sister, who was about seven, called out to me and said she was really sleepy and wanted to lie down. The older boys, about nine and closer to my own age, snickered and called her names. My anger burst forth like a volcano erupting, and I dived onto the main culprit. Before I realized what was going on, all the other boys came to protect their gang leader and jumped on me and punched me hard. I was enraged at the injustice, but at the same time I didn’t know how to pull out of the pile or what to do next; I was shocked by their unexpected ganging up against me.
In the confusion of hands and feet, between being pushed down and trying to stand up, I reached for what seemed to be a fleshy arm and bit firmly into the skin. I tightened the grip of my teeth until I felt moisture on my lips. A loud howl from the gang leader silenced the entire party, and soon the parents rushed in and pulled apart this melee of children.
The gang leader was rushed to the army nursing room, and I got the worst talking to from my mom, who admonished me to behave like a girl. I was surprisingly collected after that release of anger. I must have looked like a Halloween partier with drops of the boy’s blood still beaded on the corners of my lips, but I responded to my mom very calmly that it just was not a manly thing for me to allow an outsider to tease my sister. Besides, only I had the right to torture her. The intensity with which I spoke silenced my mom as she realized that I really meant it. She was horrified, and later when she narrated this incident to anyone she always added, ‘Why can’t she be like the younger one, my angel?’
My dad stayed out of this even though he was present at the scene, as it was considered appropriate for mothers to handle such situations. As I lay in bed that night, my dad came and tucked the mosquito net neatly around me and whispered, ‘Well done, Son. I am so proud. That was very brave of you. Don’t let anyone ever treat you or your loved ones badly.’
That became my defining moment. All my life thereafter I have often dived into stuff like that and stood by the weaker party, being brave for them and never caring about the consequences. Of course I learnt that bleeding someone was not the best way to make a point.
What’s wrong is wrong. The sooner this is cleared, the lesser the pain for all involved.
Often a mother and a father go about parenting each in their own unique manner and don’t come to a joint agreement as to how they should raise their offspring. It was like that with my parents. They both went about it in their individual way, and neither conferred with the other. It led to a lot of confusion within me, as often I did not know which way to go. It is important to instill core values into kids at an early age, which my parents did very well. They imparted honesty, integrity, industriousness, determination, focus, humour, and intelligence to me and my sister early on. Despite their best intentions towards me, their first born, they got it wrong in the most important area by not communicating with each other. Maybe instilling clarity into their kid didn’t occur to them, or perhaps they didn’t have that within them in the first place.
My identity was sealed when I bit the bully. I would be both boy and girl; I had to go on fluctuating between those two depending on the situation, I thought to myself. Was I not half the cells from my mom and half from my dad anyway? Biology came to my rescue.
That incident was the last time those boys spoke up in my presence. I was the uncrowned champion with all the girls and all the boys too, except for the bandaged gang leader. Soon after, his dad was transferred, and thankfully my bad reputation was washed away.
My sister saw me as a support through that fiasco, and whenever she was in trouble or needed advice she would come to me for an opinion; even now she continues to do that. Often my solution was to take over the matter by personally going to the person who she had a problem with and saying whatever had to be said as if she was saying it. This was no real solution at all, and I did not realize that I was becoming a bully now. After that the problem would go away and in fact the person causing the problem would never come close to either her or me. Nobody knew any better at home.
As a fee for all this free emotional protection, my sister received regular hammerings from me if she didn’t comply in certain situations. She isn’t joking when she says she is short because I never allowed her to grow. I would just keep banging her back into the earth at regular intervals. Physical fights amongst us were not so frequent, but there were some real lessons that I learnt through play.
One such time we were left at home while mom went out to replenish the weekly groceries. I was the mistress of the house, and my sister was to play the part of the housemaid. In this role she had to clean the kitchen and the toilets and keep the food ready in time for the master to return home. She did all her assigned tasks rather quickly and came to me, the mistress. ‘Ma’am, pardon me for disturbing your siesta, but all the work is done. When will the master come home for lunch?’ ‘Later,’ I said, ‘and since all the chores are done and you have nothing else to do until the master returns, I would like you to massage my tired feet for a while.’
