In plain words
Youth is something that comes in the middle and vanishes in the middle. The young do not recognise this truth. Here is a small example. Once, when Vinoba Bhave was travelling by train, a young man was smoking. Seeing it, he said, ‘My boy! Smoke does not agree with me, so put it out.’ The young man said, ‘The cigarette is mine, the matchbox is mine, the body is mine, so it is my choice.’ Vinoba Bhave was no ordinary man; he was very wise. In answer to the young man's question: ‘When the cigarette is yours, the matchbox is yours and the body is yours, why do you let the smoke out? Keep that inside you too,’ he said. At once the young man saw his mistake. So man is bound by the possessiveness that says, ‘All of it is mine, mine, mine’, but he does not believe that there is such a thing as society. In society we must develop equanimity. ‘To grow in equanimity in joy and sorrow, in blame and reproach, in insult and praise: that is forbearance,’ they said. Tyāgarāja said it. ‘Without Śānti there is no happiness.’ We must attain Śānti.
We must strengthen the faith that God is in our own heart
Tukārām was a supreme devotee. At all times and in every state he would repeat the name of Rāma alone. He had a single acre of land. Repeating the name of Rāma, he would till his field. If anyone begged for anything, he would give from whatever he had. One day he told his wife that he would bring the sugarcane crop home, and she was glad. As he was bringing the cane home in a cart, people passing along the road took the canes one by one and ate them. Tukārām saw it and, with a large heart, went on thinking, ‘Oho! Each gets as much as is his lot.’ In the end one stick of cane was left. He took it and went home. His wife saw it: ‘If you go on giving things away like this, leaving your duty and never thinking of your wife and children, how can you keep the household?’