Cithipatra, Vol. I, Letter No.16, Shelidah, June 1898.
A letter from Rabindranath Tagore to his wife Mrinalini
Bhai Chuti,
I found your letter when I got back from Dhaka. I'll go
briefly to Kaligram to tie up some business, and then come to
Calcutta to make all necessary arrangements. But please, don't
worry yourself needlessly. Try to bear every occurrence with a
calm, peaceful, serene mind. This is what I try to do all the
time in the way I lead my own life. I'm not always successful,
but if you can keep calm, then perhaps - strengthened by our
mutual efforts - I also may achieve peace and happiness of mind.
Of course you are younger than I am, and your experiences have
been much more limited, and your nature is in some respects much
more patient, much more easily controlled than mine. Therefore
you have less need than I to keep your mind free of emotional
disturbance. But in everyone's life major crises occur, in which
the utmost patience and self-control are required. We then
realize how silly we are to complain of trivial, daily
annoyances, petty aches and pains. I shall love, and I shall do
my best, and I shall do my duty by others cheerfully - if we
follow this principle, we can cope with anything. Life does not
last long, its pleasures and travails are also constantly
changing. Wounds, setbacks, deception - it's hard to bear them
lightly; but if we don't, the burden of life gradually becomes
insufferable, and it becomes impossible to fix one's mind on any
goal or ideal. If we fail, if we live in dissatisfaction and
tension day after day, in constant conflict with our
circumstance, then our lives become completely futile. Great
calm, generous detachment, selfless love, disinterested effort:
these are what make for success in life. If you can find peace
in yourself and can spread comfort around you, you will be
happier than an empress. Bhai Chuti, if you go on fretting over
little things you will do harm to yourself. Most of our troubles
are self-imposed. Do not be cross at me for lecturing you
pompously like this. You do not know the intense concern with
which I am saying these things. I feel such deepening of my love
and respect for you, such a strengthening of the sympathy that
ties me to you, that the pure calm and contentment that I wish
for you means more than anything else in the world: compared to
it, life's daily troubles and disappointments are nothing. These
days I look at things with a new kind of longing.
A woman when young can be unsettled and deluded by love, but
even from your experience you perhaps know that at a maturer age,
admist the extraordinary ups and downs of life, a steadier,
quieter, deeper, more real and controlled love develops. As her
family grows, the outside world recedes. So in one respect her
isolation grows - ties of intimacy seal off the married couple
from the world around them. Our souls are never more beautiful
than when we can draw close and look at each other face to face:
real love begins then. There is no infatuation any more, there
is no need to see each other as gods any more, unions and
partings do not create storms of feeling any more - but near or
far, in security or in danger, in poverty or wealth, the pure and
joyous light of unqualified trust shines all around. I know you
have suffered much because of me, but I also know that because
you have suffered on my account you will one day know a greater,
fuller joy. Forgiveness in love and sharing of troubles are true
happiness; the satisfactions of personal ambition is not
happiness. These days my sole desire is that our lives should be
simple and straightforward, that all around us there should be
peace and cheerfulness, that our way of life should be
unostentatious and full of bounty, that our needs should be small
and our aims high and our efforts unselfish and our work for
others more important than our work for ourselves. And even if
our children gradually fall away from the example we have set
them, I hope that we may, till the end, live our lives
beautifully in mutual compassion and total selfless, unambitious
trust. This is why I have become so eager to take you all away
from Calcutta's stony temple of materialism, and bring you to a
far and secluded village. In Calcutta there is no opportunity to
forget profit and loss, friend and foe: one is so constantly
troubled by trifling matters that in the end all the finer
purposes of life are shattered into fragments. Here one is
content with little, and does not mistake falsehood for truth.
Here it is not hard to 'accept with equanimity whatever may come,
happy or sad, pleasant or unpleasant'.