The ‘housemaid’ became aggressive and rude and said that that was not part of her job. Like any good mistress, I was outraged and would not stand such rebellion from the help. I told her to get out of the house and never come back. She started crying and apologized. After expelling my sister, I returned to the imaginary world of the privileged mistress and continued to rest my tired feet.
Everything was alright for the next hour or so until the real mistress, my mom, returned from the weekly shopping trip only to find her little daughter locked out of the house and crying like a lost orphan. My sister related the housemaid’s sad tale, and I never played the mistress again after that. I graduated to playing a lot of ‘doctor-doctor’ in my teenage years though. When I was married and managed a home of my own, I was always careful to be friendly, rather than superior, to all my domestic help.
My mom had settled that once and for all by making me the housemaid and giving two days of leave to the paid helpers. My sister floated about the house in joy while I was made to clear and wash her plates and dishes, polish her shoes, and iron her school uniform as a final reinforcement to ensure the demon mistress never returned.
At that time not only did I have an identity crisis, but my bullying became worse, as now I would do it without my mom’s knowledge. I became a bit of a liar, too. The person who has suffered the most because of my identity crisis, besides me, has been my sister.
Despite being so thin as to appear almost malnourished those days, I believed I was strong, and that often made me do things that others would have turned their head from and politely declined to participate in. Confident of winning, I went wherever the action was. My inner strength carried me through a lot of unpleasant situations in life.
Often I was expected to respond differently in situations as compared to my sister. It made me feel superior, and along with this dad would whisper to me that I was the son and could easily do it.
For example, all the banking was assigned to me at an early age while he was away on a posting to a border area. Not only did I withdraw and deposit money, but mom asked me to perform the more complex task of budgeting for the entire household. Her relationship with money was bad, or so my father revealed in one of the secret confidences he shared with me.
While kids my age were being responsible for taking the trash out or feeding the family cat, I was adding up all the expenses and setting aside money for the daily expenditures until the next payday. That’s when I developed a love for numbers. I became very adept at juggling things and could find solutions to the seemingly impossible. As a child I had the advantage of not being bound by the limitations that adults feel as they often turn down the most obvious solutions.
Although this ability benefited me later in life, it put a lot of pressure on my less than fourteen-year-old mind. While I suffered and was confused in other areas, I was very confident and had perfect clarity when it came to money. Since my friends could not understand my thought process, I was often the outcast for knowing too much. The identity crisis deepened further. Was I a carefree child or a financial wiz?
That parents can harm their own flesh and blood without even realizing it, and then further compound their mistakes by not discussing them with one another, is a lesson I have learnt well and been careful not to inflict on my own child. Young people cannot be expected to take over adult roles just because parents are weak or incompetent in some areas. The terrible money handling on part of my mom placed a huge burden on me. It has helped me later but was a big weight to carry those days. My great responsibilities made me a serious person when I should have been free to be a child, making the normal mistakes that children make and learning from them. This inappropriate financial responsibility has defined a large part of me. Many things I do, have to be completed perfectly, leaving no room for error, and no room for much else either. Spontaneity was totally missing from my life, and only recently have I reclaimed it.
Around age fourteen, I could no longer pretend to be a son, so I developed a kind of convenient split where I would be the Beta when my dad was around and play the ‘swan’, which I was now beginning to enjoy, when he wasn’t. That was the beginning of a long and dangerous ride.
My mom tried in vain to make a girl of me. My sister was the delicate one and I was the wild one. To please my mom I took to knitting and cooking, and I even became very good at stitching clothes. I was the perfect son to dad and the almost perfect daughter to my mom, who was impossible to please. My sister was always the perfect daughter and continues to be.
Mom was just trying to get all the chores done, since dad was away often. She never reinforced tenderness and love with her children. Discipline and good manners were her theme. Any physical display of affection was rare.
I saw my friends being hugged and kissed frequently by their parents, and it seemed strange to me that people would do that so often to each other and for apparently no reason at all. It wasn’t even their birthday, I marvelled when I was younger; it wasn’t as if they had performed exceptionally well at school or at a sport, I reasoned when older. I was unable to understand why other families made such a big deal of it.
While spending a day at a girlfriend’s house, I watched her rush out of the room to hug and greet her dad when he returned from work. When I asked her why she had just done that, she replied that she always did when he came home. Always? Every day? I wondered. When I asked mom why we didn’t hug every day, she had no answer and neither did that motivate her to to consider becoming more expressive. I found myself getting more and more confused, as we just did not express our feelings so openly despite obviously loving each other.
