Ehan sat down with a sheet of paper and the kind of seriousness only children can bring to small things. His fingers worked patiently, folding, pressing, adjusting, beginning again where needed. To anyone else, it may have looked like a child making a paper aeroplane.
But it never feels that small when you watch closely.
There is something sacred in the way children make things. They do not merely fold paper. They give it a future. In their hands, an ordinary sheet begins to carry direction, hope, experiment, and flight. Before the aeroplane has even left the ground, it has already travelled somewhere in the mind.
That is what moved me as I watched him.
Those little hands were not just playing. They were imagining. Measuring. Believing. They were taking something flat and fragile and asking it to become something that could move through the air.
Maybe that is what all of us keep trying to do in life.
We take what is simple, what is available, what is lying quietly before us and we try to shape it into something that can fly.
A child does this naturally. An adult spends years trying to remember how.
And so I keep these moments carefully. Small domestic scenes. Quiet acts of wonder. The unnoticed workshops of childhood. This blog has slowly become a museum for such things, a place where paper aeroplanes are not just paper aeroplanes, but evidence that imagination is still alive in the world.
Today, it lived on the floor, between soft light and folded paper, in the hands of a little boy preparing something for flight.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here. I’ve written a small book as well if you’re into that. If you like listening to stuff, do scroll through the selection of podcasts. If you’ve time, have a look at the visuals I’ve made. Grateful for your moment here. Keep coming back here : )
These days, even people who do not usually follow the news are carrying a certain heaviness. Regional tensions, missiles and drones have definitely affected people’s inner spaces.
You can feel it in the way messages arrive. In the way people ask each other, half casually and half seriously, “What do you think will happen?” In the way silence lingers a little longer after evening prayers, after dinner, after the child has fallen asleep.
Regional tension does that. It enters homes without knocking. It sits beside us while we scroll. It makes the ordinary feel fragile.
But tonight, I want to say something gentle.
Not everything that shakes the air must shake the soul.
Yes, the world may be tense. Yes, there may be noise, speculation, fear, analysis, rumours, and endless expert opinions marching across our screens. But the human heart was not made to live in a permanent state of alarm. We are not meant to keep drinking from that cup every hour.
There is a difference between awareness and surrendering ourselves to fear.
The first is wisdom. The second is exhaustion.
Sometimes, when the world grows loud, the most radical thing we can do is return to what is still here. The glass on the table. The hum of the fan. The familiar crease in a loved one’s pillow. The smell of tea. The steady rhythm of a verse we know by heart. The fact that tonight, in this room, life is still asking us to be present.
Fear always speaks in the language of tomorrow.
Peace almost always speaks in the language of now.
Now, your breath is here. Now, your family is here. Now, your prayer is here. Now, your duty is simple. Now, your heart can rest for a while.
This is not ignorance. This is not denial. This is not pretending that the world has no fractures.
It is choosing not to let imagined futures steal the mercy of the present moment.
We do not control the map. We do not move nations like pieces on a board. We do not know what tomorrow’s headline will say. But we do know this: panic has never protected the heart. Endless worry has never brought dawn faster.
And history, for all its storms, has always been carried somehow by ordinary people doing ordinary things with extraordinary steadiness. Mothers still feeding children. Fathers still going to work. Shopkeepers opening shutters. Workers pouring concrete. Students revising notes. A man watering a plant on a balcony. Someone somewhere folding clothes. Someone whispering a prayer before sleep.
Civilisation is not only held together by power.
It is also held together by these small, faithful acts.
Maybe that is what we need more of now. Not bigger fear. Bigger steadiness.
Let the news come in measured portions. Let rumours die outside your door. Let your home remain a home. Let your children inherit calm from your face. Let your loved ones feel that with you, at least, the room becomes softer.
There is deep strength in being the person who does not spread trembling.
And if your heart still feels restless, that is all right too. Sit with it kindly. Recite something. Step outside for a moment. Look at the sky not as a battlefield of headlines but as the same sky under which generations before us also worried, prayed, loved, and slept.
The world has always had its seasons of unease.
Still, morning has kept arriving.
So tonight, let us not hand ourselves over completely to fear.
Let us stay informed, but not consumed. Let us stay alert, but not undone. Let us care, but not collapse. Let us hold one another a little more gently.
Some peace is still possible, even now.
Sometimes peace does not arrive as a grand event.
Sometimes it arrives as a decision.
