My inauthenticity is the root cause of my anger.
No. I'm not enlightened. Yet.
But I thought I must list down all the moments where I was closer to realizing something profound. So here's the SECOND ONE.
My daughter was about 5. She had this peculiar problem of nightmares. She would suddenly wake up at night and start crying. I don't know what poor thing went through but she would cry incessantly. This used to happen quite often.
My cousin and I had found a club where we could play table tennis. We were very competitive to each other and every night we used to look forward to getting up in the morning and take on each other in the game.
So my routine was to get up at 6am and go to play.
While I knew my daughter probably wouldn't understand what I tried to talk to her, still I did my best to ask her during the day why does she cry at night. I would kind of try to convince her to 'wake up' and describe me her experience when she's about to cry. She would innocently nod her head in acceptance.
One night, I worked till midnight and had just slept. Lo, my daughter woke up at 1am to cry unstoppably. I shook her to wake her up. I tried to apply water to her face and did everything I could, to stop her from crying. No, she did not.
Suddenly I got angry. I thought 'latonke bhoot batonse nahi manate'. So I shouted loud and gave her a slap. (Not a hard though). Even then she didn't stop and eventually slept after crying for half an hour or so.
Cursing myself for hitting her, i too slept. Morning as usual I woke up, went to play and came back.
But the guilt of hitting my child was killing me from inside. I was so much regretful that I even thought of chopping my hands off. No I'm not making it up, I really felt so strongly bad. What would an innocent child do when she doesn't know why she's crying? What would go through the baby who was being punished for something that she hasn't done deliberately?
Out of the guilt and in order to address it, I gave a call to my coach in Landmark Education which I had just completed. He told me many things and out of which was listing down 10 things what made me hit her at night. He asked me to be honest and write down my inauthenticity.
I wrote. I took about an hour to write down my inauthenticity for being angry and showing it on the innocent soul. Tears of regret mixed with realization rolled down my cheeks.
Out of the ten things, what ruled as an inauthenticity was, "I was sleepless. I had just slept off after working in pressure. I had an excitement and pressure to play and defeat my cousin the next day. I had to wake up early which meant further loss of sleep. I wanted more rest. So I got angry on my daughter who was spoiling it."
Something dawned on me. I was painting my fault as her fault. My own inauthenticity was the root cause of my anger.
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