ehan – The Border of a Mind

the road by which they find their way home

September 6, 2026September 6, 2026 by Ajmal

In my book, Borders of the Inner World, I wrote about something closely related to this in the chapter “A Place Called Home.” I wrote that carrying home with us often means preserving its rituals: preparing a particular dish because our mother once made it, returning to a familiar song, or holding on to an ordinary object that quietly connects us to another time.

I was thinking then about the rituals adults preserve because they remember.

But there is another side to it.

Children remember because we repeat.

A family tradition does not always begin with the announcement that a tradition is being created. Most of the time, nobody decides that a particular evening, meal or sentence must become important. It simply happens once, then again, and then often enough that a child begins to expect it.

Perhaps it is pancakes or noodles on a Sunday morning.

Perhaps it is the same birthday song sung slightly out of tune every year.

Perhaps it is a father making a tent from blankets in the living room, a mother preparing a certain meal whenever it rains, or everyone climbing into the same bed for a story before sleep.

These things may appear too small to deserve the word tradition. Yet childhood is built from such smallness.

Adults tend to remember the unusual days. Children are often shaped by what happened repeatedly.

They remember the sound of someone returning home at a particular hour. The cup in which milk was served. The words spoken before the light was switched off. The place where everyone sat during dinner. The song played during long drives. The way birthdays began. The smell that filled the house on certain mornings.

None of it appears especially important while it is happening.

That may be precisely why it becomes important.

It enters memory without asking permission.

The quiet architecture of belonging

A child is born into a world whose rules they do not yet understand. Days arrive and disappear. Adults leave for work. Schools begin. Houses change. People visit and return to distant places. Even the seasons seem unreliable.

Repetition gives shape to this uncertainty.

When something familiar returns, it quietly says:

I know this.

I have been here before.

This part of the world belongs to me.

This is why the value of a tradition is not necessarily found in how elaborate it is. A costly holiday may become a beautiful memory, but so might the way the family gathered around the kitchen counter while tea was being made. Children do not measure meaning according to expense. They notice presence, atmosphere and repetition.

They notice that everyone came.

They notice that someone remembered.

They notice that a place had been kept for them.

What repeats becomes a kind of emotional furniture. It gives the child somewhere inwardly familiar to sit.

We are always telling our children a story

Every family tells its children a story about who they are.

Most of that story is not told directly.

It is revealed through what the family repeatedly makes time for.

When people eat together despite busy days, the story may be: We return to one another.

When birthdays are marked, even simply, the story may be: The day you entered our lives matters.

When the same relatives are called during festivals, the story may be: Distance does not remove people from the family.

When an old recipe is prepared, the story may be: There were people before you, and something of them remains here.

When bedtime ends with the same words, the story may be: However the day went, you are safe and loved at its end.

Children absorb these messages long before they have the language to explain them.

Years later, they may not remember every conversation that took place around the dining table. They may not know why a particular meal was always cooked on a certain day. They may even find some traditions embarrassing when they become teenagers.

Still, the deeper message remains.

This is how we lived.

This is what we returned to.

This is how love behaved in our house.

The danger of making it perfect

Perhaps one reason families hesitate to create traditions is that we imagine they must be impressive.

We picture beautiful decorations, coordinated clothes, carefully prepared meals and photographs in which everyone appears delighted to belong to one another.

Real family life is rarely so cooperative.

Someone is tired. Someone refuses to eat. A child cries while the photograph is being taken. The cake leans to one side. The planned outing is shortened because everybody is irritable. The bedtime story is read by a parent who is struggling to keep their eyes open.

Yet traditions do not require perfection. In fact, their beauty may depend upon their ability to survive our imperfections.

The child may not remember that dinner was late or that the decorations were uneven. What they may remember is that, every year, the house changed a little for their birthday. Someone placed their name on a cake. People gathered and sang because they existed.

The ritual does not need to be performed flawlessly.

It only needs to return.

Traditions must also be allowed to grow

Not everything must be preserved exactly as it was.

Children change. Families move. People grow older. Work becomes demanding. Someone who once sat at the table may no longer be there. A ritual that was once joyful may gradually become burdensome.

Tradition should not become a command issued by the past.

