Wisdom – The Border of a Mind

the distance things travel to reach us

September 14, 2026September 15, 2026 by Ajmal

There is a saying whose author seems to have been lost somewhere in the vast circulation of words across the internet:

“If the rain that touches your skin travelled miles to find you, then so will the things destined to your name.”

I came across it recently and, at first, it seemed like one of those beautiful sentences that survives mainly because it is beautiful.

Then I began thinking about the rain.

Not metaphorically.

The actual rain.

A drop landing on the back of your hand on an ordinary afternoon may have begun as water somewhere you have never seen. It may once have belonged to an ocean thousands of kilometres away. Sunlight lifted it invisibly into the atmosphere. Winds carried it across regions and borders that exist only on our maps. Temperatures changed. Vapour gathered around particles too small for us to notice. A cloud formed. The cloud travelled.

And eventually, among millions of possible places on Earth, that particular water fell where you happened to be standing.

Of course, the rain did not know you were there.

It did not cross continents with your name written inside it.

Physics brought it.

Gravity finished the journey.

Yet there is something strangely moving about the fact that the universe can arrange such enormous journeys without our awareness of them.

We live almost entirely at the receiving end of processes we never see.

And I wonder how much of life is like that.

Most of the important things that enter our lives do not begin when we notice them.

We meet someone and say, I met this person today.

But that is not really true.

The road towards that meeting may have begun decades earlier.

Two families lived in different towns. Someone accepted a job. Someone else missed a train. A university admission was received. A visa was approved. A house was rented on one street rather than another. A child was born in one year instead of the next. Thousands of decisions, accidents, delays and migrations slowly moved two human beings towards the same point in space.

Then one afternoon they are introduced.

“Nice to meet you.”

As though the meeting began there.

Perhaps almost nothing begins where we think it begins.

The visible moment is only where a much longer story finally becomes visible.

A seed breaks through the soil and we call it the beginning of a plant, although months of invisible work have already taken place underground.

A child speaks a sentence and we call it a new ability, forgetting the thousands of sounds, faces, repetitions and attempts that quietly assembled themselves before the words arrived.

An opportunity appears and we call ourselves lucky, although years of learning, mistakes, conversations and small decisions may have been preparing us to recognise it.

We see arrival.

Nature contains the journey.

There is a human arrogance hidden in the way we experience time.

We assume that if nothing is happening in front of us, nothing is happening.

If an answer has not arrived, we assume there is no answer.

If our life has not changed, we assume nothing is changing.

If the thing we hope for has not appeared, we imagine the universe has remained motionless.

But look at a horizon before rain.

For a long time, the ground knows nothing.

Children are playing. Cars are moving. Laundry is drying on balconies. Trees stand in ordinary sunlight.

Hundreds of kilometres away, moisture is gathering.

None of this can yet be seen from where you are.

And still, something is coming.

There is a lesson there that has nothing to do with superstition.

Not everything approaching your life is visible from your present position.

But the saying becomes more interesting when we examine the word destined.

It is a dangerous word if misunderstood.

We sometimes use destiny as a comforting promise that everything we want must eventually arrive.

The right person.

The right job.

The house.

The recognition.

The success.

As though existence had signed a private contract agreeing to deliver our preferred future.

Nature makes no such promise.

Rain travels extraordinary distances and sometimes falls into the sea.

Seeds travel on the wind and land on stone.

Rivers change direction.

Branches break.

Animals migrate enormous distances and still encounter storms.

Nature is magnificent precisely because it is not arranged around our wishes.

So when I read “the things destined to your name,” I do not hear a guarantee that everything we desire is secretly travelling towards us.

I hear something more unsettling.

Some things will reach us whether or not we planned for them.

And some of them will change us completely.

Think of the people who now occupy the deepest rooms of your memory.

There was once a time when you did not know them.

That fact is almost impossible to feel once someone becomes part of your life.

Your closest friend was once a stranger walking somewhere in the world without any idea that you existed.

The person you love once woke up on mornings in which your name meant nothing.

