Courage and Patience in Adversity

The episodes

Ram's life after the age of twenty-five was a series of blows. He lost his kingdom on the morning of his coronation. His father died while he was away. His wife was abducted from his own hut. His brother lay dying on the battlefield with dawn approaching. The Ramayana does not hide what he felt. After Sita is taken he wanders the forest asking the trees and the river if they have seen her. When Lakshmana falls he says he could find another wife, another kingdom, but not another brother.

And yet each time he gets up. He performs Jatayu's rites, walks south, makes an ally, builds a bridge.

The reasoning

The epic separates two things we usually confuse: feeling grief and being ruled by it. Ram weeps, and it is not treated as weakness. What he does not do is decide while weeping. Lakshmana's steady words bring him back, and then he asks the only useful question: what is the next step?

Patience in the Ramayana is active. Fourteen years in the forest were not spent waiting for them to end. Ram protected the sages, learned the country and made the friends who later formed his army. The four months of rain in Kishkindha, when nothing could be done, were endured and then followed at once by action. Even the Ocean, who made Ram wait three days, was first asked politely.

Courage, likewise, is not the absence of fear or sorrow. It is Hanuman in Lanka, alone and for a moment hopeless, deciding to search one more garden.

How to practise it

• Let yourself feel the loss. Then set a time to stop and act.
• Do not make large decisions on the worst day. Keep someone like Lakshmana near you who will speak plainly.
• Break the problem into the next step only: not "how will I get her back from Lanka" but "who can tell me which way they went".
• Use waiting time to prepare.
• Remember that the exile ended. Hard times do.

Next: Humility and service. Families read the Sundara Kanda in difficult times for exactly this reason.