The purpose is not to imprison a family within repetition, but to give continuity to love.

A weekly outing may become a monthly meal. A bedtime story may become a late-night conversation. A young child who once helped mix the cake may one day bake it for everyone else.

The form can change while the meaning survives.

Perhaps that is when we know a tradition has truly become part of the family. It no longer belongs to the person who began it. It has entered the shared language of the home.

What they may carry away

One day, children grow beyond the rooms in which these rituals began.

They leave for university, work or a home of their own. They enter unfamiliar kitchens. They spend birthdays among new people. They discover that not every household eats at the same time, celebrates the same occasions or says the same words before sleep.

And sometimes, without planning it, they begin to repeat something.

They make the meal they once watched being prepared.

They play the song that used to fill the car.

They call home on the day everyone always called home.

They say to someone they love the words that were once said to them.

In that moment, the tradition reveals what it had been doing all along. It was not merely organising family life. It was planting a small piece of home inside the child, something portable enough to survive distance and strong enough to outlive the room in which it began.

We may never know which ordinary habit will remain with them.

It could be the Friday evening drive.

The special plate used for birthdays.

The stories told about grandparents.

The tea made when somebody is unwell.

The way everyone waited for one another before beginning a meal.

The little celebration after the last day of school.

Or simply the words spoken every night before the door was gently closed.

That is why family traditions do not need to be grand.

Their deepest work is almost invisible.

They tell a child:

You were expected here.

Your presence changed the shape of our days.

There were things we did simply because you were part of us.

And years later, when childhood has become a distant country, those small repeated moments may become the road by which they find their way home.

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. Instagram link for some visual updates.
Grateful for your moment here. Keep coming back here : )

before the world teaches him the lines

August 11, 2026August 11, 2026 by Ajmal

Ehan is drawing a boat.

At least, that is what the page seems to say: a mast, a dark sail, a body floating in an impossible blue, small circles of colour gathered around it like buoys, planets, or things for which he has not yet learned the correct name.

But I keep looking at this photograph and thinking that the drawing is not really the thing being made here.

Something else is.

A way of seeing.

There is an age when the world has not yet been divided completely into what is right and what is wrong. The sea does not have to be a particular shade of blue. A sail can carry black across half a page without anyone worrying about balance or perspective. The sun may appear where it wishes. Proportion is negotiable. The laws of physics are, for a little while longer, merely suggestions.

And perhaps this is one of the quiet tragedies of growing up: we become increasingly skilled at drawing inside the world as it already exists.

We learn where the lines are.

We learn that boats must look like boats, that skies have acceptable colours, that houses have sensible roofs, that success has certain shapes, that adulthood should proceed in a particular sequence. We become very good at correcting ourselves before anyone else has the chance.

Children have not yet acquired this habit.

Look at the hand holding the brush.

There is no hesitation in it.

He is not wondering whether the picture deserves to exist. He is not comparing it with another child’s boat. He is not imagining an audience somewhere deciding whether the sail is technically convincing.

There is only the remarkable seriousness of making.

A brush goes down.

A world appears.

And I wonder when exactly we lose that kind of courage.

Not the heroic courage we celebrate publicly, but the smaller, rarer courage of putting something into the world before knowing whether it will be admired.

Perhaps creativity begins there.

Perhaps life does too.

One day, Ehan will learn perspective. He will learn that shadows fall in particular directions and that boats obey engineering and oceans obey gravity. He will discover rubrics, examinations, deadlines, expectations, professions, mortgages, traffic, calendars, and all the invisible rulers with which adulthood measures a human life.

He will become better at many things.

I hope he never becomes entirely better at this.

I hope some part of him continues to believe that an empty sheet of paper is not an absence but a possibility. That when the prescribed colours run out, another colour can be invented. That something does not have to be perfect before it can be loved. That sometimes the most important question is not “Am I doing this correctly?” but simply:

“What do I see?”

There are wooden sticks scattered on the table. Tiny cups of paint. A toy car waiting in the background. The ordinary debris of childhood.

Nothing monumental is happening.

And yet, perhaps these are the moments from which a life is actually assembled.

Not the photographs we deliberately pose for, but these unnoticed afternoons when a child is absorbed in becoming himself.

