Sri Aurobindo
Letters on Himself and the Ashram
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo. Volume 35
Life and Death in the Ashram
Exercise and Sports [4]
As to your idea about the sports, your idea that the
Mother looks on you coldly because you are not capable of taking delight in
sports, that is entirely without foundation. I must have told you already more
than once that the Mother does not want anybody to take up the sports if he has
no inclination or natural bent for them; to join or not to join must be quite
voluntary and those who do not join are not cold-shouldered or looked down upon
by her for that reason. It would be absurd for her to take that attitude: there
are those who do her faithful service which she deeply appreciates and whom she
regards with affection and confidence but who never go to the playground either
because they have no turn for it or no time,— can you imagine that for that
reason she will turn away from them and regard them with coldness? The Mother
could never intend that sports should be the sole or the chief preoccupation of
the inmates of the Ashram; even the children of the school for whose physical
development these sports and athletic exercises are important and for whom they
were originally instituted, have other things to do, their work, their studies
and other occupations and amusements in which they are as interested as in these
athletics. The idea that you should “throw up the sponge” because you do not
succeed in sports or like them, is surely an extravagant imagination: there are
other things more important, there are Yoga, spiritual progress, bhakti,
devotion, service....
I do not understand what you mean by my giving time to
sport; I am not giving any time to it except that I have written at 
the Mother’s request an article for the first number of the
Bulletin and another for the forthcoming {{0}}number.[[See “Message” and
“Perfection of the Body” in Essays in Philosophy and Yoga, volume 13 of
The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo, pp. 517–35. — Ed.]] It is the
Mother who is doing all the rest of the work for the organisation of the sports
and the Bulletin and that she must do, obviously, till it is sufficiently
organised to go on of itself with only a general supervision from above and her
actual presence once in the day. I put out my force to support her as in all the
other work of the Ashram, but otherwise I am not giving any time for the sports.
4 March 1949