Dad’s Wisdom – Part 2

When I look back, I can’t remember a time when I listened to my parents. Something that I’m not proud of, in retrospect. My Dad gave words of wisdom sparingly, but kept reiterating these repeatedly over long periods of time – stubborn that I was, I never listened to them. In recent times, on some of the occasions when my Dad spoke what I considered were words of wisdom, I had the foresight to write them down. When I collected all the points together, the total came up to 24! I don’t know what it is about wisdom and 24 – Dattatreya had 24 gurus, and such. With my Dad’s permission, I am posting these nuggets of wisdom. Some of them may be obvious – some of them may be brand new – and some of them you may vehemently disagree with. Which is as it should be. The italicized items are my Dad’s words. In some of the points, I have provided a brief explanation, and those words are mine.

Part 1 of this post can be found here.

13. When people crucify you for your mistakes, you should be thankful. If not, you will pay a compounded price at a later time.
    The laws of karma will bear fruit sooner or later. The more we postpone them, the penalty will compound. 
14. You should have enough activities that you don’t have time to dwell on your problems.
    This piece of wisdom has also been reiterated several times by Swamiji – He often says that villagers never complain of depression!
15. Putting bread on the table is the foremost duty of a man.
16. Others’ problems are bigger than ours.
    We tend to believe that our problems are the most acute. I am using ‘we’ quite freely – I should say that when I was going through tough times, my problems were the only things that I focused on, and I didn’t recognize that my less-than-graceful responses were in turn causing problems to those around me. If I had stopped to see that others’ problems are, I would have been viewing things from a different perspective. 
17. Just because you made a mistake out of ignorance, wrong cannot become right.
    A corollary of the law of karma.
18. We get sucked into a lot of useless “competitions” in life.
    I cannot remember a single instance where my Dad got sucked into a “competition”. During my tenth and twelfth grades, my Dad never put pressure on me to score well in my board exams, regarding these as “rat races”.
19. There is no destruction for Truth.
20. At any time, there is only one answer: “I am going to work on myself.”
21. You have a list of rights and wrongs. Why should anyone else play by these rules?
22. When things are not going so well, bite your tongue, bide your time, till the tide changes and good times come.
23. Till this minute, what happened is a matter of the past. Starting this moment, say “I am responsible for my life.”
24. Okay – people have been unjust, unfair to you. Is there any law against it?

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