Years from now, this little painting may disappear into a cupboard, a box, a forgotten folder. The paper may yellow. The colours may fade.

He may not remember making it at all.

But I think I will remember the hand.

That small hand suspended above an unfinished world, completely certain that there was still something worth adding to it.

And perhaps that is what I want childhood to leave with him:

not the belief that the world is perfect,

but the belief that it is unfinished.

And that he is allowed to pick up a brush.

the life beneath our days.

June 19, 2026June 19, 2026 by Ajmal

Somewhere between the mountains of Ascona and the horizons only children can see, Ehan paused briefly, as if listening for a future calling his name.

“Do not disturb yourself by imagining your whole life at once.”

There is a terror hidden in the full picture.

A whole life, seen at once, would not look like a story. It would look like a debt. All the mornings already lost. All the rooms entered and abandoned. All the versions of ourselves we wore for survival and later mistook for identity. All the people we loved before we understood that love does not suspend time, it only makes time more visible.

Perhaps this is why life refuses to arrive as a whole.

It comes in fragments. A breakfast. A phone call. A meeting. A child asking the same question again. A parent walking more slowly than last year. A face in the mirror that has not changed suddenly, yet has somehow changed entirely.

We are spared the totality because we could not bear it.

But even in fragments, the exchange is always happening.

Thoreau’s sentence is merciless because it cannot be softened. The price of anything is the amount of life exchanged for it. Not the money. Money is only the symbol we use because it is less frightening. The real payment is attention. The real payment is the afternoon. The real payment is the tenderness we did not have left when we came home. The real payment is the inner life quietly thinned by years of wanting what everyone else wanted.

We say something was expensive when it cost too much money.

We rarely say it when it cost too much of the soul.

A man can lose himself in perfectly respectable ways. He can become efficient, admired, responsible, promoted, insured, well-dressed, reachable at all times, and still discover that some essential room inside him has been left unfurnished. Not destroyed. Not dramatically ruined. Simply unused. A room where wonder once lived. A room where he could hear himself before the world became loud enough to call that silence laziness.

This is one of the cruelties of adulthood. It does not always wound us through catastrophe. Often, it wounds us through repetition. Through usefulness. Through the slow training of the mind to value what can be measured. We learn to answer quickly, decide practically, buy conveniently, speak acceptably. Little by little, the wildness of being alive is replaced by the management of being alive.

Then one day aging begins to speak.

Not in philosophy. In the body.

The knee. The back. The tiredness after a day that once would have been ordinary. The photograph in which we recognize ourselves only after a delay. The first time a child sees us as old. The first time we realize our parents were not always parents. The first time we understand that memory is not a museum, but a house with lights failing in certain rooms.

And yet Bowie’s line carries a strange, difficult mercy.

“Aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person you always should have been.”

Not because aging makes us wiser by default. Many people age only into harder versions of their fear. But aging has a way of stripping the decorations from the false self. It weakens our appetite for performance. It makes certain ambitions look theatrical. It asks, with increasing directness, whether we have been loyal to our own life or merely obedient to the shape expected of it.

The tragedy is not that life is short.

The tragedy is that we often spend it before knowing its value.

We give years to anxieties that had no body. We rehearse disasters that never arrive. We carry insults longer than love. We postpone tenderness as if the heart were a bank account accumulating interest. We imagine that someday, after the work, after the pressure, after the next settlement of life, we will return to ourselves.

But the self we keep postponing is not waiting untouched.

It is aging too.

This is why Marcus Aurelius matters. In his work Meditations, he advises himself not to be overwhelmed by the thought of an entire lifetime, but to focus on the present task and the present moment. He is not telling us to avoid thinking about life. He is warning against thinking about it in a way that makes us incapable of living it. To imagine the whole life at once is to stand outside time like a judge. To live one day honestly is to stand inside time like a human being.

Maybe peace is not the absence of burden.

Maybe it is the refusal to carry the entire horizon in one pair of hands.

Today has enough weight. Not because it is small, but because it is real. The cup on the table is real. The person beside you is real. The work in front of you is real. The breath entering and leaving without asking permission is real. A life is not lived in the grand summary we keep preparing for some invisible audience. It is lived in the unnoticed transactions of attention.

