When will there be time again?

When will it be time? When will you go to yourself at last? How much longer will you keep running from yourself like this? When will that time come for you? Counting carefully, it's been twelve years since I began walking with myself, only with myself now. I haven't asked anyone—could you give me a little time, would you spare some time? I haven't asked, because I know that time wouldn't belong to anyone. I never got whatever I wanted simply by wanting it, just by asking. I know what solitude is. After some terrible nights of solitude in my life and some lonely days, after nearly dying, I finally learned to live. Now I have no fear of solitude, no fear of leaving at any moment. Yes, I do fear death, but I also know this—every living being must taste death! Death is that unwritten contract we brought with us at birth. And that's why accepting it hasn't caused me much suffering.

You think, you only keep running from death, but are you even alive? You've named it...self-isolation! In the end, then, a tiny virus has forced you to return to yourselves! Now you're trapped within four walls! Was this how it was supposed to happen? Was it supposed to be like this—returning to yourself so shamelessly, under compulsion? No, I no longer feel alone with myself. I love being with myself now. When I'm busy with work in a crowd of people, it feels like just work to me. I don't seek any joy there. There doesn't have to be joy in work. But there will be some tasks in work, and they must be done at any cost. I've come to know that this world is as alone as each of us is. This seems like a trivial matter to me, nothing worth thinking much about. Being with yourself—there's no better company than this. Yet you keep running away from your most beloved companion every day! External glitter has so enchanted you that you think that shell is what's real.
How carelessly, how easily you insult yourself every day, every moment, yet when others insult you for some reason, you make a big deal of it. When will you ever have time to give to yourself? This constant running from yourself—who do you really have besides yourself? Pushing away your own true being, what illusion has possessed you? When will you go to yourself? How much more compulsion will it take for you to return to yourself? All this time you've seen neither night nor dawn. When dawn came, you rushed to the road. When night fell, you returned to your mundane refuge. You've passed time just somehow. What more do you want, tell me? How much more money? How many more cars? Exactly how much property do you need? Your closets are full of clothes, yet you go shopping every day. Your cosmetics must not only be branded, but you need vast quantities. You don't want to use one mobile phone for very long—after some time you want a new one again.
Every day you have friends' parties — today a birthday, tomorrow New Year's, the day after something else. You spend millions on each event, yet still feel something is missing, something left undone! Many of you have no groceries at home, no food, yet you pile up mountains of expensive designer clothes! Tell me, what do you do with all those outfits? You can't wear the same dress to more than one occasion, can you? You cannot sleep without air conditioning. You cannot eat anything but chicken fry or chicken curry. Even when there's no particular need, you spend hours and hours out of the house, while at home your parents endure one unbearable day after another! Do you ever wonder where the money comes from?
You spend year after year in prestigious public and private universities, dropping semesters, taking retakes, completing just a subject or two at a time, until somehow, after four years, you manage to finish your degree. Then you emerge as wise and worldly before your uneducated or semi-educated parents. Your parents begin to feel a certain pride in you. But where have your principles, your ethics, your values vanished? You forget your responsibilities to your country, to its people, to society, to the world. You don't even glance at your neighbors or your poor relatives — not even by accident. Because you have prestige, after all. How can you talk to just anyone? You who are so busy with your extensive studies don't even have time to look their way. You must climb very, very high. You must only climb upward, you have no time to spare. You truly have no time for anyone. No time to watch the sunrise at dawn, no time to see the play of light at high noon, no time to gaze at the bright stars in the night sky. You are all becoming such important people!
What do you actually do? Either you come home and listen to music at full volume, or after finishing school-college-university-coaching-private tutoring, you come home and immediately sit down to study for the next day. You rarely need to take a rickshaw, or never do at all, so you never know that sometimes you have to pay the rickshaw-puller extra fare just to be humane for no reason. You only have girlfriends and boyfriends, and you only give surprises to them. The poor, the helpless — they never get to receive surprises. Because you forget that a person cannot choose their place of birth. And that's why you so quickly forget the fortune you received by birthright. You forget love, compassion, cooperation, empathy — all of it. To you, love means only expensive gifts or sex with your beloved. To you, being well means only appearing well to others — that is, showing off. You have gradually learned, quite skillfully, the art of deceiving yourselves to yourselves.