Your child, before entering your life, was not yet someone whose laugh you could recognise from another room.

There are people whose absence would now rearrange your entire universe who once passed through years of their lives completely outside your knowledge.

That alone should make existence feel stranger than we usually allow it to feel.

We treat familiarity as though it had always existed.

But every person we love crossed an enormous darkness of non-acquaintance before arriving inside our lives.

One day you do not know someone.

Later you cannot imagine your life without them.

How does a human mind ever become accustomed to something as astonishing as that?

The opposite is also true.

There are people we once believed would remain forever who have already completed their part in our lives.

They came.

They changed something.

They left.

We often think departure proves that a relationship was somehow mistaken.

But nature does not measure significance by duration.

Rain touches the earth for seconds.

A season lasts months.

A tree can stand for centuries.

All three can alter a landscape.

Maybe permanence is not the only evidence that something belonged to our story.

Some things arrive to stay.

Others arrive to turn us slightly in another direction.

A conversation can do this.

A teacher can do this.

A book can do this.

A failure can do this.

Even a stranger can say one sentence that remains in your mind for thirty years.

The event may last less than a minute.

Its consequences may travel much further.

This is where the rain becomes an even more beautiful image.

Because a raindrop does not stop existing when it touches you.

It continues.

It runs down your skin.

Falls onto pavement.

Enters soil.

Feeds a root.

Moves through a plant.

Evaporates again.

What we call arrival is often merely one stage of a much longer movement.

Maybe we are like that too.

We enter one another’s lives, carrying things we ourselves received elsewhere.

A mother sings a song she remembers from her childhood to a child who will one day sing it without remembering where it began.

A father prepares food in a particular way because his own father once did.

Someone comforts you with words that another person once used to comfort them.

A teacher gives a student confidence because, decades earlier, another teacher gave it to her.

Kindness travels.

Fear travels too.

So do habits, stories, wounds, recipes, gestures, prejudices, jokes, faith, language and love.

Human beings are less like sealed individuals than we imagine.

We are passages.

Things move through us.

And perhaps this is what interests me most about the sentence.

The idea that life contains movements larger than our immediate field of vision.

We are very good at measuring what is missing.

We count the things that have not happened yet.

The message that has not come.

The work that has not succeeded.

The person we have not met.

The answer we do not have.

The future we cannot see.

But absence from sight is not the same thing as absence from reality.

Every horizon hides activity.

While you are sleeping tonight, somewhere a plane is crossing an ocean carrying someone who will matter enormously to someone else.

Somewhere a student is learning a skill that will one day save a stranger’s life.

Somewhere two people are making separate decisions that will eventually cause their paths to intersect.

Somewhere a child is being born whose work may affect people not yet alive.

Somewhere water is rising from a sea that may become rain over a city next week.

The world is continuously preparing events for people who know nothing about them.

We are all living downstream from causes we cannot see.

There is humility in recognising this.

We like to imagine that we construct our lives entirely by intention.

We make plans, set alarms, send applications, choose routes, sign contracts, book flights.

And we should.

Agency matters.

Effort matters enormously.

But even the most carefully designed life is penetrated constantly by things we did not design.

The family into which we were born.

The century.

The country.

The language we first heard.

The people who happened to live nearby.

The illnesses we avoided.

The accidents that missed us.

The strangers who helped us.

The coincidences whose importance became obvious only years later.

We steer.

But we do not manufacture the ocean.

Perhaps wisdom begins somewhere between fatalism and control.

Not sitting still because “what is meant for me will come.”

And not imagining that everything depends upon our ability to force the future into shape.

The tree does something more sensible.

It grows roots.

It reaches toward light.

It responds to seasons.

And when the rain finally comes, it is ready to receive it.

That may be the part of destiny we actually participate in.

Readiness.

You cannot command rain.

But you can prepare the soil.

You cannot decide who will cross your path five years from now.

But you can become someone capable of recognising goodness when it arrives.

You cannot guarantee opportunity.

But you can develop the skill that allows you to use it.