And so the question is not: What do I want to achieve before I die?

That question is too easily corrupted by applause.

The harder question is: What is worthy of my disappearing life?

What deserves the only currency I truly possess?

Some things do. Most things do not.

To know the difference is perhaps the beginning of wisdom. Not a loud wisdom. Not the kind that announces itself in quotes and declarations. A quieter wisdom. The kind that changes how long you look at your child’s face. The kind that makes you call your mother without needing a reason. The kind that makes you stop mistaking urgency for importance. The kind that lets an old dream die without bitterness because you have finally recognized the life that is actually yours.

We do not get to keep our days.

We only get to decide what they become before they leave us.

And perhaps aging, at its deepest, is not the enemy standing at the end of the road. Perhaps it is the slow removal of everything we used to hide behind. The borrowed desires. The rehearsed identities. The needless shame. The hunger to be seen by people who never truly looked.

What remains after that removal may be smaller than what we imagined.

But it may also be truer.

A face without performance.

A love without display.

A day not sacrificed to the wrong altar.

A life no longer imagined all at once, but received, with trembling attention, in the only form it ever agreed to come.

One breath.

One hour.

One vanishing, immeasurable exchange.

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 : )

piecing dreams together

May 31, 2026May 31, 2026 by Ajmal

The white bedsheets are an empty canvas and the scattered blocks are his chaotic paint. He sits there in his red and white striped shirt entirely absorbed in a world that only he can see. I watch his small hands pick up a piece, examine it, and press it into another. There is a profound silence in his concentration. It is the kind of quietness we lose as we grow older.

Looking at those disjointed plastic pieces, I cannot help but see the fragments of our own lives. We are constantly surrounded by isolated moments, random encounters, and unpredictable days. On their own they seem to lack meaning. But given enough patience we piece them together into a narrative we call a life.

They simply play. And for a moment, the whole world becomes enough.

It brings to mind Tagore and his timeless lines from Gitanjali. He wrote of children meeting on the seashore of endless worlds, building houses with sand and playing with empty shells. They do not seek hidden treasures or cast fishing nets. They simply play. Sitting on this bed, my son is on that very seashore.

We carry the heavy luggage of yesterday and the anxious blueprints of tomorrow. But his entire universe exists right here in the space between his fingers. He is breathing in the absolute purity of the present.

Carl Jung believed that creating something new does not come from the intellect. It comes from an inner necessity, a play instinct. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves. This is exactly what is unfolding in front of me. He is not trying to engineer a perfect car. He is simply letting his imagination spill out into the physical world.

But the most beautiful part is what happens tomorrow. He will take this car apart. He will pull the pieces away from each other without a single trace of sorrow and use them to build something else. He creates for the sheer joy of creating, completely unattached to the final product.

We hold onto things until our hands bleed. We grieve over broken plans and shifting realities. Yet here is a masterclass in letting go, taught quietly by a child playing on a Sunday afternoon. He knows that no matter how many times a structure falls apart the pieces remain. They are just waiting to be built into a new dream.

the border of a mind

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 : )

paper aeroplane

March 8, 2026March 6, 2026 by Ajmal

This afternoon, the floor became an airfield.

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 : )

hero beside a boat

March 4, 2026March 4, 2026 by Ajmal

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.

between curtains and clouds

February 27, 2026February 27, 2026 by Ajmal

This morning, Dubai disappeared.

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.

the museum in an old chocolate box

February 20, 2026February 20, 2026 by Ajmal

From Ehan’s box today.

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.

A museum.

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.

the window seat

January 12, 2026January 12, 2026 by Ajmal

My son is pressed toward the oval window like it is a secret portal the world forgot to lock.

There is something holy about the way children look outside an airplane. Not curious in the noisy way adults are curious. Not trying to capture it, not trying to explain it, not trying to turn it into proof. He is simply there, leaning into the light, letting the sky arrive in him without resistance.

The cabin around us is a small mechanical universe. Plastic edges. A screen that knows how to entertain. Trays and latches and polite instructions. Everything is designed to make travel efficient, controlled, predictable. Yet his gaze refuses that architecture. His eyes keep returning to the one soft, ancient element that cannot be managed: open space.