To lower the phone. To speak softly. To trust God a little more than the noise. To sit with our loved ones. To sleep without feeding the storm any further.
And perhaps that is enough for one night.
The world may be unsettled.
But inside the heart, we can still keep a lamp lit.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here. I’ve written a small book as well if you’re into that. If you like listening to stuff, do scroll through the selection of podcasts. If you’ve time, have a look at the visuals I’ve made. Grateful for your moment here. Keep coming back here : )
On one small square of paper, a red figure stands upright.
Large black eyes. A curved smile. Long grey legs. Arms slightly open. Underneath, in careful uneven letters, he has written spiderman.
On another square, separate but somehow connected, there is a boat.
Just a curved outline, dark circles inside, floating in white space.
He told me it’s a boat.
That is all.
No sea. No sky. No buildings. No villains. No waves.
Just a hero and a boat.
And I keep thinking about it.
When children draw heroes, they strip them down to their essence. There is no dramatic pose, no web shooting between towers, no muscular definition. The hero is simply upright. Present. Smiling.
Strength, to a child, is not aggression. It is not complexity. It is not burdened by backstory.
It is colour. It is stance. It is kindness.
And then there is the boat.
A boat is trust in motion.
You only draw a boat if you believe something can be crossed.
Water is not even visible here. The page is empty. But the boat exists anyway. Which means the ocean is assumed. Imagined. Felt.
That might be the most profound part.
We adults demand to see the entire map before we move. We want the sea drawn, the weather forecasted, the coordinates fixed. Children do not. They draw the vessel first. They assume the crossing is possible.
And look at the relationship between the two drawings.
Spiderman is not inside the boat.
He stands beside it.
It is as if courage and journey are separate but related. One is identity. The other is movement.
You must first stand upright in who you are before you step into what carries you forward.
Or maybe the boat is him.
And the hero is who he believes he can become.
Or maybe the hero stays on shore while the boat ventures into the unknown.
There is something deeply tender in the white space around both sketches. He did not feel the need to fill it. He is not anxious about emptiness. The world does not have to be fully constructed for meaning to exist.
A hero can stand in unfinished space. A boat can float on an unseen sea.
That is faith.
As adults, we clutter our pages. We add backgrounds, narratives, defenses. We armour our heroes and weigh down our boats. Somewhere along the way, we stopped smiling in our own drawings.
But here, on two small pieces of paper, courage is simple.
Stand tall. Smile. Trust the vessel. Leave room for the ocean you cannot yet see.
Maybe that is all life ever asks of us.
And maybe a child understands that long before we do.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here. I’ve written a small book as well if you’re into that. If you like listening to stuff, do scroll through the selection of podcasts. If you’ve time, have a look at the visuals I’ve made
I was walking near the company today, in that narrow lane behind the warehouses where everything feels functional and tired. Beige walls. AC compressors humming. Pipes running like exposed veins. A red fire hose cabinet embedded into a white wall, as if even safety here is quiet and rectangular.
And then — bougainvillea.
Not in a garden. Not curated. Not landscaped.
Just bursting out from behind a low wall as if it refused to ask permission.
The building behind it is worn. The plaster is cracked. Laundry hangs from a curved balcony above. The walls carry the fatigue of heat, dust, and years of sun. It is not an Instagram place. It is not aesthetic in the conventional sense.
But those flowers.
A fierce, unapologetic pink against muted concrete. Soft petals against industrial edges. Life pressing against structure.
I stood there longer than I expected.
You know, for people working in design like me ,especially in engineering , we are trained to think in loads, stresses, tolerances, factors of safety. Walls are for retaining. Surfaces are for protection. Systems are for performance.
But nature does not calculate like that.
It occupies.
It insists.
It blooms even where the soil is probably shallow and neglected.
There was something deeply honest about that scene. No grand skyline. No glass towers. No curated landscapes like the polished side of Dubai. Just a back lane, humming machines, and this eruption of color.
Maybe beauty does not wait for the right setting. Maybe it creates its own contrast.
The bougainvillea did not need a perfect background to be beautiful. In fact, the roughness made it more striking. Against smooth luxury, it would have been decorative. Against decay, it became defiant.
It reminded me of something personal.
In our own lives, we often wait for conditions to be ideal before we “bloom.” When work settles. When finances stabilize. When responsibilities reduce. When the environment becomes supportive.
But what if blooming is not about environment?
What if it is about inner insistence?
