Not all change is loud. Sometimes, it happens so quietly that we don’t even realize we have outgrown something until we return to it and feel the difference. A conversation that no longer stirs the same emotions. A place that once felt like home but now feels distant. A habit that simply fades, not because we forced it away, but because it no longer belongs to us. We expect change to be dramatic, to come with an announcement, a defining moment. But often, it is slow, invisible, happening in the background of ordinary days. We wake up one morning and realize that the things that once hurt no longer do. That the dreams we once chased no longer call to us. That we have become someone we never planned to be, but somehow, exactly who we were meant to become. And maybe that is the most beautiful kind of growth, the kind that does not demand our attention, but simply unfolds. The kind that does not ask us to rush, but meets us exactly when we are ready. So if you feel like nothing is changing, if you feel stuck, take a step back. You are growing in ways you cannot yet see. And one day, without warning, you will realize that you have already become someone new.
Some of the most important days of our lives don’t feel special while we’re living them. There is no grand moment, no sign telling us pay attention, this will matter later. They pass like any other, unnoticed, unmarked, until we look back and realize everything changed somewhere in the middle of them. A conversation that seemed casual but planted a seed in our mind. A decision so small it felt meaningless, yet it led us somewhere we never expected. A quiet afternoon spent with someone who, years later, we would give anything to sit beside again. We think of life as a collection of big moments, but the truth is, most of it happens in between. In the everyday routines, in the laughter that wasn’t supposed to be memorable, in the unnoticed pauses where something shifts without us realizing. Maybe today is one of those days. Maybe something seemingly ordinary is happening now that, years from now, we will look back on and see differently. And maybe that is reason enough to be present, to pay attention, to cherish even the simplest moments, because we never really know which ones will stay with us forever.
So much of life is spent waiting, for the right moment, for the right conditions, for someone to tell us it’s okay to begin. We wait for permission to take up space, to chase a dream, to change direction, to finally say what we have been holding inside. But permission rarely comes the way we expect it to. No one will show up and say, Now is the time. Now you are ready. Now you are allowed. The doors we are waiting to be opened are often ones we could have walked through all along. We wait because we are afraid, of being wrong, of failing, of stepping outside of what is familiar. But in the end, the waiting itself becomes the thing that holds us back, not the thing we are waiting for. What if we stopped waiting? What if we acted before we felt fully prepared? What if we gave ourselves the permission we’ve been waiting for from others? Because the truth is, no one else gets to decide when we are ready. No one else can give us the life we want. At some point, we must decide to step forward, not because we are certain, not because we are fearless, but because waiting will never be what moves us forward. Only action will.
There are small moments that arrive quietly, almost shyly, and yet they stay with you far longer than the larger, louder ones. I’m recollecting a similar moment with my son Ehan to share.. The bed sheets were slightly crumpled, a toy robot with springy arms rested there, and beside it was a pencil sketch my son had made with all the seriousness a child can hold.
The most beautiful thing I felt is that I had not asked him to draw. He did not announce it to me after drawing. He simply sat down, picked up a pencil, and translated the world inside his mind onto paper.
A robot. Sturdy, tall, oddly proportioned, cheerful in its own way. A version entirely his.
Children are like that. They do not only see what is right in front of them. They see what might be, what could exist if the world allowed a little more imagination to spill over. And they draw from that place. Bill Moyers once said, “Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the marvelous.” Although not in its enirety, I think I’m getting a sense of it when I saw this sketch.
Nothing about that afternoon was special. There were errands waiting, emails stacked up, adult worries humming in the background. And yet, right in the center of that ordinary day, my son quietly found the marvelous on a simple sheet of paper.
He studied the toy robot next to him, tracing its shapes with his eyes, not copying but interpreting. Children do not imitate. They reinvent. The circle on the head became a dot. The springs became long lines. The boots became tiny rounded feet. Every choice was an echo of how he sees, how he thinks, how he dreams.
Watching him, I felt something soften. A reminder perhaps that imagination is not a luxury. It is a way of seeing the world brighter than it is. It is a way of staying open to possibility. Butwe are in a rush.
As we all might have read, Picasso once said, “Every child is an artist.” And standing over that piece of paper, I realized the truth of it. Not because of skill or perfection, but because a child draws with a kind of unapologetic honesty. There is no fear of getting it wrong. No hesitation. No self edit. Only creation, as natural as breath.
We lose that somewhere along the way. But our children thankfully keep showing us the path back.
Today, the sketch still lies on my desk. I have not moved it. I do not want to. It reminds me that there is something sacred in the small and unplanned acts of creativity. The marvelous does not always announce its arrival. Sometimes it walks into the room holding a pencil, humming softly, and draws a robot.
And sometimes, that is enough to light up an entire day.
