BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE IN OTHERS

“To be the change without action you aren’t going anywhere. An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”

       ~ Mohan Das Karam Chand Gandhi

Change is the law of nature. Charity begins at home. We must first be content and satisfied then only we can satisfy the demands and requirements of the others. If we try to satisfy the needs of others and ourselves remain needy, then we can’t do justice with the charity. It will be a forced charity just to prove ourselves philanthropists.  It is very easy to make wishes for a transformation; we have to change ourselves from within.

Gandhiji who was an epitome of change. His philosophy was that:

“You must be the change you want to see in the world. As human beings, our greatness lays not so much in being able to remake the world, as in being able to remake ourselves.”

There are cruel, unkind and kind people around us. Even the kinds are subdivided into- “Sympathetic and Empathetic.” Sympathetic people may be passive one but empathetic persons are the real active humanistic creatures to feel the sorrow and pain of others. They raise voices for the deprived ones, although being the member of other part of society enjoying luxury. History is full of these empathetic leaders, who had been the change to see the world change after them.

Without taking action very little will be done. However, taking action can be hard and difficult. There can be much inner resistance and so you may resort to preaching. So, to really get where you want to go and to really understand yourself and your world you need to practice. Books can mostly just bring you knowledge. You have to take action and translate that knowledge into results and understanding. ACTION SPEAKS LOUDER THAN WORDS.

Find what you really like to do. Then you will find the inner motivation to keep going, going and going. Success or victory will seldom come as quickly as you would have liked it to. I think one of the reasons people don’t get what they want is simply because they give up too soon.

Attempts of micro level changes, leads to change in the society. That is how society has evolved to present day’s world. Macro level changes through legislation hardly prove its worth. If you change yourself you will change your world. If you change how you think then you will change how you feel and what actions you take and so the world around you’ll change. Not only because you are viewing your environment through new lenses of thoughts and emotions but also because the change within can allow you to take action in ways you wouldn’t have or may be even have thought about, while stuck in your old thought patterns. The problem with changing your outer world without changing yourself is that you’ll still be you when you reach that change you have strived for. You’ll still have your flaws, anger, negativity, self-sabotaging tendencies etc. intact. So in this new situation you’ll still not find what you hoped for since your mind is still seeping with that negative stuff. And if you get more without having some insight into and distance from your ego it may grow more powerful. Since your ego loves to divide things, to find enemies and to create separation it may start to try to create even more problems and conflicts in your life and world.

Be congruent, be authentic, be your true self, to be the change. “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.” So the change starts from me, right here where we are now, from each one of us. Let us all join together, acts of friendship and acts of compassion. Our children should get a better world than what we have inherited.

 – BY SANYA SINGHAL