When you need
to change yourself, you must face yourself – your inner demons and the brutal
reality of your Life.
There’s a beautiful parable I remember
reading in Daniel Gottlieb’s ‘Letters to
Sam’. Once a man came back home late in the night to find that he had been
locked out of his house. His neighbour saw him searching for the key under the
streetlight and he too joined the search. Soon several other neighbors joined
in the search wanting to help their distressed neighbor. After a while, one of
them asked the man where he had last seen the key he was searching for. “Near
the front door,” replied the man. The neighbor was puzzled. “Then why are you
looking for it down here by the streetlight,” he asked. “Because the light is
better here,” came the reply! Gottlieb shares the moral of this parable saying
that when we are looking for answers in Life, we intuitively go where the light
is better. Because it is convenient to search! But sometimes, says Gottlieb, for
real transformation to happen, we must go where it is dark!
To be sure, no one likes to face the
truth. The truth always is uncomfortable. Even thinking about it leads to a
gnawing feeling arising within, doesn’t it?
Almost a decade ago I had a tobacco
habit. For years since my early adulthood I had been chewing tobacco. I tried
to give it up many times in those years. But every time I attempted, my resolve
would break in few weeks because my mind would insist that I needed that habit,
that crutch, to help me deal with the stressful Life I kept. So, I would
capitulate and allow the habit to take over. But soon I would start feeling
guilty – and depressed – with my inability to quit. Then one day, my doctor
told me, that with the way my medical reports were reading, I would not live to
be 40! I was 36 then. He held a mirror to me. And for the first time I faced my
fear of my death. It was a very scary and, at the same time, awakening moment. I
must confess that every time I popped tobacco into my mouth, I would always think
of cancer and death. But I would brush aside the thought telling myself that since
death was inevitable I would face it whenever it came. Besides, I vainly kidded
myself that the habit helped me relax – when in reality it actually made me
feel guilty and fearful, every single time that I chewed. But that moment in
the doctor’s clinic was different. I clearly understood the import of what he
was saying. I knew that if I continued this way, I was sure to die in the next
few years, maybe as the doctor had estimated, by the time I was 40! I quit
chewing that instant. I did not even heed my mind urging me to pop one last
sachet of tobacco as I left the clinic and got into my car to drive back home.
I simply quit. Period. When I look back now, I feel that it had been possible to
quit – and abstain ever since – only because I had faced what I feared most –
the reality about where I was headed with my habit and my lifestyle.
Interestingly, all of
us know what’s right for us. We know the futility and the ruinous nature of
some of the choices we have made and continue to make. It is our inability to
face our realities that keeps us running down the path of escapism. The more we
run, the more we live haunted lives. The more we run away from the truth the
more we struggle to change, to transform.
It is only when you
stop, turn back, and face your inner demons that you will truly transform. When you allow the truth about yourself to hit you, you will
wake up to be the change that you wish to see in you – and in your world.
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