A GyaniNani confession about anger, regret, dhairya — and learning to stay long enough for the story to change.
I have walked away too quickly from many things in life.
Most often, from jobs.
When I felt deeply hurt, angry or unfairly treated, my instinct was rarely to wait. I would react. Sometimes I would argue. Sometimes I would simply decide that I had had enough.
And then I would resign.
There was something almost satisfying about the decisiveness of it.
If you don’t value me, I am leaving.
If this is unjust, I will not tolerate it.
If I am unhappy, why should I stay?
At that moment, walking away often felt like courage.
Wisdom usually arrived later.
Sometimes much later.
Then came the questions.
Could I have handled that differently?
Could I have stayed and fought instead of leaving?
Could I have waited until the anger settled before making a decision that would affect the next several years of my life?
Some of those decisions cost me professionally. Some brought financial insecurity. And some left me wondering whether what I had called courage was, at least partly, impatience.
So today, when I write about धैर्य — dhairya, I am certainly not writing as someone who has mastered it.
That would be dishonest.
I am writing as someone who is still learning.
Perhaps I have simply become a little better at creating a space between feeling and acting.
And increasingly, I wonder whether that small space is where peace begins.
Slowly, slowly…
There is a Kabir doha I have heard countless times:
“धीरे-धीरे रे मना, धीरे सब कुछ होय।
माली सींचे सौ घड़ा, ऋतु आए फल होय॥”
Slowly, slowly, O mind. Everything happens in its own time. The gardener may pour a hundred pots of water, but the fruit comes only in its season.
I understood the words.
I am not sure I understood the wisdom.
As a working mother, I spent years negotiating calendars.
School timings. Office timings. Homework. Illnesses. Meetings. Children’s activities. Travel. Deadlines.
I had a husband who was—and remains—extraordinarily supportive.
Yet I still wanted to do everything myself.
I wanted to be available to my children. I wanted my work to continue. I wanted the household to function. And somewhere in all this, I think I also wanted my children to become independent quickly.
Perhaps many working mothers will recognise this contradiction.
We want our children to need us.
And simultaneously, because there simply aren’t enough hours in the day, we desperately want them not to need us quite so much.
My children did become independent.
But not because I hurried them into becoming so.
It happened slowly.
They stumbled. They learnt. They managed. I really thank them for their patience with me.
They became strong.
They became resilient.
And somewhere along the way, I became resilient too.
My husband, of course, seems to have possessed that resilience long before the rest of us discovered it.
Looking back, I understand Kabir differently.
You can water the tree.
You can nurture it.
You can protect it.
You can show up every day.
But you cannot command the season.
There are things in life that will simply not ripen because we are impatient for them to do so.
When passion takes over the rudder
Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet:
“Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.”
I wish I had listened to my parents who always tried to amke me calm. Wish my younger self had good ears.
I had plenty of sail.
I have always cared deeply about my work. About fairness. About women. About children. About injustice. About doing things properly.
That passion has given me tremendous energy throughout my life.
But passion can also make you respond very quickly when you believe something is wrong.
At several points in my professional life, I allowed the sail to take over the boat.
I felt wronged.
I became angry.
I responded.
And sometimes, I left.
Later, when the storm had passed, reason would quietly return and ask:
Was resignation really the only response available to you?
Sometimes it was.
Leaving an unhealthy situation can be an act of courage.
But I also know now that not every battle has to be fought by leaving the battlefield. Did Arjun leave the battlefield in Mahabharata after seeing his guru and grandfather on the other side? No, he didn’t. May be because he had the lord- Krishna as his guide.
Sometimes staying requires greater courage.
Sometimes negotiating requires greater courage.
Sometimes waiting for your anger to settle requires greater courage.
Dhairya is not submission.
It does not mean tolerating injustice.
It does not mean becoming so “peaceful” that other people are allowed to walk over you.
Perhaps dhairya simply gives reason enough time to reach the rudder before passion steers the entire boat.
Then Buddhism found me….as I didn’t have patience to look for wisdom.
One professional experience taught me this more powerfully than anything else.
There was a period when a senior colleague was extremely unhappy with me.
Our relationship deteriorated badly.
Some colleagues around us added their own stories about me—many of them untrue—and the environment became increasingly hostile.
It seemed that every possible difficulty was being created for me.
I wanted to leave.
Of course I did.
That was what I knew how to do.
But this time I was also deeply broken. There were days when I could barely imagine how I would continue through the situation.
And somewhere during that period, Buddhism appeared in my life.
The Dhammapada says:
“Hatred is never appeased by hatred in this world. By non-hatred alone is hatred appeased.”
It sounds beautiful when printed on a page.
