There are people we cross paths with who we will never truly know. The stranger sitting across from us on a train, lost in thought. The barista who remembers our coffee order but not our name. The person we smiled at in a moment of shared understanding, then never saw again. These brief encounters are small, almost forgettable, yet they shape the rhythm of our days. A kind gesture from a stranger can linger in our minds. A moment of unexpected warmth can soften an otherwise difficult afternoon. And though these people may never become part of our story, they still brush against it, leaving something behind. It is humbling to realize that we exist this way for others, too. That somewhere, we are the stranger someone else briefly noticed. That we have entered and exited lives without knowing the impact we left. That, in the background of someone’s memory, we may still be there, our voice, our laughter, a single sentence we once spoke. Most people we meet are passing moments. Fleeting presences. But that does not make them insignificant. Because sometimes, the smallest encounters leave the deepest marks, proof that even in the briefest connections, something meaningful can be exchanged.
There are moments in life that feel like a quiet shift, a turning point we don’t fully recognize at the time. A conversation that lingers in the back of our mind. A decision made on instinct. A fleeting moment of clarity that whispers, something is different now. Not all beginnings announce themselves. Sometimes, they feel like ordinary days, like small choices, like something we brush off as unimportant. But later, when we look back, we realize, that was when everything started to change. That was when a door opened, even if we didn’t walk through it right away. Maybe it was the first time you let go of something that wasn’t meant for you. Maybe it was the moment you decided to try, even though you were afraid. Maybe it was the day you met someone who would change your life, though you didn’t know it yet. We don’t always recognize the beginnings while we are living them. But one day, we will trace things back and see, it started there. So pay attention. To the small moments. To the choices that feel insignificant. Because sometimes, what seems like nothing at all is actually the start of everything.
We are surrounded by things that should leave us speechless , yet we walk through them like ghosts.
Somewhere between waking up and going to sleep, you will pass through dozens of moments that , if you actually paid attention would stop you completely. The way light bends through a glass of water. The specific sound of rain before it arrives. The fact that your heart has beaten roughly 100,000 times today without a single conscious instruction from you. These are not ordinary things dressed in familiar clothing. They are extraordinary things we have simply agreed to ignore.
We develop a kind of voluntary blindness as we age. Children stare at beetles for twenty minutes. Adults check their phones. Somewhere along the way, we traded wonder for efficiency and called it growing up.
Think about the ground beneath your feet right now. Compressed time. Layered history. Organisms living and dying in a single teaspoon of it. From that , from something so dark and dense and seemingly inert , a plant life erupts. Flower color erupts. Fragrance erupts. The audacity of a flower, pushing through earth toward a sun it has never seen but somehow already knows how to find, is one of the most quietly radical acts in nature. And we walk past it.
We are not bored because the world is dull. We are bored because we have stopped asking what the world actually is.
theborderofamind.com
Or consider what it means that you exist at all. Not in a vague sense but literally. The sequence of events required to produce you is so improbable, so finely threaded across centuries of human life, that the odds of your specific existence are essentially incalculable. One different choice by one ancestor you will never know the name of, and you simply wouldn’t be here. Yet here you are, probably reading this blog while mildly distracted, as if your own existence were the least interesting thing happening today.
When did you last feel genuinely astonished by something not entertained, but astonished?
If your life were to change entirely in the next hour, what would you wish you had noticed more?
Is the way you spend your days an honest reflection of what you believe actually matters?
What are you carrying that you have never once stopped to examine?
There is also the question of time , the one we are least comfortable sitting with. Life moves at a pace that feels slow until you look back, and then suddenly decades feel like a long weekend. The things we keep postponing , the conversations, the changes, the courage , they wait for a future self who will also be busy, also be tired, also have reasons to wait a little longer.
We are always halfway through something. The strange grace of knowing this is that it doesn’t have to produce anxiety. It can produce attention. It can make this meal, this conversation, this ordinary day feel like the irreplaceable, unrepeatable event it actually is.
The tragedy isn’t that life is short. The tragedy would be to go through it without ever really thinking about it , to borrow a mind capable of profound understanding and spend it entirely on the surface of things. Every person holds a depth of thought they have never fully explored. It doesn’t require silence or solitude or special conditions. It requires only a willingness to stop, for a moment, and actually look.
Thought is not what happens when you have nothing to do. It is what you owe the life you were given.
theborderofamind.com
The world is not withholding its meaning from you. It is offering it constantly, in every direction, at every scale , from the architecture of a seed to the architecture of a grief. The only question is whether you are showing up to receive it. Whether you are willing to live examined, on purpose, with your eyes genuinely open.
Not because it will make you more productive. Not because it will solve anything. But because you are here, briefly and improbably , and that deserves more than sleepwalking through it. Almighty has left hidden locks of understanding in this short life of ours.
Perhaps the deepest truth is this: the Almighty did not leave the world without meaning . He embedded meaning into its very fabric, layered it beneath the surface of every created thing like hidden locks waiting to be found. But a lock without a key is only a mystery. And the key, it turns out, is not intelligence, nor education, nor ambition .. it is awareness. A sincere, humble, unhurried willingness to look at this world and ask why. Those who carry that key move through life differently. They find wisdom in the ordinary. They hear something in the silence. They understand, slowly and with great wonder, that nothing around them was placed here carelessly , that every detail, from the architecture of a leaf to the weight of a loss, is a door. And behind every door, for those willing to truly seek, is a glimpse of something far greater than the world itself.
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.