Those flowers were not apologizing for the cracked walls behind them. They were not negotiating with the AC units. They were not adjusting their color to match the concrete.
They were simply being.
And perhaps that is enough.
Maybe growth is not about perfect soil. Maybe it is about stubborn roots.
I left that lane with a strange calm. The hum of compressors continued. The pipes remained exposed. The walls still cracked.
But the pink stayed in my mind.
Sometimes, the most powerful reminders are not in grand landscapes or dramatic sunsets.
Sometimes they are in forgotten corners near your workplace, where beauty chooses to exist anyway.
And maybe that is the kind of blooming we should aspire to.
Not dramatically. Not with thunder or rain or a storm that announces itself. It simply softened. The towers dissolved into milk. The horizon folded into silence. Even the usual certainty of edges… buildings, roads, distance.. was gone.
And there he stood.
Between two white curtains, in his blue slippers, looking out at a world that refused to show itself.
There is something about fog in late February here. It feels like a pause before the furnace doors open. Before the air thickens. Before summer claims the sky for months. This is the last stretch of gentleness. The last mornings where the city exhales cool breath.
He doesn’t know that yet.
To him, this is just mystery.
Children stand differently in front of fog. Adults look for clarity. We want outlines. We want to know what is behind it. We check the weather app. We think about traffic delays. We measure inconvenience.
But he simply watches.
He is not frustrated that he cannot see the skyline. He is not trying to solve the fog. He is letting it be.
And I wonder when we lose that.
When did we begin to resist what is unclear? When did we start needing visibility as a condition for peace?
Fog is an honest teacher. It tells you: you will not see far today. Walk anyway.
Life has seasons like this city. There are months of sharp clarity where everything feels defined and bright. And then there are mornings like this. Soft. Uncertain. Edges blurred. The future standing just beyond a veil.
Before summer sets in.
There is tenderness in that phrase. Before the intensity. Before the tests. Before the long stretch of heat that asks more of you than you think you have.
This morning felt like mercy.
He stood there quietly, his small silhouette framed by white, staring into a sky that had erased the world. And I thought: maybe this is what trust looks like in its purest form.
To stand at the edge of what you cannot see. To not panic. To not rush. To simply watch.
Dubai will return by noon. The fog will lift. The buildings will reappear as if nothing happened.
But for a brief early hour in late February, the city remembered how to be gentle.
And he was there to witness it.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here. I’ve written a small book as well if you’re into that. If you like listening to stuff, do scroll through the selection of podcasts. If you’ve time, have a look at the visuals I’ve made. And please come back soon : )
I opened it the way one opens a drawer of old letters, not looking for anything in particular, but expecting to feel something.
Inside, a small white card with “Nasna” written in thick, uneven black strokes. A red glitter heart. A larger green one. A tiny brown dinosaur walking toward a purple egg as if it knows something we don’t. Underneath, scraps of paper. “Chocolate” written in bold innocence. A small container of glow gel. Random memos. Torn edges. Nothing arranged. Everything important.
Children don’t curate. They keep.
That box is not storage. It is evidence. Of what caught his attention. Of what he thought was worth saving. Of what love looks like when it has no language yet.
The way he wrote Nasna was not perfectly centered, not carefully measured, but certain. Certain enough to glue a heart next to it. Certain enough to decorate it with a dinosaur, because in his world love and dinosaurs belong on the same line. There is no hierarchy in a child’s mind. A mother. A heart. A prehistoric creature. Chocolate. Glow gel. All equally sacred.
I sometimes think we lose this democracy of importance as we grow up.
We begin to rank things. Salary above sunsets. Inbox above intimacy. Deadlines above drawings. We stop putting glitter hearts next to names. We stop saving scraps. We throw away what cannot be justified.
But in that box, nothing needed justification.
I noticed something else. The box itself. It was once a chocolate box. Something meant to be consumed and discarded. Now it holds permanence. It has been opened and closed many times. This is not a one time archive. It is a living museum. He goes back to it. Re enters old fascinations. Revisits yesterday’s treasures as if they still breathe.
When was the last time I revisited my own treasures like that. Not achievements. Not certificates. But small proofs of affection. Handwritten names. Uneven letters. Silly combinations that made sense only in that moment.
There is a kind of theology inside a child’s box. It says nothing beautiful is too small to keep. Nothing loved is too trivial to preserve.
Maybe that is the real inheritance children give their parents. Not toys scattered across the floor. Not noise in the evenings. But a reminder. A reminder that meaning is handmade. That value is assigned by the heart, not the market. That memory does not ask for perfection. It only asks to be noticed.
