The Light We Give

What if the key to personal peace and social healing wasn’t found in power, wealth, or even education, but in how you choose to see others? Simran Jeet Singh, in The Light We Give, invites you to reimagine what it means to live fully in a world divided by anger, bias, and fear. Drawing on the profound but practical teachings of Sikh wisdom, Singh contends that we awaken our greatest potential—and the world’s brightest possibilities—when we embody the light shared between us all: love, humility, courage, and service.

At its core, The Light We Give argues that we can transform hate and disconnection into grace and compassion. Sikh philosophy, as Singh presents it, is not only religious but deeply human: it teaches that each person contains a divine spark, ik oankar—the oneness that unites all existence. When you see that same divine light in others, love and empathy become natural responses rather than abstract ideals. In today’s noisy, polarized world, Singh’s message feels like both a balm and a blueprint for peace.

The Roots of Sikh Wisdom in Modern Life

Born and raised in Texas as a brown, turban-wearing Sikh, Singh experienced racism from an early age. The moment after September 11, 2001, defined much of his path—Sikhs across America were targeted by hate crimes because they were mistaken for Muslims. Instead of retreating, Singh’s father and mother taught him and his brothers a mantra that would anchor his life: “We can’t control how others treat us, but we can control how we respond.” That was more than good parenting—it was spiritual strategy. It became the cornerstone of his belief that one’s inner strength controls one’s outer experience.

Sikh teachings, Singh explains, are not abstract doctrines but living practices. They emphasize daily remembrance (simran), selfless service (seva), and equality among all people. Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, offered a spiritual vision radically inclusive for its time: oneness of God, justice for all, humility instead of hierarchy, and devotion expressed through action. Singh shows that Sikh philosophy isn't just relevant to Sikhs—it offers a universal approach to cultivating inner peace and building compassionate communities.

From Hate to Healing

A central thread of the book is the transformation of hate into love. Singh tells of terrifying encounters with bigotry—a racist referee when he was eleven; passengers on flights staring at him with fear; others yelling “terrorist” on the street. Yet instead of allowing bitterness to define him, he cultivated humor, patience, and purpose. The shift didn’t happen overnight. After the 2012 Oak Creek Sikh Temple massacre in Wisconsin, Singh felt broken and betrayed. He had preached love and unity, but anger and grief overcame him. That crisis led him deeper into Sikh wisdom and shaped a new framework for confronting injustice rooted in three insights: how we feel, how we see, and how we connect. These insights now ground his life’s work as an activist, scholar, and father.

Each insight becomes a doorway to greater wholeness. Learning how to feel means shifting from despair to what Sikhs call chardi kala—everlasting optimism, regardless of circumstance. Learning how to see means recognizing the divine light even in those who harm you. And learning how to connect means embracing oneness across difference, not by erasing diversity but by honoring it. These are not just ethical principles—they are emotional technologies for freeing yourself from hate’s chains.

Love as a Life Practice

In later chapters, Singh deepens this spiritual vision into a practical guide to living with purpose. Love becomes the organizing principle of existence. It is not passive emotion but disciplined practice. From the story of Guru Tegh Bahadur giving his life to protect religious freedom, to his own reflections on parenting his young daughters, Singh illustrates that love is expansive, selfless, and ever-giving. Each person experiences it differently, but the more we practice it, the more infinite it becomes. Like language, love expands as we use it.

The book culminates in the Sikh ideal of seva—selfless service that dissolves ego and nurtures collective humanity. For Singh, seva is activism rooted in love: whether you’re teaching, parenting, caring for strangers, or fighting injustice, what matters most is intention, humility, and connection. “The Giver keeps on giving,” Guru Nanak said, “while the takers get tired of taking.” The more we give, the greater our joy.

Why This Book Matters

The Light We Give is equal parts memoir, manifesto, and modern spiritual guide. Singh bridges Sikh wisdom with contemporary life, blending stories of racist encounters, family love, parenting, and activism. The heart of his message is simple yet radical: When you see yourself as connected to everything, you can meet hate with grace, outrage with creativity, and fear with courage. In an age of cynicism and division, the book calls you back to the oldest and most revolutionary truth—that love is not just what we feel, but what we practice.

Simran Jeet Singh’s journey begins with navigating daily racism in Texas and evolves into a life devoted to understanding connection and compassion. Growing up as a Sikh boy with a turban and long hair, he was constantly told to “go back home”—even though home was San Antonio. Despite these assaults, his parents taught him to respond with dignity, not anger. This moral foundation crystallized into a spiritual insight: that hate says more about the hater than the hated.