We were really good at expressing our anger or sharing our feelings or thoughts, minus the physical hugs and kisses and the actual words ‘I love you’. Everything else was discussed. Nothing negative was ever kept hidden, waiting to surface at some inopportune moment. There was never any negativity left to deal with later. Everything was handled swiftly and immediately. We got really good at releasing all our feelings. A part of me enjoyed this process of releasing as any boy would. Sometimes our love was expressed through anger, too. It seems odd, but in our family we knew that this anger was an expression of love and not real animosity.
Between ages fourteen and sixteen, all was well with me. Suddenly I was the swan. I knew it and capitalized on it big time. The dating started, and I went out with a continuous string of boys, many wilder than me. After all the years I plagued my mom, it was now my boyfriends’ turn to deal with me and unsuccessfully try to make a girl out of me.
They had a tough time. I was too much of a guy, but they figured that out only later. What they expected and were used to was a typical Indian girlfriend, soft-spoken, pretty, delicate, demure, blushing, coy, giggling perhaps, and ditzy. She would cry easily, and then it was up to the boyfriend to patch things up and buy her gifts and chocolates or roses. I was extremely deceptive in this area. I certainly looked the part during the first two dates.
I was extremely adept at shifting gears between the boy-girl personas by now. But by and large the masculine aspect surfaced at the third date, and the unsuspecting boyfriend would be rather amused at my occasional swearing. From meeting number four onwards, my boyishness would dominate, and I’d remain a complete tomboy until the end of the relationship.
Sometimes I would let out a string of words that would make the boys blush for me. When they said something out of line I would smack them on their arms or back. As our familiarity grew, I graduated to slapping them on the face. They were too shocked to react. I once hit one of them where it hurts the most, and he doubled up on the floor in pain and squeaked out what sounded like nasty words. Even today I have no idea what they were, as he wasn’t at his eloquent best then. He wouldn’t repeat them to me when I told him later that I didn’t quite catch what he said while he was curled up on the floor; perhaps he was afraid of a repeat treatment. He had to wheel his motorbike home, as he wasn’t able to sit very well. His rather tight jeans didn’t help either. We broke up soon after.
Word spread. Many such instances made me hot property amongst all the boys between sixteen, my own age, and twenty-one. My reputation grew, and each wanted to try his luck, confident that he would emerge the champion. Taming of the shrew could have been their theme. No one ever won with me. I would always come out on top. Winning was in me. Whether it was love or war, I didn’t differentiate. Very rarely, would I let one of them feel good by letting the fight end in a good round of animal sex. Indirectly, he would think he had won that round. It only happened when I liked that one particularly more than anyone else.
Extremely critical of who I was seeing and always warning us of the possible consequences, mom became the enemy. I learnt to block her out completely. I could handle myself.
I decided I was going to take charge of my life as soon as possible. Studying doubly hard and determined to move away from the family as soon as possible, I graduated in commerce and obtained a hotel management diploma at the same time. Additionally, I studied German just in case I got a job as a translator and got an opportunity to move to Germany, which was one of the places I had always wanted to visit when I grew up. My choice of language also gravitated towards the more guttural and manly one as compared to the delicate French that most of my peers opted for in college.
Finally, and it couldn’t have been soon enough for me, I started out in Mumbai. A job with a leading hotel helped me finance my stay in this city of dreams.
Still going about life as either a boy or a girl depending on the situation I was in, I found Mumbai accepted me in no time at all. I felt that the city had been waiting for me to come and discover it.
I smoked now and drank and led a pretty active social life, hitting all the night spots and living the life of a twentysomething. To be seen as someone who was game for anything and with very little inhibitions and no parents around made it that much easier. There was a lot to see, and I learned the ropes quickly.
I realized later; that I attracted men in my life who were extremely expressive with their emotions, because that was what I never got when I was younger and what I deeply craved. The identity crisis and its deeper questions were never really answered at all. After a while I got heavily involved with dating, which resulted in a quick marriage to a colleague who was many years older. That made him a good choice for the wild and reckless me. I had barely known him for six months before I agreed to the marriage. He had proposed within a month of my joining this leading publication house. I never did pursue the hotel job. In retrospect, it was my not knowing what I really wanted that made me vulnerable to his insistence to get married and live in a home of our own in Mumbai instead of boarding in a working women’s hostel.