Without realizing it, we carry pieces of the people we have known. A phrase we picked up from a friend. A song an old love introduced us to. A way of laughing, a habit, a favorite food, all borrowed, all absorbed, all woven into who we are. We are not just ourselves; we are a mosaic of everyone who has ever left a mark on us. The way we fold our laundry, the books we reach for, the small superstitions we never questioned. We inherit these things, sometimes consciously, sometimes without even noticing. And just as we collect pieces of others, we leave parts of ourselves behind, too. A joke someone still tells because we once made them laugh. A recommendation someone now swears by. A kindness we barely remember giving, but that someone else never forgot. It is a quiet kind of immortality, proof that we live on in ways we never see. That even after time and distance have pulled us apart, something of us still lingers in the people we have known. And maybe, when we feel lost, when we feel like we don’t know who we are anymore, we can remember this: we are made up of love given, lessons learned, moments shared. We are never just one thing. We are everyone we have ever met.
You know.. sometimes travel memories light you up from inside. This is one such recollection that I want to share with you. I had travelled to Cold Spring Harbor in Laurel Hollow, a beautiful village in the Town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, on the North Shore of Long Island, in New York. It is one of the finest green spaces I have ever walked through in my life , a place where the density of the trees creates its own soft hush, where the calmness settles into you before you even realise it, where the slowness of the air feels like an invitation to breathe differently. Being someone who has spent most of my adult life in the Middle East, this sort of a space is one of the luxuries I cherish. The interplay of trees and light were like magic. The sunlight filtered through the trees with a gentleness that made everything look newly washed. I remember sitting on that empty bench for a long moment, letting the silence settle around me. The trees stood in their quiet confidence, their branches stretching into the open sky as if reaching for something that had always been there. Sitting there peacefully, I had a kind of clarity that morning that felt almost unfamiliar. Netta and I (may be Ehan also) have fond memories of this place.
The shape of the trees in particular…made me skim through a faint recollection from years ago. I once came across an old illustration in a very old art book, a simple sketch that placed a pair of human lungs beside the shape of a winter tree. I’m not remembering the book. The image had stayed with me without my knowing it, tucked quietly into some corner of thought. I had forgotten its details. But sitting there in Laurel Hollow, the memory returned with surprising clarity. The resemblance was unmistakable now. The trees around me were breathing in their own slow language. And somewhere inside my chest, a matching structure was doing the same. I’ve tried to draw it digitally here. I am marveling at the similarity between the lung airways and the tree branches.
The branches overhead divided and softened into thinner lines, narrowing into delicate paths of light. Deep inside the body, the airways mirror this same patient branching, splitting again and again until they reach the quiet threshold where air becomes life. It is almost impossible not to feel humbled by this symmetry. That the architecture of a tree and the architecture of a lung share the same longing. To hold. To receive. To release.One breathes out what the other breathes in. A silent partnership written long before we learned how to notice it.
Sitting there that afternoon, the shadows of the branches lay across the grass like long fingers of memory. The world around me felt achingly familiar and strangely new. The trees were not just scenery… they were part of a larger rhythm that had been happening around me my entire life. A rhythm my body participates in without instruction, without effort, without acknowledgment most days.
It made me wonder how many miracles move through our ordinary days unnoticed. Trees that give without being thanked. Lungs that work even when we forget them for weeks at a time. The quiet exchange between the two continuing in perfect harmony, whether or not we are aware of it. Whether or not we ever pause long enough to recognise the beauty of being held between them.
There is something tender in this realisation. That the world outside and the world inside are not separate at all. The trees stand on the hillside, reaching upward. The lungs rest quietly beneath the ribs, reaching inward. Both searching for the same invisible gift. Both offering it back. Both shaped by a generosity that requires nothing from us.
Most days, we pass through life too quickly to see these patterns. The branches remain branches. The breath remains breath. The sacred hides inside the familiar. But once in a while, on a morning like that one, something makes you look twice. And in that second look, something opens.
A tree. A lung. Two reflections of the same mercy.
And you realise that all of this continues even if you never notice. But noticing turns the ordinary into reverence. And reverence becomes a quiet remembrance of the Almighty, who shaped both breath and branch in the same loving pattern. A moment of grace. Let not the noise of this life blind our inner eyes. The trees on the sides from your drive back from work, may now look a bit different 🙂
Not everything we communicate is spoken. There are words we never say, yet they echo in the things we do. In the way we linger in a hug just a little longer. In the way we show up without being asked. In the way our eyes soften when we look at someone we love. Silence carries meaning. A glance can say I’m sorry. A small gesture can say I care. The absence of words is not always emptiness, it is often a language of its own, subtle and profound. Sometimes, what we feel is too deep for words, and so it slips through in other ways, in a shared laugh, in a hand placed gently on a shoulder, in simply being there when it matters most. But we forget how much we say without speaking. We forget that love can be in the way we listen. That forgiveness can be in a simple nod. That understanding can be in the silence that asks for nothing but presence. So pay attention to what isn’t said. Listen to the quiet. Notice the gestures, the pauses, the unspoken truths that pass between people. Because often, the deepest conversations happen without a single word, in a language older and softer than speech.