This is what moves me.

Because I realise how much of adulthood is spent building inner cabins. We create routines, boundaries, strategies. We learn to fold ourselves into seats that fit. We learn to keep our feet within the lines. We learn to be useful, to be correct, to be timely. Over time, even wonder becomes scheduled. Even joy gets a slot between meetings.

But my son has not learned any of that yet. He does not know the weight of deadlines. He does not know the silent negotiations inside a grown man’s chest. He does not know the language of worry that adults speak fluently without moving their lips. He has not inherited the habit of looking at the world and immediately asking, “What does this mean for me?”

He only looks.

And in that looking, he reminds me of something I keep misplacing.

That the world is not a problem to solve. It is a presence to meet.

When I watch him, I begin to understand the window as more than a piece of glass. It is a border. Not the kind that separates countries, but the kind that separates states of being. On one side, a child who still belongs to the wide open. On the other, a parent who is always tempted to reduce the wide open into plans and precautions.

The window is also a mirror, if I let it be. I see my own life as a sequence of departures.

Leaving childhood without knowing I was leaving it.

Leaving friends with the confidence that time would wait.

Leaving places I swore I would return to, then discovering that return is never a perfect circle. You go back, but you are not the same person. The streets are familiar, but your inner weather has changed.

Maybe that is what travel really does. It does not merely move our bodies across distances. It exposes how often our hearts live in the wrong time zone.

My son, meanwhile, is perfectly timed.

He looks out at a sky that offers no promises. No fences. No signboards. Only a vast, indifferent beauty. And he is not intimidated by it. He does not ask the sky to shrink into something comfortable. He does not demand that it be useful. He simply allows it to be enormous.

I envy that. I need that.

Because there is a quiet fear adults carry, even when everything is fine. A fear that life is slipping forward faster than we can hold it. That our children are growing in increments too small to notice, until one day a voice deepens, a hand becomes larger than ours, and the doorway suddenly looks different because they are almost tall enough to leave.

In this moment, his legs are stretched toward the seat in front, shoes slightly too big for his small frame, as if even his body is practicing for the future. I want to freeze time, not because I am unhappy with what is coming, but because I am stunned by how quickly love evolves. It begins as protection. It becomes guidance. Then one day, it becomes a blessing you give from a distance.

Parenthood with all my imperfectness is the art of holding and releasing at the same time.

Maybe that is why this scene pierces me. This is not just my son looking out at clouds. This is my heart rehearsing the day he will look out at the world without me sitting beside him. The day he will be the one in motion, and I will be the one waving from the ground, pretending my smile is enough.

Yet I also feel something gentler beneath the ache.

Gratitude.

That I get to witness this version of him.

That I get to sit close enough to hear his quiet breathing while the world rearranges itself outside.

That I get to learn, again and again, from someone who has not yet been trained to doubt beauty.

I do not know what he is thinking as he looks out. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. Perhaps he is not thinking at all, only receiving. And perhaps that is the highest form of intelligence we forget as we grow older: the ability to be moved without needing to own the reason.

The sky will not remember this flight. The clouds will not keep our names.

But I will remember this.

The small head turned toward light.

The way wonder can live in a seatbelt.

The way a child can turn a simple window into a doorway back to what is true.

And as the plane continues forward, I make a quiet promise to myself.

To not rush past moments like this.

To let his wonder educate my tired adulthood.

To look out more often, even when there is no window.

Because sometimes, the most profound journeys are not the miles we travel, but the return we make to a gaze that is still capable of awe.

ladder house

December 22, 2025December 22, 2025 by Ajmal

“My son calls it a “ladder house”.

Not a tower. Not a building. Not a stack of colours. A ladder house. As if the most important part of a home is not the walls or the roof, but the way you move between levels. As if living is simply climbing, step by step, from one little world to the next.

These days, as I’ve written in some other post as well, I try to explore the “inner world” he creates.

I found this one the way I often find his quietest work. Not presented. Not announced. Just left behind, like a small pebble on a path, waiting for someone who knows how to notice.