For you, a special day means nothing more than setting up a lunar marketplace at home, displaying a houseful of expensive furniture. For you, celebration simply means dining at some costly restaurant, taking selfies and uploading them to Facebook. You're learning to recognize life through a handful of likes, loves, and wow reactions. You buy your children expensive toys, yet your close relatives can't manage a single meal a day. You keep your children busy with numerous tutors, but you never check what they're learning or not learning—and moral education? You yourselves lack that entirely! You vacation abroad. Money wraps you in such a thick coating that this very coating threatens to suffocate you in time. How will you ever reach yourselves through all these walls?
You have actually lost yourselves. Your insides are hollow, empty, and you're filling that emptiness with external debris. You unwrap everything, yet you've never once opened yourself up to yourself. One sparkling day passes after another, nature plays alone with itself, adorns itself in one form after another, then eventually the sky breaks and evening descends. Again, trampling the darkness of night, nature dresses in a different garb. Yet you see none of this. Of course, I didn't have your kind of urgency; I had no important work worthy of doing, which is why I had tremendous time to observe all this. I always had time to watch the sun-bathing and rain-pouring by my window! And when dawn came wrapped in thick fog, I would gaze with full eyes to the very edge of my sight. When night spread its canopy studded with the weariness of the entire day, and the stars began whispering stories to one another, I would keep watching until sleep finally overwhelmed these two eyes like a bursting dam. I had no one sitting beside me to share stories with.
I have always felt the profound absence of a little sister. Oh, if only I had a little sister like my elder sister did! Then I could have woven stories whenever I pleased, made all sorts of demands! I did have many classmates like friends, as you do, but not quite what one means by friend, not what one means by friendship. Though I was always everyone's favorite in friend circles, I was actually quite antisocial. Like you, my friends had birthdays too, but when they came I would either forget entirely, or hand over the gift packet two days early and slip away beforehand to avoid the crowd. I never quite clicked with them somehow. They would talk, chat away, and I would stare blankly, or suddenly say something so unexpected that they would all burst into laughter and roll on the ground. And sometimes, in the midst of a lively gathering, I would quietly slip away without saying anything to anyone! Who would want to befriend such a strange creature, tell me?
It was their virtue that they maintained friendship with me despite accepting this mad nature of mine, reaching out to me of their own accord. When they sought me out, I understood only one thing—perhaps they needed some help from me now. Otherwise, they had never really looked for me in such a way before! Now, why do you think I'm saying all these nonsensical, rambling things about myself, making fun of you all, picking out your faults? Because you have turned your life into a destination. You are being born, studying, or doing something else to earn money. You are chatting with friends, partying, chilling, then doing everything that everyone does—marriage, children, car, house, luxurious living, expensive furniture, teaching your children to run like you, teaching them to live like you, some religious observance or education, or somehow dragging through a life worth living... that's it! Then at some point, death. Do you have any other purpose beyond this? That's what life is, isn't it?
This situation you've been forced into today, feeling trapped—have you thought about it a little? Why is this happening? Loneliness is gripping you, you can't stay put. You feel like a burden to yourself—why is this really happening? This wasn't supposed to happen to you, was it? Did any of you think you would end up in such a situation today, trapped by yourselves? Perhaps some didn't think about it, but some people are always prepared for such situations. Some among us are always ready for every situation. Perhaps they don't know as much as you or I, don't understand when they might face which situation, but whatever the circumstances—good or bad—they know how to accept and adapt to them. While you are becoming restless staying at home, doing this and that, bothering this person and that person, there are many others who can't find enough time to spend on themselves. They have no time! They are busy all day with the instruments of their own joy. Listen, you too have many, many things to do. If you start them, even two months won't be enough. Look around you—you'll find plenty of work. Of course, the lazy ones can't find any work. Actually, work isn't something to be found; it's something to be created.
Life is like an interconnected lock and key. If we want to reach the highest peak in something special, then that destination isn't everything. Because everything we do moves through a journey. Our present situation is also part of that journey. Now we are perhaps at one port of our journey; in a few days it will change again, and we might have to stay at another port. The confined state we find ourselves in today certainly has a key. We must find that key. Countless such journeys come one after another in our lives. Every moment of every day in our lives is an event, and how much each of us learns from these events—that's what matters. For any player, two words carry great importance—victory and defeat. There's nothing in between this victory and defeat. And another element gets added to this—the 'draw.'