Today, I closed the box gently. Not because I was done exploring, but because I understood something.
He is building memory in fragments.
One day the handwriting will straighten. The dinosaurs will disappear. The glitter hearts will look embarrassing. But this box will remain as proof that there was once a boy who believed his mother’s name deserved decoration. That chocolate deserved bold letters. That love could be glued together with craft paper.
And maybe my task is simple.
To make sure he never fully loses that instinct. To quietly recover some of it for myself.
Because as I closed that old chocolate box today, I realized something.
This is what I have been trying to build here all along.
Not of achievements. Not of polished thoughts. But of fragments. Of feelings caught before they disappear. Of names written in uneven ink. Of moments that would otherwise be thrown away by the adult world.
If his box holds glitter hearts and dinosaurs, this blog holds the grown up equivalents. Questions. Reflections. Confessions. Small awakenings.
He curates with glue and craft paper.
I curate with words.
And maybe this space becomes a museum too. For all of us.
A place where nothing beautiful is too small to keep.
By the way, did you know that I’m actively writing in malayalam also these days. Find them here.
There are words meant for us that we will never hear. Compliments spoken behind our backs, admiration never voiced, gratitude left unexpressed. Somewhere, someone remembers something kind we once did, yet we will never know. A teacher who still recalls our curiosity. A friend who never forgot how we showed up when it mattered. A stranger who carries a moment we don’t even remember when we smiled at them on a hard day, when we made them feel seen, if only for a second. These moments live in the minds of others, silent and unshared. And just as there are words we will never hear, there are words we never spoke. The thank you left unsaid. The I’m proud of you that stayed locked inside. The I love you we thought we had more time to say. We assume there will be another chance. That people already know. That our feelings do not need to be spoken aloud. But what if they do? What if the words we hold back are the ones someone is waiting for? So let us not leave too much unsaid. Let us not assume people already know how much they mean to us. Because words unspoken are not always felt and the weight of words never heard is carried far longer than we think.
We do not speak the same way to everyone. With some, our voices soften, careful and measured. With others, we are louder, more certain, unafraid of being misunderstood. Our words shift, our tone adapts, our sentences rearrange themselves depending on who is listening. There are people with whom we are our truest selves, unguarded, unfiltered, speaking without the need to explain. And then there are those with whom we edit, choosing words carefully, adjusting our truths to fit the space they allow. It is not always deception; sometimes, it is survival. Sometimes, it is simply habit. We even do this with ourselves. The way we speak in our minds, the way we narrate our own lives, it changes depending on what we believe in that moment. Some days, we tell ourselves we are capable. Other days, we tell ourselves we are not enough. The voice inside us, just like the voice we share with the world, is always shifting. But who are we beneath all the adjustments? When no one is listening, when there is no need to explain, no need to be anything but real, what do we sound like then? And how often do we let that voice be heard?
They don’t care about job titles, unfinished inboxes, or carefully rehearsed competence. They don’t even care about names. The desert looks the way the ocean looks, the way the night sky looks. Not cruelly. Not kindly. Simply.
And that simplicity feels like mercy.
In Mleiha, at that hour when the sun is tired and generous, the sand turns into a quiet instrument. Every step writes something that will not be preserved. Every footprint is a sentence the wind is already preparing to erase.
Netta is holding Ehan’s arm as they climb a dune that isn’t steep, exactly, but feels like it is because the sand refuses to stay put. It slides under small shoes and adult soles as if to remind me: nothing here is meant to be owned, not even balance.
From a distance they are silhouettes. A mother leaning forward. A child lifting his leg with the seriousness of a mission. The sky is wide enough to make even brave thoughts feel smaller. The clouds are soft, almost careless. And somewhere far behind them, thin metal towers hold their straight lines against all that natural curve, as if humanity is always trying to prove it can draw a ruler across a world that was never built for it.
That contrast feels like the story I keep living.
Certainty gets built. Schedules. Systems. Plans. Power gets strung through emptiness and is called progress. Life gets compressed into tasks and outcomes, as if being alive is a problem that can be solved.
But the sand doesn’t agree.
The sand makes honesty unavoidable.
In one of my earlier reflections, I wrote about the freedom of feeling like a grain of sand. That freedom isn’t the kind I usually chase. It isn’t loud. It doesn’t come with achievement. It doesn’t raise the heart rate in the way ambition does.
