Alright then, I walked away after taking a mouthful of scolding from my wife. Goats like me are hard to find. Wherever I go, all I get is abuse. This must be God’s will. He’s saying, “Hey fool, don’t open your mouth. Don’t open your mouth. Just shut up. You’ve got only a few days on this earth. Enjoy them, you madman.”
When does joy happen? When you can keep your mouth shut. The moment you open it, trouble begins. And when does supreme bliss arrive? When you know chidananda. That chidananda is hiding inside you. Come on, it’s actually you yourself. You understand it. You know it. And if you don’t know it, what’s the point?
So instead of speaking, you fool, write. Keep writing. Whether anyone reads it or not, you write. Misspellings don’t matter. You’re not letting anyone read it anyway. In truth, you’re talking only to yourself, in your own way. No one will stand there and hurl abuse at you. This is your satchidananda speaking to you. He is hidden inside your breath, eager to talk with you.
So first, you must make a few things clear. You came into this world alone, and you’ll leave it alone. You had no companion before, and you’ll have none after. In this life, your only friend is yourself, no one else. In truth, everyone is as alone as you are. Everyone is submerged in the deep abyss of their own sorrow.
The wife you keep blaming, she too is alone. She studied with many dreams, did well, topped her class, leapt into every competition. Marrying you, she left her home and came to another city, riding on the wings of countless dreams, trusting you. So many dreams, so many broken dreams, so much pain—do you even understand that? Her life ended in the kitchen and in raising a kid. Where did her own fulfillment ever happen? What did she get from life?
Maybe you achieved some of your dreams. All your life you wanted only to write, and today you do that, earning a little money alongside. You married, you had a kid, you built a household. But what did your wife get?
Still, don’t blame yourself without reason. If you stop working today, the carefully arranged garden will dry up before your eyes. It will crumble like a kid’s sandcastle on a beach, collapsing grain by grain. The rhythm of the world will not be disturbed in the slightest. No one will even hear the sound of it breaking.
You have to keep working, whether you want to or not. Yes, in a country like India, a man must go on working silently, swallowing abuse. Staying alive here, carrying the responsibility of two more lives, is no small matter. You will have to hear harsh words, and you must not break.
I know you want to throw everything away and leave. But no, the time hasn’t come. It may never come. Hearing harsh words at the office and at home, you’ll have to keep your mouth shut and keep working. This is your fate, and the fate of millions of men like you.
Your wife too will have to keep working against her will, after crushing her own dreams. If you were to exchange places, neither would your household survive on her salary, nor would anyone be able to swallow the meals you cook. The world—at least your world—would collapse.
So instead, speak to the person within you. Speak to the one who lives inside your mind. Even if no one else listens, he will. The peace you get from speaking to your mother, you will get the same peace from speaking to the person within. The only way to speak to that inner person is through writing. So you will keep writing. Even if people think you’re mad, you will keep sending yourself, regularly, a letter written by your own hand.
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