“The harder you fall, the heavier your heart; the heavier your heart, the stronger you climb; the stronger you climb, the higher your pedestal.”
Criss Jami, Killosophy
There are certain lines you read that do not try to comfort you directly. They do not pat your shoulder or hand you a neat solution. They simply place a mirror in front of your life and let you recognise something quietly familiar. This is one among them.
Somewhere in Munnar, Kerala.
When I first read it, I didn’t think of falling in the dramatic sense. I thought of the private kind, the small collapses that happen inside us, the ones no one sees. The mornings when you carry an unspoken heaviness and still go about the day. The weeks where something doesn’t go the way you hoped, and you adjust without announcing the disappointment. The subtle ways life presses on you, reshaping your inner edges. The heart becomes heavier in these moments. Not in a burdensome way, but in the way clay gets weightier with moisture, more grounded, more malleable, a little more real. A heavy heart is often just a heart that has felt deeply and stayed awake through the feeling. And from that kind of weight, a strange strength grows. Not the obvious kind. More like the strength that shows up when you are washing dishes after a difficult day and realise that resilience sometimes looks like simply continuing. Or the strength that comes when you choose gentleness instead of bitterness, even when the easier option is to shut down. It is the strength that quietly accumulates in the background, almost unnoticed. Climbing then is not always a dramatic ascent. Sometimes it is just learning how to inhabit yourself again. Standing back up in small ways. Saying yes to one more day. Understanding that healing rarely arrives with ceremony, it arrives slowly through ordinary movements. And that pedestal the quote speaks of… I don’t read it as a place for applause. I see it more like a vantage point. A higher place within yourself where you can see with a little more clarity, a little more compassion, for your own past, for other people’s hidden struggles, for the world’s unevenness. It is not a pedestal you climb to show others you have overcome something. It is one you reach almost quietly, without realising that the path upward was carved by all the moments that once felt like a fall. There is something tender about that, how life keeps shaping us through the very things we once wished to avoid. And maybe the insight is …: the heart does not grow heavier to weigh us down. Sometimes it grows heavier so we have something steady to push against as we rise. Life has a beautiful way of humbling us.
On Saturday afternoon, between 5:30 PM and 6:00 PM, Ajmal, author of Borders of the Inner World, held a dedicated signing session at the Author Signing Corner of the 44th Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF 2025). The event formed part of the world-class literary festival organized by the Sharjah Book Authority, held under the theme “Between You and a Book.” The signing drew some of his long time readers, friends, fellow authors, and book lovers from across the UAE and beyond — offering a personal, contemplative space amid the fair’s lively, global atmosphere.
“I really wanted to meet the people who’ve been part of this journey, and to hear and listen to them, and they’re a very important part of me, every single one of them are dear to me. Each signed copy became a shared moment with them, a conversation between minds, and I’m so grateful for that time they gave to me beyond anything else, and I value them a lot.. my small book is built entirely on gratitude.”, said Ajmal in a statement.
From author’s release statement, 08 November 2025
Now in its 44th year, the Sharjah International Book Fair remains one of the world’s largest literary gatherings. The 2025 edition welcomes more than 2,300 publishers and exhibitors from 118 countries, presenting over 1,200 cultural, academic, and creative events.
This year’s Guest of Honour Country is Greece, spotlighting Hellenic literature, poetry, and art in a rich exchange of ideas that bridges the ancient and modern worlds. Under the patronage of His Highness Dr Sheikh Sultan bin Mohammed Al Qasimi, Ruler of Sharjah, the fair continues to strengthen the emirate’s reputation as a UNESCO World Book Capital and a cultural hub where the love of reading transcends languages and borders. Borders of the Inner World— written by Ajmal and published under Harborlight Publishing, and distributed internationally via various distribution partners — is a contemplative non fiction work inspired by Ajmal’s long-running reflective journal, The Border of a Mind. The book explores mindfulness, meaning, and the quiet spaces of thought that shape our inner lives.
There are weights we pick up along the way that were never truly meant for us. Expectations that grew from someone else’s dreams. Guilt that was never ours to bear. The silence of others, their disappointments, their ideas of who we should be can quietly settle on our shoulders until we begin to mistake them for our own. We hold on because we care. Because we were taught to give, to help, to keep everyone else comfortable. But in doing so, we sometimes forget that our hands were also made to release. Not everything handed to us is ours to keep. Not every opinion needs to be carried. Not every expectation needs to be met. There is a soft kind of strength in pausing and asking, “Does this really belong to me?” The fear. The pressure. The story about who you’re supposed to be. Maybe they were only passing through. You are allowed to put them down. You are allowed to be lighter. You are allowed to make space for what is truly yours: joy, peace, purpose, your own voice. Because sometimes, the greatest freedom begins when you realize this simple truth: not everything you carry was meant to be yours.