This winning and losing—it is something entangled with other matters. If we were to place the whole affair on a scale from 1 to 10, then 1 would be the lowest maturity, 5 would be average maturity, and 9 or 10 would be maturity to the power of infinity—that is, the highest maturity. If this could be shown through a straight line, then between 1-4 there exists only winning and losing. There dwell those who wish to confine themselves solely within the bounds of victory and defeat. They fundamentally understand nothing beyond winning or losing, nor can they even think beyond it. If they win, their hearts remain joyful, they stay happy; and if they lose, their hearts grow heavy, they then experience unrest and discomfort. Those who can rise above 5 gradually transcend all defeat and victory, and they come to know continuously the higher dimensions and significances of life. What a wondrous, blissful journey this is!
We never think to consider that this matter of winning and losing is entirely a momentary feeling. If we pay a little attention, we'll see how quickly that moment flees from our lives—the day we win or the day we lose! Then it seems merely an event. Again, when we lose at something, or when we cannot be completely satisfied with some matter, time seems unwilling to pass. Time seems to have stopped. This feeling of stagnation comes only when we take it as our destination. When certain things lie beyond our control, then it becomes merely a part of our journey. It is not the achievement of our entire lifetime. Time will change if we change ourselves. Seen this way, accepting it becomes much easier.
In my life I have seen people who do not know exactly how much money they possess. Unable to find places to keep it all, they stuff money even into their pillows. Despite having such vast amounts, why do they keep crying for more money—how much joy is there really in this? I don't quite know, but what I do know is that at some point this becomes a habit for them. They keep thinking: more money needed, more money needed! Money eventually becomes mere numbers. It becomes a kind of addiction—an addiction to seeing and counting numbers. It's exactly like software. It runs ceaselessly without fatigue; they can no longer escape from it. Despite having abundance, they remain dissatisfied. These people, we often see, hesitate greatly even when it comes to trusting others. We may indeed be deceived, but does that mean we should abandon trusting people altogether? Can one live this way? For how long? Even if we trust and ultimately lose, what do we actually lose?
The day we install this "a little more would be better" software in our heads, from that very day we'll know for certain that we aren't living in today's life at all—we're always living in tomorrow's life. And whenever we remain fixated solely on our future, our eyes will constantly dart from side to side. Suppose someone walks past you right now wearing a dress more expensive than the one you're currently wearing—what will be the first thought to cross your mind? You'll think, "Oh, if only I had that dress, it would probably be wonderful!" Or when we see people who are better off than us, whose financial or other circumstances are comparatively much better than ours, we think, "Ah, if only we had such good circumstances like theirs! If only our lives could be as good as theirs!" This is where suffering begins. It's a kind of self-imposed poverty!
My point is this: why don't we consider abundant what the Creator has given us at this very moment? Why do we repeatedly think of ourselves as lacking? Why do we keep thinking that "a little more would be better"? Suppose what I'm receiving in my life at this moment is something that 70% of the world's population doesn't have or isn't getting—how would that feel? Do we know that each of us possesses specific things that no one else in the world has? Of course we do. So if, instead of seeking this inner strength, we merely keep comparing ourselves with others, how appropriate an action is that toward ourselves? This habit of comparing ourselves daily with others—does comparison truly exist in this world? It really doesn't. Because we've all been born with different energies. Comparison is entirely our own creation. Whatever each of us has at this moment is the best, the most worthy, the most beautiful, the finest. What enables my life to function right now, and function well, there's absolutely no reason to create even an atom of dissatisfaction about it in the mind.
Each of us should understand the distinct dimension or expanse of our lives. When this country of ours was fighting for independence, throughout those long nine months, everyone who was directly or indirectly connected to this liberation war had their own separate tasks. Each of them was working alone on their individual responsibilities. Could any of them have imagined that their solitary efforts would bring us today's victory? Yet they all knew that no single person could liberate this country. Giving their all, each of them began searching for the ocean within that single drop. At that time, every person thought—especially a certain number of people believed—that even if my life is lost, I will continue fighting for my country and my people, for my nation's independence. If we simply consider that the independence we achieved took us at least nine months, though the preparatory phase began much, much earlier—especially after the Language Movement, the national unity we felt, the need for identity, human equality, the lack of recognition we experienced—it was from there that it truly began, and gradually through these various circumstances and reactions to different events, we ultimately achieved our independence.
Why do I bring up this point here? Because while we take a considerable amount of time to embrace something good, we spread something bad, something negative—within ourselves and in others—in far less time. If we look at it this way: during the war, those who entered the battlefield—did they initially receive support from their homes, from their families? Or how many families readily gave permission to go to war? What did their families say at first? They said it wasn't necessary, or simply refused outright. Perhaps they said, what can you do alone? Can you single-handedly liberate the country? Yet later, all people, regardless of gender, gave their lives. The women of that time had to navigate restrictions a thousand times greater than today's. Despite this, they worked for the country in various ways, sacrificed their lives, and spent their entire existence under unimaginably harsh circumstances. They made such decisions voluntarily.