He won only because I didn’t know my mind and heart or even myself; I figured that if someone was so crazy about me, how could he possibly be an unsuitable partner. My outer confidence made people believe that I really was sure of myself but inside I was just a lost and wide-eyed mix of boy-girl.
After that, I was really caught up with my home, child, and career. The question of identity now revolved around my roles as wife, mother, successful manager, or youngest chairperson of the housing complex where we lived.
I purchased a house against strong opposition from my husband, who thought it wasn’t a good idea to look for financing from a bank. I went into it alone, and at some point he was convinced that owning was better than paying rent. I could be stubborn about things I really wanted. I made most of the difficult, and usually male decisions the entire time I was married, even the decision to get divorced.
During my nine years of marriage, I still did not know who I was. I was a bit of everything I was expected to be, and on my own I was nothing. I defined myself based on who I was with and never thought of who I was when I was alone.
At that time it didn’t matter, because I had not been alone for long periods of time. Everything was just happening to me, as opposed to my being responsible for creating anything at all. Life was a series of accidents back then, many good ones and some nasty ones. No single situation ever had me worried for long periods of time.
It got to a point where I was looking to find quick solutions to every challenge, to keep all parties happy. I always had all the answers and often thought that life was just a big game to be played and won, always easily excelling.
I never questioned until I was hit with thunder and lightning from the skies and was stripped of all the layers of conditioning wrapped around me. The cocoon within which I had become so comfortable was forcibly peeled off, and I was exposed to the strongest sunlight and blinded. All I could do was grope around.
This was when my identity was finally challenged and threatened.
I was already confused, and there was more and more being dumped on me. As the stark reality hit me, I was forced to choose to continue to live with my husband, who I was told was cheating on me even though he was the one who had chased me to get married to him nine years ago, or to opt out of the marriage and live alone with my son. Armed with the information I was given, I gave my husband the ultimatum to choose the other person or me, and to my shock he chose to move out.
This was a blessing in disguise, as he didn’t try to fight for the custody of my son, my only anchor and reason to go on. We spent our last night under the same roof on 1st May 2000.
I was now totally alone in Mumbai with no dad to fall back on, no husband, and no savings. The life of a single parent of a five-year-old, lost in the sea of people and the fast pace of life in Mumbai, would challenge anyone, especially someone who still had no idea of her very identity. I thought I was sinking, being pulled down and thrashed about by the shark from Jaws. How could it be? I could not lose. I always had been the winner.
I turned to mom, who came to my rescue in a flash. She took over my daily troubles of managing my less than five-year-old son and the house at a time when I could not even get myself to get into the shower each morning.
There was nothing to look forward to now. Mom could not help in any other way. All she could tell me was to pray. I could never relate to her, and as usual whatever she said fell on deaf ears. My confidence was completely shattered. I was dead on the inside and would have very well jumped into a well or from the top of a tall tower, as my life had very little purpose then.
The only thing that prevented me was the thought of leaving my son alone in this world for no fault of his own. That was my only thread to sanity, and even then it kept me sane for brief periods only. Later I learnt to utilize both the masculine and feminine sides of myself to give this boy both the parents rolled into one. This was the one way my split identity actually worked well for me, I think.
I turned to my sister too. She stood by me like a rock and offered unconditional emotional and financial assistance. She was the silent strength behind me. But all her support and all the love she showered on me and her nephew could not help me to understand who I was — the basic thing I needed to know before I could move to the next set of life questions I wanted to solve.
My sincere search for my identity began then, at age thirty and alone. In the nine years since, I think I have found the answer. I did what I have always done when in doubt, jump in a la Superman. Choosing to go ahead with the divorce, I started life afresh with my son and thought I would handle the identity issue later on, when I had the luxury of time.
I tricked myself into believing that things would magically fall into place if only I could find that key that would open all the doors and locate the right door that would give me a happily ever after life. I changed my name twice to get the right vibrations to achieve that.
In numerology, I discovered instant success and a sense of everything falling in place, only to later realize that while it gave in some areas, it took away in some other very critical areas. The name change hadn’t been done correctly the first time around, and I learnt this the hard way.