You cannot choose every event that will enter your life.

But you are constantly shaping the person who will meet those events.

And perhaps this is why some things seem to arrive at exactly the right time.

Not necessarily because the universe delayed them until a perfect hour.

Sometimes we simply became able to understand what had already been possible.

The same sentence can mean nothing to us at twenty and undo us at forty.

The same place can feel ordinary once and sacred years later.

The same person might have passed us unnoticed had we met them during another season of ourselves.

Timing is not only about when something arrives.

It is also about who we have become when it does.

I keep returning to the physical fact of rain.

Water rises without sound.

Travels invisibly.

Collects slowly.

Then one day the sky changes.

Maybe much of life behaves in similar ways.

The things that eventually define our existence often spend years outside our awareness.

Friendships are travelling towards their first conversation.

Ideas are travelling towards the mind that will understand them.

Children are travelling towards families that cannot yet imagine their faces.

Places are waiting to become memories.

Ordinary days are approaching that we will later give anything to live once more.

And we stand beneath all of this movement knowing almost none of it.

That is not proof that every longing will be fulfilled.

It is something, to me, much more beautiful.

It means the present moment is never the whole story.

There are always roads beyond the horizon.

There are causes already in motion.

There are lives moving towards other lives.

There are consequences still travelling from things we did years ago.

There are seeds underground.

There is water in the sky.

And somewhere beyond what you can presently see, the world is still becoming the world you will one day remember.

Maybe that is enough reason not to demand that life reveal everything at once.

Stand under the open sky long enough and you begin to understand something:

the rain only looks sudden to the person standing on the ground.

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 : )

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.

the world we carry into the world

August 25, 2026August 25, 2026 by Ajmal

A room can change without anything in it moving.

The furniture remains where it was. The same light falls across the floor. The same voices come from the next room. Yet one evening the place feels warm and familiar, and on another it feels strangely small, almost hostile.

Nothing in the room has changed.

We have.

It happens so quietly that we rarely notice. We think we are looking at the world, when much of the time we are also looking through ourselves.

A tired mind finds irritation everywhere. A worried mind hears danger in ordinary words. A wounded heart can turn someone’s silence into rejection, their busyness into indifference, their distance into proof of something it has feared for a long time.

On a gentler day, the same silence may mean nothing at all.

This is one of the unsettling things about being human. We are never entirely sure how much of what we see belongs to the world and how much has been added by the state in which we meet it.

A difficult morning can follow us into the afternoon like a shadow. Someone speaks carelessly, traffic moves slowly, a message goes unanswered, and suddenly the whole day begins to gather around that one unpleasant hour. By evening, people who had nothing to do with our disappointment are living inside its atmosphere.

The first incident may have lasted only a few minutes.

Inside us, it continues for hours.

There are other days when life is no less complicated, but we move through it differently. Work is still unfinished. Money is still being thought about. Someone we love is still difficult. The future has not suddenly become clear.

Yet the mind is not wrestling with everything at once.

A delayed reply remains a delayed reply. A mistake remains a mistake. A bad day is not promoted into a bad life. We do not turn every uncertainty into a verdict.

The world feels kinder then, though the world itself may not have done anything kind.

We often assume that peace comes after life has been put in order. After the difficult conversation. After the bills are paid. After the body feels better. After the child settles, the career improves, the house becomes quieter, the answer arrives.

But life has a habit of replacing one unfinished matter with another. One concern leaves, and another takes its chair.

There is rarely a clean, uninterrupted stretch in which nothing needs our attention.

That may be why peace is so easily postponed. We treat it as a reward the future will give us for surviving the present. Meanwhile, the present keeps becoming the past.

Years can disappear this way.

Not dramatically. Not in catastrophe. Simply in the steady habit of being elsewhere.

We sit at a table while thinking about tomorrow. We listen to someone while preparing our reply. We arrive home carrying an argument that happened at work. We lie beside the people we love while mentally living in a life that has not yet occurred.

The body is present. The mind keeps leaving.

