You tell yourself you just care about people. And maybe you do. But somewhere underneath the caring, there is a smaller, more frightened thing - a child who learned, very early, that being loved was conditional. That approval was something you had to keep earning, like a lamp you couldn't stop feeding oil to, terrified of the dark it would leave behind. The Gita was spoken on a battlefield, but its quietest verses are not about war. They are about the war inside a person who has forgotten the difference between living and performing. Arjuna, for all his strength, collapses not because he is weak, but because he cannot bear what others might think of him. And Krishna doesn't comfort him. Krishna shows him a mirror.
