They say a father-daughter relationship is very special. I empathise very well!! To be very clear I can empathise only the daughter side of the relationship. I have never made any special effort to understand what maybe going through my father’s head every time I say anything. I only predict with 95% accuracy, what my father will say for anything that I have to ask of him.
Ever since I was 13, I had observed drastic changes in my father. And I have this bad habit- I am never curious, especially with people very close to me. Every morning I saw that he used to sit straight in the very small enclosure that we had as a Pooja room for about 45 minutes and the house was forced to be silent. Well 7 o clock in the morning and 2 people have got to leave for work and one teenager has to leave for school, its not easy to maintain peace and quiet you know, so definitely one of the rest of us at home are sure to get chided. Maybe another daughter would have lived her life with an Oh-my-God-my-father-has-turned-spiritual edge to it, but me- well... I used to be the same girl who used to watch television to the exclusion of everything else and who used to preach English to her friends who studied in the kannada-medium school. My father being spiritual hardly made any difference to my life because all those times he thought I was too young to take the load.
Now I am 19 years old. Old enough to take any kind of load. His mother had 2 kids by this age. And so enters spirituality in my life.
I don’t know what spirituality means to me. Its supposed to bring some kind of a meaning into my life, I understand, and it has. Its 2 years in my life since I have had a strong desire for anything. My life is moving on. And I am taking every success and every failure in the right spirit. Maybe with little faults here and there, I have cried for a short while when there was failure and enjoyed for a short while when there was success. But I think I am allowed liberty to learn through errors and I am learning slowly, slowly. But I don’t know how to think of studies as a kind of meditation. Given a situation I don’t know whether I should do what I want or I should do what is expected of me to do.
A typical morning at home:
Father: what is it that you are reading?
Me: (some subject)!!
Father: what is this topic and what does it say??
Me: (I explain something about what I am reading)
Father: read with 100% focus and use it as a meditational tool to relieve yourself from other distractions. You understand??
Me: ??!!(I nod my head nevertheless)
(and now comes the most confusing part)
Father: “Who am I?” is the most effective meditation that you can do. It will lead you to liberation. You have to simply surrender to God and ask yourself “Who am I?”
Now today I was not going to just ignore it like this. After he went and I got enough solitude, I cleared myself of all other thoughts and asked myself “Who am I?”
I heard a voice inside me which said, “Well.... frankly I don’t think its a very intelligent question. You learn how to answer to such questions when you are in first standard”
And so folks, here is my problem with spirituality.
My father maybe right about whatever he is saying but I don’t understand this whole thing of meditating at all. These days people say sitting and meditating when you are deeply disturbed will clear your mind. So far as I have seen when I am disturbed I am not able to clear my mind and close my eyes and think. I only observe that mind is disturbed after a long time of delving into the disturbance and deliberately stopping to think about it. I asked my father about this and he said what I was doing was meditation. Oh yippee!! J What about Who am I??
Me: “Who am I??”
My inner voice:.................... Uh... um.. well its getting late how long will you keep lazing around like this?!
Me: Alright! I will go take bath in sometime. Meanwhile, who am I??
My inner voice: listen can we just drop this question for some time?? You got to finish your degree and earn something and establish your own life. Then one day at leisure you can sit and ask me the question and I will answer.
Me: Oh but if I don’t get any leisure time when I am working??
To this day, my inner voice remains silent for that question alone though it is very noisy for everything else that happens in my life.
So,
Father: The solution to all problems in this world lies in the question who am I. Do you understand??
Me: Uh........ Yes, of course, I do.