And because the mind is absent, ordinary life begins to look ordinary in the worst sense. A meal is just a meal. A familiar voice becomes background noise. The drive home is merely the distance between two obligations. The person beside us becomes part of the furniture of our days: always there, and therefore easily overlooked.

Only later do we understand what was hidden inside those moments.

The sound of someone moving about in the kitchen. A child calling from another room. A friend sending a message for no particular reason. The relief of coming home and knowing someone is there. A conversation that seemed unimportant until the voice that belonged to it was no longer available.

So much of what makes a life feel full does not announce itself while it is happening.

It does not arrive with music. It rarely looks important enough to remember. It simply repeats itself until one day it stops, and only then do we see the shape it had been giving to our lives.

A peaceful inner world does not make a person cheerful all the time. It does not remove grief or make injustice easier to accept. There are experiences that should disturb us. There are losses that cannot be softened into lessons. There are people from whom distance is not bitterness but wisdom.

Peace is not the denial of pain.

It is the refusal to let pain become the only language in which life can speak.

A person can be grieving and still notice the evening sky. Someone can be afraid and still laugh at dinner. A family can carry uncertainty and continue setting the table. Beauty does not always wait politely outside until sorrow has finished.

The two often live in the same house.

This is why the calmest people are not necessarily those who have suffered least. Sometimes they are simply people who have learned not to make a home inside every passing feeling.

They know that anger can be real without being permanent. That fear can be loud without being prophetic. That a thought can enter the mind without deserving to be believed.

They do not win every argument with themselves. They have merely stopped treating every thought as an instruction.

There is a quiet freedom in that.

The mind tells stories constantly. It fills gaps, predicts endings, interprets expressions, remembers old injuries and places them over new faces. It can turn a pause into rejection, a delay into disaster, another person’s success into evidence of our own failure.

Most of these stories arrive in our own voice, which is why they sound so convincing.

Peace creates a little distance between what happened and what we decide it means.

In that distance, another possibility becomes visible.

The friend may be tired, not distant. The colleague may be carrying something they have not spoken about. The day may be difficult without being ruined. We may be uncertain without being lost.

Nothing is solved by this. Yet something opens.

The world becomes less personal in the best way. Not every closed door is an insult. Not every silence is about us. Not every delay is life withholding something we deserve.

People become human again, rather than characters in the story of our disappointment.

And when we see them that way, we become gentler without making a performance of gentleness. We listen a little longer. We do not answer every sharp word with another. We leave room for what we do not know.

This inner atmosphere travels further than we imagine.

A peaceful person changes a room without speaking much. So does an angry one. We bring our inner weather into kitchens, meetings, cars, classrooms and phone calls. What we carry privately is often felt publicly.

Our patience can become someone else’s relief.

Our anxiety can become the tension they cannot explain.

Our attention can make another person feel visible.

Our absence, even while sitting beside them, can make them feel alone.

The world within us never remains entirely within us.

Still, there is no reason to turn peace into another achievement, another standard by which to judge ourselves. Human beings are not meant to remain calm through everything. We become tired. We react badly. We carry yesterday into today. We sometimes realise too late that our fear has been speaking on our behalf.

That, too, belongs to being alive.

But every so often, something interrupts the noise.

A familiar song begins playing. Someone says something unexpectedly funny. Light enters a room in a way we had forgotten to notice. A child places a hand inside ours without saying anything. For a few seconds, the mind releases its grip.

The world has not changed.

It has simply become visible again.

It’s not the idea that life is beautiful only when we are peaceful, but that beauty can remain inaccessible while we are at war within ourselves.

It may be close. It may even be ordinary. But a crowded mind has nowhere to receive it.

The cup of tea is warm. The evening is quiet. Someone we love is telling us about their day. Nothing extraordinary is happening.

And then, for once, we are fully there.

The moment does not become grand. It becomes enough.

That may be one of the most honest forms of peace: not feeling that life has finally become perfect, but no longer requiring it to be perfect before we allow ourselves to belong to it.

