In the pleasant town of Lalgudi, where the days followed one another with the steady rhythm of the kollidam river, young Krishnan had begun to notice how quickly his inner spirit rose and fell. A good mark in school sent it soaring; a sharp word from the teacher or a lost cricket match brought it tumbling down. Wealth or praise made him feel large; their absence made him feel small. The spirit inside him was like a weathercock, turning with every breeze.
One evening on the terrace, he confessed this to Uncle Venkatesh.
“Uncle, my mind keeps changing with every small gain or loss. I wish it could stay steady.”
Uncle Venkatesh nodded and opened a thin volume. “Seneca, the Roman thinker, wrote about this very thing. He said we should regulate our character so that the spirit within feels neither loss nor gain. It remains the same no matter how things fall out. A spirit like that, even if heaped with worldly goods, rises supreme above them. And if chance strips away wealth, the spirit is not impaired.”
Krishnan looked thoughtful. “That sounds like the work of an expert yogi.”
“Perhaps,” his uncle replied with a smile. “But as Ward Farnsworth says in his book on practising Stoicism, we need not wait to become experts. We can be practitioners. Every day we renew ourselves a little. There is an old engraving that simply says, ‘Renew thyself each day.’ That is enough to begin.”
Krishnan asked how a boy in Lalgudi might practise such a high ideal.
Uncle Venkatesh suggested a simple system of daily habits, which he called PIES:
Physical– Walking
Intellectual – Learning
Emotional– Caring
Spiritual – Sharing
“These four small actions,” he said, “can help regulate the character day after day. They keep the spirit steady, neither swollen by good fortune nor shrunk by bad.”
The next morning Krishnan began.
He walked to school by a longer route along the river instead of rushing. The steady movement quietened his body.
In the evening he spent twenty minutes learning something new—not for marks, but for the pleasure of understanding a page of history or a new English word.
When his younger sister looked sad, he sat with her and listened instead of brushing her aside. That was caring.
And when he received two laddus from a neighbour, he shared one without being asked. That was sharing.
At first the habits felt awkward, like new shoes. Some days he forgot. Some days the old rising and falling of the spirit returned when a classmate received praise or when he himself was overlooked. But each evening he returned to the four practices, renewing himself a little.
Weeks passed. A small examination result came that was neither brilliant nor poor. The old Krishnan would have swung between pride and disappointment. The practising Krishnan noticed the movement of his spirit, walked a little longer by the river, learned a fresh page, cared for a friend who had done worse, and shared his notes. By nightfall the spirit had settled again—neither raised too high nor cast down.
One evening he reported to Uncle Venkatesh, swinging his legs on the terrace wall as the sky turned deep blue.
“I am not an expert yet, Uncle. But I am a practitioner. Every day I try to regulate my character with those four habits. The spirit inside is learning to stay more the same, whether things go well or not.”
Uncle Venkatesh smiled. “That is the path Seneca pointed to. Not sudden perfection, but daily renewal. Keep walking, learning, caring, and sharing. The steady spirit will grow stronger, day after day.”
In the soft dusk of Lalgudi, while other boys still rode the ups and downs of praise and blame, young Krishnan walked home with a quieter step. He had begun to build, one ordinary day at a time, a character that could meet both gain and loss with the same calm face. And in that small, steady practice, the spirit within him was learning to remain its own.