You Cannot Fight the Darkness

 I read something today that turned me around. Sister Gyanamata, in one of her letters, writes that we thank our good stars far more than we ever thank our suffering — and that we have it backwards. Because it is not the good times that change us. It is the hard ones. It is only through our struggles that we transform, that we rise above our own limitations. The most important parts of our lives are the times that do not go well for us. We despise them while we are in them. And only later do we see that it was in exactly that darkness that we learned to give birth to our own light.

Here is the thing about darkness. You cannot fight it. As long as you try, it only grows stronger, because it feeds on your struggle. What takes its power away is not a bigger fight. It is light. You do not battle a dark room. You switch on a lamp.

So what is light? What does it actually translate to in a life? Let me tell you through mine.

I come from a family that rose up from the ground. My grandfather was part of a refugee family that came to Delhi from Lahore around Partition — no roots, no base, everything to be started from nothing. My father sold pens and milk when he was young. My grandfather eventually took a job as an accountant in Doordarshan. A government job. We lived in government quarters. We were a modest family.

My parents wanted my life to be better than their own, so they stretched far beyond their means and put me in a school full of children who were much better off than we were. I would reach that school by rickshaw while some of my classmates arrived in sedans. Their lunches were hand-delivered by house help. Quietly, without anyone saying a word, I was placed in the position of feeling inferior. I was bullied. I was struggling with who I even was, and how a boy like me was supposed to stand tall in such a tall world.

That was my first darkness. And I could not fight it — I could not change my house, my rickshaw, my family's bank balance. So I did the only thing I could. I changed what was inside instead.

I turned to my studies, because studies were neutral. There was no bias there. The teachers did not favour the rich boy or the poor boy — they favoured the one who knew his work. So I gave my whole attention to that. I taught myself English, because I understood English was the ladder into the world I wanted to enter. I read, because in a book there is no judgment. And there, in the one place that could not look down on me, I began to shine. Only when I stopped fighting the outside and turned inward did my circumstances slowly begin to change. Today I am thankful for every one of those situations, because they are what lifted me above my own limitations.

I thought I had learned the lesson. Then, years later, it came for me again.

I was having a good run at work when circumstances I could not control began to close in. There were forces in that workplace far stronger than me, and I could not focus on anything that needed to be done. It was in exactly those months that my son was conceived — my first taste of a responsibility larger than my own life. So I reached outward, the way we all do first. I looked for other jobs. I applied everywhere. I was ready to take a salary cut, whatever it took. And none of it worked, because the forces outside were simply stronger than me.

I fell into a real depression. The thought of walking into that office was dread. The people who used to listen to me stopped listening. The only pillars left standing were my family — my mother above all. And that was when I turned, for the first time, to spirituality. I sat my first ten-day Vipassana.

I came back from it knowing there was no point being afraid anymore. Almost immediately, the office tried to pull me into a corner I knew I could not win. And I simply said: do what you want. They did not expect it. But I said it — and it felt like the deepest relief, because I had finally let go of my grip. I came back to Delhi and began taking life one step at a time.

This is the whole of it. You do not remove darkness from a room by fighting it. You remove it by switching on the light. And when the inner sun burns bright enough, it shines away all the darkness outside.

I thank God for my suffering — for the learning it carried in its hands. And I ask only that His grace keep finding me, again and again.