A soft green sheet, curled slightly at the edges, resting against a dark surface. In the centre, a shape made of thick crayon strokes, layered like slices of something warm. Pink at the top. Yellow beside it, bright and open. A brown curve holding one side like a protective shoulder. A bold green strip cutting across the middle, steady as a floor beam. Then the blue, the part my eyes kept returning to. Blue lines pressed in a row, like steps, like rungs. Under that, orange, then purple, then a red curve at the bottom that feels like an arm, or a door, or the last room where you keep your secrets.

It is not a house the way adults draw houses. There is no triangle roof. No square windows. No stick people smiling under a sun in the corner.

But I know, with a certainty that is hard to explain, that this is a house.

Because children do not draw what they see. They draw what they mean.

A ladder house is not built to impress anyone from the street. It is built for someone who lives inside. It is built for a mind that understands home as layers. Some bright, some dark, some loud, some quiet. Some you climb into with excitement. Some you climb into slowly, holding the sides, careful not to fall.

When he says ladder house, I hear more than a name. I hear a theory of belonging.

In a ladder house, you cannot stay in one room forever. You must move. You must rise. You must return. You must learn which step creaks, which step is safe, which step you can jump over when you are brave.

It makes me think about how he experiences his days.

A child’s day has levels too. Morning is one floor. School is another. Play is another. Hunger is a floor with its own laws. Sleep is the highest floor, where the world becomes soft and everyone else finally becomes quiet.

And maybe, in his inner language, the blue part is the ladder. The only thing that truly connects the whole structure. Without it, the colours would be separate. With it, they become a single place.

I look at the way he pressed the blue, line after line, and I imagine the patience it took. The decision to repeat a shape until it feels right. The small seriousness of his hand. That kind of effort is its own form of love, even when it is not meant for anyone.

There is a tenderness in the materials too. Crayon on green paper, nothing precious, nothing framed. A child does not wait for perfect paper. He uses what is near. He does not worry about permanence. He just makes the thing, and then moves on.

Adults live the opposite way.

We postpone. We plan. We tell ourselves we will begin when we have better time, better tools, better conditions, better versions of ourselves. Children begin in the middle of ordinary life. They begin with what they have. Their courage is practical.

This ladder house reminded me of that.

It also reminded me of how a child builds meaning from colours long before he builds meaning from words. Pink can be a roof. Yellow can be a room where someone laughs. Brown can be safety. Green can be the line that holds everything together. Purple can be the quiet place you go when you do not want to be asked questions.

And red, that red at the bottom, feels like the part you touch last. The part that carries weight. The part that meets the ground.

It is easy to underestimate a drawing like this, because it does not explain itself in adult terms. But a child’s art is often a kind of map. Not a map of streets, but a map of feelings.

If this is a house, then it is a house made of moods.

And if it is a ladder house, then it is a house that assumes you will change as you climb.

I keep thinking about that assumption.

Children believe in change without calling it growth. They believe the next level exists because they have already lived it a thousand times in play. Today a chair is a mountain. Tomorrow it is a ship. Later it is a cave. Nothing stays fixed. Everything is allowed to become something else.

A ladder house is built on that faith.

Maybe that is why it moved me more than I expected. Because somewhere along the way, many of us forget that home can be made like this. Not as a finished structure, but as a living stack. Something you keep building, colour by colour, step by step.

There is also something quietly comforting in the way he centred the whole thing. As if he knows, even at his age, that a house needs a heart. That a life needs a centre.

The edges of the paper are curled, imperfect, like any day in a real family. But the ladder house stands there anyway, held together by intention. It does not apologise for being odd. It does not try to look like the houses in books. It simply exists as itself.

And maybe that is the gift he gives me without knowing.

A reminder that the world does not have to look familiar to be true.

A reminder that a home is not only where you live. A home is also what you make in secret, when nobody is watching, when your hand is free, when your mind is quietly arranging colours into meaning.

He calls it ladder house.

I will probably remember that phrase for a long time.

Because it sounds like something we all need. A place where you can climb. A place where each step leads to another room inside you. A place where the colours do not have to match, as long as they belong.

Tonight, I will keep this little green sheet somewhere safe.

Not because it is a masterpiece.

Because it is a window.

And because, for a moment, it let me stand at the edge of his world and look in.

I may come again with another of Ehan’s art piece. Yes, I’m obsessed! =)