Learning to Respond, Not React

Singh recalls the painful absurdities of racism: referees calling him a terrorist, passengers avoiding sitting next to him, children mocking his turban. Early on, he tried to respond with humor, sometimes even adopting a Texan drawl to defuse tension. Over time, he learned to cultivate perspective—the recognition that racism stems from ignorance, not truth. His Sikh upbringing helped him practice restraint and compassion over retaliation.

The attacks after 9/11 deepened this conviction. Sikhs were mistaken for Muslims and subjected to deadly hate crimes, including the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi. Singh describes how this tragedy awakened his purpose: to tell his community’s story and challenge systemic ignorance. Like James Baldwin and Maya Angelou before him, he channels trauma into teaching and service.

Discovering Ik Oankar: Seeing the Shared Light

At the center of Sikh philosophy lies the phrase ik oankar—the oneness of all existence. Everything and everyone, Singh explains, carries the same divine light. Understanding this truth intellectually is easy; living it is transformative. The 2012 Oak Creek massacre forced Singh to confront his limits. When a white supremacist murdered six Sikhs in a Wisconsin gurdwara, Singh initially burned with fury. Only through teaching Sikh children about forgiveness did he reawaken to his tradition’s core: see the light in everyone, even those who do harm.

To embody this, Singh guided a meditation with children who asked whether God’s light also existed in the shooter. A young girl answered wisely: “The killer had God inside him but chose not to see it.” Her words broke open his heart. That moment, he writes, marked the beginning of truly seeing others not as enemies but as part of himself.

Radical Connection in Action

Connection, for Singh, is not sentimental—it’s practical spirituality. When he confronted a teenager who yelled slurs at him, he didn’t retaliate. He stopped running, spoke kindly, and transformed a racist exchange into an opportunity for human connection. Moments like these prove that compassion is contagious. “Hate is learned,” he writes, “so it can be unlearned.” Radical connection is not weakness; it’s the most powerful act of resistance in a divided world.

How do you stay hopeful when life deals you pain? In Sikh wisdom, this question finds its answer in chardi kala, a practice of “ever-rising spirits.” After the Oak Creek tragedy, Singh wondered how his community could embody joy amid grief. Survivors offered a stunning response: they chose gratitude over despair, service over vengeance, light over darkness.

Resilience Rooted in Faith

For Sikhs, chardi kala isn’t naive positivity—it’s defiant hope. It means trusting that good can emerge from suffering. One survivor, Pardeep Kaleka, found friendship with a former white supremacist as a form of healing. Others organized the “Chardhi Kala 6K,” turning tragedy into community empowerment. Their optimism, Singh writes, “wasn’t denial; it was devotion.”

He learned that gratitude and service act as spiritual technologies for happiness. Even Lieutenant Brian Murphy, the police officer wounded that day, embodied this spirit when he said he was thankful to feel pain—because it meant he was still alive. This line echoed the Guru Arjan’s words, “Your will is sweet to me,” spoken while enduring torture. To live in grace, Singh realized, is to find sweetness even in suffering.

Gratitude as Daily Medicine

Singh adopted a nightly gratitude practice, listing three things each day he was thankful for. Within weeks, his perception changed. He began spotting blessings he once ignored—strangers’ kindness, his daughters’ laughter, morning quiet. Gratitude didn’t remove hardship; it rebalanced his vision. Now, like the Oak Creek survivors, he defines happiness not as the absence of pain but as joy that persists within it. The Sikh path, he concludes, “is not about escaping life’s storms, but learning to dance in the rain.”

In our own lives, chardi kala offers a model for cultivating grounded optimism through three habits: honoring reality, expressing gratitude, and serving others. Together, they turn resilience into a form of love in motion.

What is love when stripped of sentimentality? For Singh, love is the essence of divine connection—the force that erases ego and unites us with others. Through stories of parenthood, faith, and historical courage, he reveals love as a daily discipline, not simply an emotion.

Guru Tegh Bahadur and Selfless Love

One of the book’s most illuminating examples comes from Guru Tegh Bahadur, who in 1675 sacrificed his life to defend religious freedom for Hindus persecuted by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. He stood for people who weren’t his followers, showing that love transcends tribe or creed. This act became the highest expression of Sikh ethics—loving so courageously that you would give your life for strangers. Singh parallels this story to modern heroes like Heather Heyer, Malala Yousafzai, and humanitarian Ravi Singh, showing that unconditional love is timeless activism.

Expanding Our Capacity to Love

When Singh’s daughter was born, he felt overwhelmed by a new dimension of love. It wasn’t a feeling—it was transformation. He realized that love comes in degrees, and English flattens them all under one word. Languages like Punjabi differentiate: pyaar (equal affection), ishq (spiritual passion), bhau (reverent admiration). Recognizing love as a spectrum liberated him from measuring which relationships were “true.” Instead, love became something elastic—capable of growth and expansion without limits.