It is the freedom of being released from the burden of importance.
A grain of sand doesn’t have to be exceptional to be real. It doesn’t have to be noticed to be necessary. It belongs without performing. It is part of something vast without needing to be the reason for it. And when that is allowed to be felt—truly felt—something inside unclenches.
Because so much suffering comes from insisting on mattering in a specific, measurable way.
The desert offers a different kind of mattering.
It suggests: I matter because I am here. Because I feel. Because I can hold a small hand and walk forward.
Looking at them on that dune, nothing grand is being announced. No staged heroism. Just movement. Just care. Just a shared leaning into the next step.
And yet it feels like a universe-sized act.
Maybe because it is.
Parenthood is like that. It doesn’t always look monumental from the outside. It looks like adjusting a sleeve. Like holding an elbow. Like slowing down because the legs beside mine are shorter. Like allowing a child to lead, even when the route is known.
But inside that ordinary tenderness is something rare: the decision to become a living shelter.
Netta’s hand on Ehan’s arm isn’t just guidance. It is an unspoken promise:
He can walk into the world. I am here. The ground may shift. I won’t.
And Ehan, doing what children do so naturally, isn’t thinking about symbolism or philosophy. He is simply stepping into his own scale of adventure. A dune becomes a mountain when someone is small. A horizon becomes a question. A sunset becomes a quiet applause for effort.
Adults forget this. I forget how to let a moment be enough.
Everything keeps trying to become a conclusion.
But the desert doesn’t do conclusions. It does continuity. It does repetition with variation. Dune after dune after dune, shaped by the same wind that shaped the last one, yet never identical.
That feels like another kind of freedom: being shaped and still remaining whole.
Being changed by what has been lived, and still being oneself.
This truth gets resisted because smallness is often treated like a flaw. As if small means powerless, invisible, insignificant. As if the only escape from smallness is becoming louder, bigger, more “successful.”
But smallness isn’t a sentence.
Smallness is a doorway.
In the desert, smallness feels accurate. And accuracy can be comforting. It means control can stop being pretended. It means certainty doesn’t have to be engineered into existence. It means the universe doesn’t need to obey a calendar.
It becomes possible to admit: I am one person on one dune on one evening in a world that will outlast me.
And somehow, instead of despair, something tender rises.
Gratitude.
Because if I am that small, then I don’t have to carry the whole world on my shoulders. I only have to carry what is mine to carry: a hand, a moment, a love, a step.
There’s something else in the edges of the photo too.
The sun is setting. Which means the light is leaving. Which means this scene is already becoming memory even as it happens.
That’s the quiet heartbreak of being human: living inside things that won’t stay.
And still loving. Still walking. Still holding arms and hands, even with the knowledge that time is a wind that never takes a day off.
Maybe that’s the deepest courage.
Not conquest. Not domination. Not mastery.
But presence.
To stand on a dune with people I love and allow myself to feel how temporary it all is—and still choose to be fully there. Still choose warmth. Still choose care. Still choose the next step.
A grain of sand cannot stop the wind. It doesn’t protest the sky. It doesn’t argue with the sun about setting too soon.
It simply exists. It belongs. It participates.
And when enough grains gather, they become a landscape that can hold a mother and a child and a moment that makes an observer pause and feel something honest.
So maybe that’s what freedom looks like.
Not the freedom of being untouchable.
But the freedom of being small enough to be real.
Small enough to be part of something wide.
Small enough to stop fighting the vastness and start letting it heal.
On that dune in Mleiha, with the sky opening like a slow breath, Netta and Ehan aren’t trying to prove anything.
They are simply walking.
And the desert..patient, enormous, and quietly wise…lets them.
There are versions of our lives that exist only in the space of almost. The job we nearly took. The city we almost moved to. The love we hesitated to pursue. These lives do not belong to us, yet they linger in the background, shadows of what could have been. It is tempting to wonder about them. To trace the outlines of choices left unmade. Would we be happier? Would we be different? Would we recognize the person we might have become? But the truth is, we can never live every version of ourselves. For every door we walk through, there are others that remain closed. And maybe that is not a loss, but a quiet kind of grace because the life we are living now is the only one unfolding in real time. Perhaps the lives that almost happened are not meant to haunt us, but to remind us that we are always standing at the edge of possibility. That even now, in this moment, there are paths ahead we cannot yet see.And maybe, one day, we’ll look back and realize the life we stepped into was the right one all along.
