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.
We spend much of life searching. For meaning, for love, for a sense of belonging. We chase answers, direction, certainty, believing that if we just look hard enough, if we just keep moving, we will finally find what has been missing. But some things do not arrive through effort. Some things are not found in pursuit, but in stillness. The best conversations often happen when we stop trying to force them. The deepest realizations come when we stop thinking so hard. Love appears not when we go looking for it, but when we are simply living, unguarded, open. There is beauty in the unexpected, in the moments we stumble upon when we are no longer trying to control the outcome. The best days are often the ones unplanned. The most important lessons come when we least expect them. The things we need often find us when we are not searching for them at all. So let go. Just for a little while. Allow life to unfold without demanding answers. Trust that not everything must be hunted down, some things are meant to arrive softly, in their own time, when we are finally ready to receive them.
There is a humility that finds us in the dark. Go out on a clear night, far from the city’s electric haze, and look up. You will feel it. Faced with the cold, scattered light of a billion stars, it is tempting to feel anonymous, to believe we are nothing but a fortunate accident adrift in an unthinking void. The sheer scale of the cosmos is designed to make us feel impossibly small.But what if we are mistaken? What if that feeling is not the sting of irrelevance, but the first tremor of awe? What if the universe is not a void at all, but a canvas, and that sprawling, breathtaking grandeur is simply the scope of the Artist?When you look for a signature, you look for a recurring style, a mark the creator cannot help but leave. In the universe, the signature is a fractal. It is the spiral of a galaxy, arms cast wide enough to hold a million suns.
And it is the same spiral in the chamber of a nautilus shell, in the unfurling of a fern, in the whorl of your own fingerprint. The laws that govern the explosion of a supernova are the same laws that govern the falling of a single leaf. There is a single, coherent thought woven through it all, from the impossibly large to the impossibly small. The signature repeats.The signature is also found in the silence of its laws. It is in the profound and unwavering rhythm of the worlds, the way gravity patiently holds a planet in its orbit, the way light agrees to travel at the same speed, always. This is not the mark of chaos. It is the mark of an intellect so vast it is unfathomable, a covenant of physics that holds the cosmos together. It is the invisible thread that connects the bee to the flower, the moon to the tide, the atom to the star.
Everything is in relationship. Nothing is truly alone.But perhaps the most personal mark, the one that speaks directly to the heart, is the beauty that serves no purpose. Science can explain how a sunset scatters light, but it cannot explain why it moves us to tears. It cannot explain the violent, impossible colors of a nebula hidden for eons in deep space, or the iridescent shimmer on a dragonfly’s wing, or the way frost draws forests on a windowpane. This is not the cold efficiency of survival. This is artistry. This is a deliberate brushstroke of grace, a sign that the mind behind the universe is not just an engineer, but an artist who delights in an extra splash of color.And then, the final signature: that we are here to see it. The universe, for all its eons, was a masterpiece painted in an empty room until, in us, it grew eyes. We are the part of the cosmos that can look back at its own origin and feel wonder. We are the witnesses. That feeling of awe is not an accident of chemistry; it is the sound of the soul recognizing its author. It is the signature written not just on the stars, but on our very hearts.The cosmos is not a void. It is a work of art, and it is signed.
We never fully know the role we play in someone else’s life. To us, an ordinary moment might be forgotten by tomorrow, but to someone else, it might linger for years. A kindness we barely remember might be a turning point for another. A passing word might be something they carry long after we have moved on. We assume we are the main characters of our own story, but in reality, we are also side characters, background figures, fleeting presences in the lives of others. The stranger who smiled at just the right time. The friend who unknowingly said exactly what we needed to hear. The person who walked away, teaching us something we didn’t understand at the time. It is humbling to think about, the ways we leave fingerprints on stories we will never get to read. The ways we become someone’s memory, without ever knowing how or why. So perhaps the best thing we can do is move through the world gently. Speak words that lift. Offer kindness without expectation. Be mindful of the fact that, at any given moment, we are shaping someone’s story, whether we realize it or not.
There is a version of life happening around us that we often forget to see. It exists in the small, unremarkable moments, the way the leaves shift in the wind, the way light spills through a window, the way laughter drifts from a nearby table. These are the things that fill our days, yet we rush past them, lost in thoughts of what’s next, what’s missing, what’s undone. We think of life as the big moments, the milestones, the achievements, the turning points. But real life happens in between. In the pauses. In the way someone looks at you when they think you aren’t watching. In the rhythm of your own breath as you sit quietly, doing nothing at all. How much have we missed in our hurry to get somewhere else? How many sunsets have gone unwatched, how many conversations only half-heard, how many days passed by without ever being truly lived? Maybe life is not something to chase. Maybe it’s something to notice. Maybe the magic is not in waiting for something extraordinary, but in realizing that the ordinary was always enough. So pause. Breathe. Look around. Life is not in the next moment. it’s in this one. And if we are not careful, we will spend our whole lives waiting for something that has been here all along.