Today, a tiny virus has declared war so swiftly without any weapons! Yet compared to the amount of money spent on just the defense sector to control the country, or the efforts made to strengthen this sector, how much is spent on the healthcare sector or on research in that field? Actually, if we could spend proportionally as much as possible, perhaps we wouldn't face as much risk today compared to the problems we've encountered in healthcare. Through this, I'm trying to explain the actual state of comprehensive service for people at every level in this country. Or what could have happened if we had acted differently.
Do we truly know what actually transforms our lives? It isn't some grand thing that transforms our lives, but something quite small, something utterly simple that changes everything. The colossal, titan-sized Titanic didn't need anything massive to sink—first there was just a tiny breach when it struck an iceberg, and then gradually this grew larger until it swallowed the entire ship. This virus that has trapped us within our homes today, that has brought the entire world to a standstill—having witnessed this, can you still say that transforming our sparrow-like lives requires us to expect some enormous change? Never.
This means that succeeding in life doesn't always require monumental shifts. We can transform even the smallest catalyst into profound change. So if we must make comparisons, compare today's condition and position with yesterday's. How were you exactly three months ago, and what good and new changes have emerged within you today—comparing these two will give you a clear sense of your progress or decline. If you place your strengths and weaknesses side by side and consider what each was like before versus how they are now, you'll understand immediately. If you think with even a slightly open mind, you'll see that your strength is actually growing.
I know something that one of my teachers taught me. He used to say: whenever you teach a student, remember that they might surpass you in some other field, and keep this in mind as you educate them. The truth is, we search for so many things to move forward in life, how many times do we say, "If only I had gotten that opportunity!" Is this really right? Or how necessary is it? Why don't we think about the capacities that have already been given to us? To move forward in life, there's no need to compare ourselves with others. What's needed is how connected we can become with ourselves. How much we can enhance our own communication skills with ourselves. If we consider our capacity for thought on a scale of 1 to 10, and if our current capacity is at 3, then if we raise that thinking capacity to 6 or to 9, how much would that ability multiply? Have we ever thought about it this way?
If we exercise our bodies daily, our immune defenses gradually strengthen. Our capabilities grow in tandem. Almost all of us have had chickenpox once or twice in our lives—many call it smallpox. For most people, it occurs only once in a lifetime, but for many others it strikes twice or even more. Those who suffer it repeatedly do so because of weaker immunity. What we observe with the coronavirus is that its external force takes on a severe form precisely when your internal immune capacity is low. When external pressure is intense and your inner strength falls short of matching it, that pressure overwhelms your internal defenses. But if we can cultivate our inner strength, then no external force can come and break us. And this inner strength must be consciously developed. It doesn't happen overnight. Have we ever truly contemplated this? Why do we simply assume that nothing bad will ever happen to us? If we reflect on this beforehand, the thought of preparing ourselves naturally arises. Through this very preparation, we can weather any circumstance, pass any test.
If we desire any great transformation, we must give importance to small things. A straight line is formed by connecting thousands upon thousands of points. Several sets of those thousands of points combine to create an even greater straight line. The points unite with one another in such a way that they take the form of a straight line. Instead of viewing anything in its overwhelming totality, break it down into smaller parts, and you'll see that every problem has a solution. Comparing your life with someone else's only increases problems—it never reduces them. If you must make comparisons, compare your childhood self with your grown-up self, and you'll see that you were far more unique as a child. Because in childhood, you erected no walls around yourself. Your capacity for belief was immense then. You considered nothing impossible at that time. The question of what was possible and what was impossible never even arose in your mind.
But as you grew older, your mind began seeking a purpose behind all your actions. Intoxicated by the pursuit of benefits, instead of seeking life's simple, natural joys, you plunged into whatever work would bring you advantage. You naturally lost control over everything—what we eat, what we say, where we go, and so forth. Passing through all these things, we eventually forget ourselves completely, begin to neglect ourselves. We lose control over our eating habits, developing tastes for things harmful to our bodies. We neglect our physical selves. We perform many actions that go against our heart's desires. And these things eventually take complete control over us. Then, even if we wish to return ourselves instantly to our former state, it becomes impossible. So when this happens, we must become even more still, with greater patience gradually bring everything back under our own control. This is never possible in a single day.