Realising that you are the light

As the world turns in uncertain times, it is becoming increasingly tempting to believe that light belongs only to some places. Those spaces seem brighter, kinder and more alive than others, and we come to see joy as geographic, as external, but that is far from the truth.

Light, real light, the one that illuminates from within, belongs to people and not to places or situations. 

There is a story about the sun and a cave that once tried to understand each other. The sun, naturally, could not comprehend darkness. And the cave, enclosed deep in the crevices of the earth, could not imagine brightness. So they agreed to exchange places.

The cave rose up into the open sky and, for the first time, felt warmth without walls. And the sun, curious and unchanged, descended into the cave. It entered the hollow, narrow and shadowy darkness and said, “I don’t see any difference.”

And this is where the secret rests. 

The sun did not bring light into the cave as something separate from itself; it was the light. It did not need the cave to change in order for brightness to exist. It did not negotiate with the darkness or try to understand it. It simply arrived, and in arriving, transformed everything.

We often wait for our surroundings to improve before we allow ourselves to brighten. Yet life seldom waits for better circumstances. It waits on your decision to move, to arrive, and to brighten. It waits for you to realise that the light you look for around you is actually inside you. We must protect this inherent light, this internal positivity, this essential calm and believe that we can move through the murky world like a quiet clear dawn. We should realise that we can walk into difficult places, places thick with smoke, doubts and darkness and not wait for permission to shine. Like the sun in the cave, we need not experience darkness the way others expect us to. Without absorbing it, without echoing it, we can illuminate it by our still, quiet and determined light. 

For the question might or might not be about the cave. But the answer is, and will always be, about the sun; about the light that did not get lost even when it entered the cave.