Love as Service

The ultimate proof of love is seva: selfless action. From caring for a sick child to serving food to strangers, love manifests not in emotion but in willing service. Singh encourages you to ask: “Can I love others the way I love my own children?” This is love as liberation—the power to see yourself in everyone and everyone in yourself. When practiced, love not only heals others—it heals you from the inside out.

Fear, Singh writes, is the biggest barrier between us and love. It drives prejudice, nurtures ego, and limits our joy. Drawing from the Sikh principle of nirbhau—fearlessness—he invites readers to examine their own anxieties, from wanting approval to fearing rejection. True courage, he argues, begins with confronting ourselves.

Facing Fear at the Airport

One of Singh’s most searing reflections occurs in airports. With every security line, he faces profiling and humiliation, from forced pat-downs to passengers’ avoidance. At first, he coped through performative smiles—appeasing others’ fear. But over time, he realized this was internalized oppression. He was living to meet others’ expectations rather than his own truth. Inspired by Guru Tegh Bahadur’s teaching—“The truly wise person fears none and frightens none”—Singh chose to walk proudly, no longer apologizing for his existence. That shift changed his inner world, even though outer conditions remained the same.

Humility Without Self-Erasure

True humility, Singh explains, isn’t thinking less of yourself—it’s thinking of yourself less. Citing C. S. Lewis and Sikh gurus alike, he shows how humility and self-respect coexist when anchored in oneness. You’re no better than others, but no worse either. Humility decoupled from shame becomes empowering—it opens space for generosity. Singh practiced this by dedicating a set portion of his time and money each week to serve others. The more he gave, the less self-centered he felt, and the freer his heart became.

Fear falls away when humility takes root. When ego softens, love flows naturally. “The wise person,” Singh concludes, “neither rules nor bows—they simply love.”

Modern life bombards you with distractions—but Sikh ethics offer a compass. Singh argues that happiness depends on alignment between your values, choices, and actions. When what you do contradicts what you believe, you create inner dissonance. True integrity arises when thought, speech, and action harmonize—a state the Sikh gurus call ik oankar within oneself.

Learning Integrity from a Candy Bar

Singh shares a childhood memory: caught stealing a Snickers bar, his mother asked, “Do you know why you wear a turban?” Then she explained that it’s a public promise to do what’s right, even when no one is watching. That moment reframed morality not as punishment avoidance but as self-honesty. Integrity, she taught, is doing what’s right because it aligns your inner and outer worlds. When you act with integration, you build self-trust—and self-trust breeds peace.

Building a Personal Moral Compass

Later, Singh’s family created its own mission statement: faith, integrity, love, service, excellence. These values became his lifelong guide. He recommends readers do the same—write down your five core values and turn them into daily practices. When death threats and harassment threatened his academic career, this framework saved him. Instead of reacting from fear, he acted from principle. Living by values, he explains, releases you from others’ hate and roots you in purpose.

Integrity transforms chaos into clarity. As spiritual teacher Parker Palmer puts it, “Wholeness, not perfection, is the goal.” Singh adds: happiness is the byproduct of living truthfully.

Toward the book’s end, Singh presents seva—selfless service—as the culmination of Sikh spirituality and the key to social transformation. Seva means serving others without seeking reward, treating every act as sacred offering. It is love expressed through action.

Beyond the Golden Rule

Singh challenges the golden rule’s “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This version centers the self. Seva, he explains, asks instead: “Do unto others as they would want.” It demands humility and listening, rejecting the colonial mindset of assuming what’s best for others. Service becomes mutual recognition, not dominance. Like Cornel West’s phrase—“Justice is what love looks like in public”—seva transforms personal compassion into structural care.

Seva During Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic tested Singh’s understanding of service. While his wife, a physician, treated patients, he cared for their children and struggled with guilt. Remembering Sikh teachings, he realized that “Don’t confuse activity for activism.” Every small act done with love contributes to justice. Seva includes tenderness at home as much as public activism. When intention replaces ego, every deed—washing dishes or feeding strangers—becomes spiritual work.

Becoming the Light

Through seva, Singh comes full circle to Guru Nanak’s lantern parable that opens the book: even one small flame can challenge the darkness. You can’t end all suffering, but you can brighten your corner through consistent care. When love and service intertwine, you no longer seek happiness—you radiate it. Seva turns compassion into daily mindfulness, humility, and joy. In Singh’s words: “Giving out of love is a bottomless well that can never be exhausted.”