It became a joke when I announced to my colleagues one Monday morning that I had changed my name over the weekend and was to be addressed by the new name. They thought it was a silly prank. No one believed me. To get them to take me seriously, I had to stop answering to the earlier name and only respond when people addressed me by my new one.
They all wanted to know what had brought this about. I had bumped into this young man who was visiting my house along with a feng shui consultant. While I was busy getting the directions sorted out with the consultant, this youthful numerologist sat in my living room and worked on my name.
He asked me for my date of birth and went about doing some quick calculations. He explained that numerology is the science of getting the name aligned to the date of birth to ensure that they are in harmony. It’s all about the vibrations that we send out, and if the vibrations of our name are not in sync with our date of birth, things keep going wrong in our lives despite our best efforts. That is what was happening to me, he explained.
What were the chances I would not buy that? The numerologist suggested a change in the spelling of my existing name. I didn’t like that option of double ‘k’s and ‘t’s, so I went about picking a new name. My identity crisis made me gladly accept this as the solution to all my so far unsuccessful attempts to find my real self. I would take on a new avatar and fool the old identity with this new me. He suggested this perfect name numerologically, and I went along with it.
Two years later, it turned out that the number he had so confidently recommended was faulty. First, there were the unending procedures that I had gone through to legally change my name. Then followed the troubles that the faulty name number landed me in.
Getting deeper into the mess, I realized that I would have to take the matter in my own hands, and I began to study numerology. With little trust in anyone else, I decided to get the right calculations myself. My previous love for numbers came right to my rescue. I explored numerology until I had educated myself in both the Western and the Indian methods.
I changed my name for the second time. This time it was like magic. Absolutely perfect. Things fell in place into my giant jigsaw puzzle with ease, but something was still missing. A strange feeling of incompleteness came over me. Slowly the reality hit that it’s more than just adding up to the right number. It’s not the vibrations you put out but the vibrations you have within that matter.
I saw Shakespeare’s quote ‘What’s in a name?’ in a different light now. He was a wise soul. ‘What’s in your name?’ he would have asked me for sure. If only this rose knew that it was the smell that defined me and not my name, would I not have gone and worked on that earlier. As I said, I was not clear then or for a long time later on.
Without any idea or a sense of knowing what I was looking for, I intensified the search and went round and round until I felt I was chasing my own tail. I figured that there are five senses, so if it is not the sound of the name, then perhaps it is in the smell that one puts out. Perhaps I was sending out a smell of fear or loneliness? And if not that, then we are left with touching. All I touched turned to gold easily. Seeing was next, and I did see it all when I travelled from one county to another. Finally it rested on the tasting. Success tasted sweet but just ever so briefly. One by one I realized that the answer was not in any of these senses.
The search and comparisons had just started. After two name changes, a divorce that took two long years to finalize, and a son sent away to boarding school, I moved to Dubai. The roads there challenged me to break all the speed limits as I zipped about the lanes with the roof of my car pulled down and my hair blowing in the hot desert breeze. My music threatened to deafen the seemingly soundproofed city. Dubai was heaven.
I drove the car of my dreams, successfully managed a career that got me a double promotion and double the salary in record time, and then brought my son back to his home — a happy home now.
I travelled the world and started living my life in a city that fulfils dreams. With each step up the ladder of success came the saddening realization that it was not enough, and l was still searching for the elusive answer to the defining question.
We do a lot of things which we think are the right things at the time. Later I realized that I was trying to be someone else. The name change just happened to be one of those things I used, to become another person. All along it was my inside self that was calling out to be looked at, while I kept looking outside.
Despite having it all only seven years after I lost it all, I still felt something was amiss. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places. I wondered if those who guided me to act in these directions knew any better themselves. If they did would they have pointed me there?
If I had a better grounding into myself right from childhood, I would have known better than to seek their advice. Having never received formal religious grounding, I was helplessly floating around and had nothing to anchor into. I was drifting. I was lost. Only I could save myself, and I had no clue where I was supposed to start.
I had read somewhere that we are all born complete and spend our entire lives in search for this elusive thing that we think we lack, while all along it lies within us. What is this thing that I lack, I wondered.
I reviewed my entire life in reverse order trying to understand where things had gone wrong. I lacked for nothing materially. In fact I had always had it all, and easily. I gave up looking backwards in time. Ironically, it was in the regressing that I finally made some progress many years later.