It is considerably less beautiful when you are expected to practise it with someone who is making your life miserable.
I struggled.
Then I began trying something that initially felt almost absurd.
I started praying for him.
Not for his defeat.
Not for him to receive some cosmic punishment.
Not even for him to suddenly realise that I was right.
I tried to pray for his happiness.
For his wisdom.
For something good to happen in his life.
Initially, I probably said the words without feeling them very deeply.
But I continued.
And slowly, something changed.
I cannot claim that my prayers magically transformed another human being.
That would make a much neater story than life usually provides.
But I know something changed inside me.
I was no longer waking each day carrying quite the same amount of anger.
I began seeing the situation differently.
I stayed.
And life moved.
Eventually, he received a better professional opportunity and moved on.
My own circumstances improved.
Years passed.
And here is the part of the story that still makes me smile:
Today, we are on very good terms.
Imagine if I had walked away at the height of my anger.
Perhaps I would have carried another wound.
Perhaps another professional relationship would have ended bitterly.
Perhaps I would still remember him only as “the man who made my life miserable.”
Instead, I stayed long enough to see the story change.
That experience gave me a sentence I now believe far more deeply than any quotation I could borrow:
Dhairya can change the ending.
Not always.
Some situations must be left.
Some relationships must end.
Some injustices must be challenged immediately and fiercely.
Patience should never become an excuse for tolerating abuse or silencing resistance.
But sometimes, the ending we can see from inside our anger is not the only ending available.
We simply cannot see the others yet.
What does this have to do with peace?
Perhaps everything.
Perhaps very little.
I am careful here.
Wars do not happen because two people simply forgot to be patient.
Wars emerge from histories, inequalities, power, territory, ideology, political ambition, fear, oppression and competing claims to justice.
Dhairya is not a substitute for politics, diplomacy or justice.
And yet…
Every large conflict is also lived through human minds.
Someone feels threatened.
Someone strikes.
Someone retaliates.
The retaliation becomes justification for another retaliation.
Positions harden.
Listening becomes betrayal.
Compromise becomes weakness.
Eventually, each side possesses a long list of reasons why it is the other side that must stop first.
And I find myself wondering:
At what point in that chain did we lose the capacity to pause?
Not to surrender.
Not to abandon justice.
Not to tell the oppressed to wait patiently for their suffering to end.
But to pause long enough to ask:
Must the next response resemble the previous one?
Have we understood what the other side fears?
Can strength sometimes mean restraint?
Can we remain firm without becoming consumed by hatred?
Thich Nhat Hanh, who knew the devastation of war intimately, expressed an idea with extraordinary simplicity:
“Peace in oneself, peace in the world.”
I understand that sentence differently today too.
Inner peace does not mean withdrawing from an unjust world and meditating while everything burns around us.
Perhaps it means ensuring that when we enter the struggle, we do not carry so much unexamined anger that we reproduce the very violence we claim to oppose.
And perhaps dhairya requires humility
There is another uncomfortable companion to patience.
Humility.
Because sometimes the reason we cannot wait is not urgency.
It is certainty.
I know I am right.
I know what happened.
I know why you did it.
I know what must happen next.
Age has made me less certain about certainty.
I have been right many times.
I have also been absolutely certain—and wrong.
So these days I am trying to learn three sentences:
I may be wrong.
I may not know the whole story.
I do not have to answer today.
That last sentence would have been almost impossible for my younger self.
Even now, I do not always manage it.
I still become impatient.
I still get angry.
I still occasionally respond and then think, Deepali, you could have waited.
So no, this is not a GyaniNani announcing that she has finally attained wisdom.
Far from it.
It is a GyaniNani confessing that wisdom seems to arrive in instalments—often after we have already paid rather heavily for the lesson.
But I am learning.
To pause.
To wait.
To allow the first wave of anger to pass.
To ask whether I need to win this argument today.
To remember that another person may be carrying a story I cannot see.
And perhaps most importantly, to understand that waiting is not always weakness.
Sometimes waiting is the moment in which we recover our freedom to choose.
Without that pause, anger chooses for us.
Fear chooses for us.
Ego chooses for us.
With it, another possibility appears.
Perhaps this is what dhairya means to me now.
Not sitting quietly while life happens.
Not tolerating what should never be tolerated.
Not becoming passive.
But developing the strength to stay inside an uncomfortable moment without immediately trying to escape it, defeat it or retaliate against it.
I am still learning that strength.
Slowly.
As Kabir would probably have expected.
And perhaps that is all right.
The gardener can continue watering.
The season will come when it comes.
One question from GyaniNani
Has there ever been a moment in your life when waiting changed the ending of the story?
I would genuinely like to hear it.
— GyaniNani Reflects