Then I went through my entire life, starting at the beginning to understand when things first started go to wrong. I gave this up even faster. It is the conditioning around us which makes us believe and operate from the feeling that we lack something.
Then we start looking for that thing which we think we lack, and the comparison and the search begins.
Lost, confused, and tired, I gave up trying to understand. I thought that if I could just get through each day, one by one, soon enough the responsibilities would be over and then I could really look for the answer.
I’d had my plate full of stuff for so long that I had to call for a side plate to pile aside some of the things to be chewed upon later. By the simple process of elimination I had finally figured what wouldn’t work for me. I didn’t know if it would work later, but I had a fair sense that it would not work right then, and so that would get dumped onto the side plate.
But there is so much in the universe, and I could not possibly sample everything and every experience in life. I kept piling my side plate with stuff to be handled later. It became precariously full and overloaded and things started spilling onto the table, especially my emotions. I was becoming cold and had started to deep freeze my feelings as much as I could. Now the freezer was full too.
It hit me that the answer had to be found right away. I could not wait another day, and certainly not until the right moment came along. Is there such a thing as the right moment anyway?
They say when the disciple is ready the master appears, and just like that as I was flipping through a children’s magazine, it happened. As I waited at the dentist’s for my son, I read the story that changed me forever.
The story was about a lion cub raised by sheep. When the cub wandered away from the herd, he was captured by an old lion. The old lion was surprised that the cub was not able to roar and chase smaller creatures like other cubs his age enjoyed doing, but behaved and made sounds like sheep. The old lion took this cub to the lake and made him see his reflection in the still waters. When the cub saw who he really was, he let out the loudest roar ever heard from any lion cub. He had suppressed his true personality because of the conditioning he had received from the herd. He could now move around the rest of his life freely and be happy with his identity as a lion.
That hour in the dentist’s reception propelled me to finding my true self. I knew then that I was holding onto the end of a thread that would unravel the more important higher truths to me. My being would be defined now. Whatever happens I should not let go of this awareness, I decided.
It is social conditioning that makes us behave differently from our true nature when we are forced to be sheep and follow the herd. The true lion lies within, and it is up to us to awaken the sleeping lion and lead the way. Nature is perfect in whatever it does. There is no room for error as far as nature is concerned. It is we humans who like to complicate things and believe that what we are creating is a correction to nature’s errors. If we were meant to be clones, we would have all been born the same naturally. Some of us are meant to be different, and we are born as such. If we have the courage to recognize the lion within, then lions we all shall be.
Look at your reflection in the mirror, and see what you have believed about yourself because others conditioned you in that way.
Being a lion requires you to move alone often, to find your path and to be prepared to face the uneven territory that is part of life. By being the lions that we are meant to be, we learn the true lessons of life.
The lion goes for the kill. But his killing for food is an integral part of the cycle that nature intended. Lions have the power to protect themselves and their cubs in times of danger may offer protection in crowds for a short time, but if faced with danger they will all cuddle and huddle away, leaving one of them alone in the face of danger.
We come alone and go alone, and that is the undeniable truth of life. Why should we be afraid to find our way alone between the coming and the going? We come from nothing and go into nothing, so why is being nothing in between not OK?
I now understand a few things better than I did in that moment three years ago. It is the sense of inner knowing and inner being that defines us, not the five senses of sound, touch, sight, taste and smell. I know now what I would like to be and where I would like to go. The journey has started and I know I’ll get there.
I am still to figure out how to get there, but that is something to be figured out just as all lions have to figure it out, by being in the wild.
The most important question of them all is the one that got answered for me recently — the question of who I am. The lion within says, ‘I am the lighthouse that sends out beams in all directions and shows the way to others who may be on the same search of trying to understand their being just as I have been.’ You can join me in this search of finding your inner lion and roar and purr as may fit the occasion.
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Life is a series of chapters that we have to first learn and then unlearn in order to arrive at the end, as we did at the beginning — pure and clean and full of faith and trust and love. In each ending, there is a beginning. New starts from exactly the point where the old concludes.
Brahmin: Hindu priestly class.
I would best describe myself who believes in the power of now. Whether it is to execute a task or to enjoy life..I believe in living in the present for it is the present that shapes our future!