The outer world will always contain noise, disappointment and change. It will also contain kindness, beauty and the small mercies that rarely call attention to themselves.

What we notice will depend, in part, on what we have carried into the seeing.

Some days, the world really is hard.

On others, we are simply meeting it through a hard hour.

There is tenderness in learning the difference.

The life that feels full

August 22, 2026August 22, 2026 by Ajmal

We are taught, almost from the beginning, to chase the visible things.

The job title.
The applause.
The milestones.
The proof.

Somewhere along the way, success becomes a performance. A life arranged in such a way that others can point at it and say, there, that is a good life. And yet, so many people reach those carefully imagined destinations only to discover a strange hollowness waiting for them there.

Because success and satisfaction are not always twins.

Success is often public. It can be photographed, announced, admired, envied. It lives well in introductions and on paper. But satisfaction is quieter than that. It does not always look impressive from the outside. Sometimes it looks like an ordinary morning. A simple home. Enough work to keep the mind alive and enough peace to let the heart rest. A meal shared without hurry. A child laughing in the next room. The ability to sleep without feeling at war with yourself.

That kind of life rarely makes noise.

And maybe that is why it is overlooked.

We live in a time that constantly confuses being seen with being fulfilled. If the world can witness it, we think it must be valuable. If others can admire it, we assume it must be worth pursuing. But the soul does not measure life that way. The soul has different standards. It asks gentler, deeper questions.

Do you feel at home in your own life?
Does your joy depend entirely on being validated?
When the world grows silent, does your heart still know peace?

There is something deeply moving about the idea that a satisfied life may actually be more beautiful than a successful one. Not because success is wrong, but because satisfaction is more intimate. More honest. More human. It belongs to the inner world, where no audience can enter.

A person may have very little and still feel rich in the ways that matter. Another may have everything people admire and still feel an ache that no achievement can soothe. That is the great secret we often learn too late: outer abundance does not guarantee inner rest.

Perhaps the real tragedy is not failing to become successful.

Perhaps it is becoming successful at the cost of yourself.

At the cost of your quiet.
At the cost of your relationships.
At the cost of wonder.
At the cost of that inward softness by which life is actually felt.

There is a kind of dignity in choosing a life that nourishes you, even if it does not impress the crowd. In choosing what lets you breathe. In choosing what allows your mind to settle and your spirit to remain intact. In choosing enough.

Not every beautiful life is extraordinary in the public sense.

Some of the most beautiful lives are small by the world’s standards and immense by the soul’s.

And maybe that is the real question before all of us:
not “How can I build a life that is admired?”
but “How can I build a life I can truly inhabit?”

A life that does not merely look good from a distance,
but feels right from within.

Because in the end, the world can witness your success.

But only you will have to live inside your life.

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.

illuminating spaces

July 3, 2026June 21, 2025 by Ajmal

Light has a quiet way of transforming a space. The golden slant of the afternoon sun spilling across a wooden floor. The flicker of candlelight making shadows dance on the walls. The way city lights reflect on rain-soaked streets, turning the ordinary into something almost magical. The same room feels different at dawn than it does at dusk. In the morning, light is sharp, filling every corner with possibility. By evening, it softens, wrapping the space in a quiet kind of warmth. Even the harsh glow of a fluorescent bulb or the dim flicker of a dying lamp shifts how a place feels, how we feel within it. Perhaps that is why we are drawn to certain kinds of light. The way fairy lights make a room feel like a memory. The way firelight makes us feel safe. The way sunlight through lace curtains can make even an ordinary afternoon feel like something sacred. Light does not change what a place is, but it changes how we see it. Maybe that is true for more than just rooms. Maybe our lives, too, can feel different simply by shifting what we let in, what we focus on, what we allow to illuminate the spaces within us.

what the seed knows

June 7, 2026June 7, 2026 by Ajmal

I once kept a plant on a windowsill for so long without any sign of life that I genuinely forgot why I had kept it. The soil had gone pale and compact. I watered it out of something closer to guilt than hope. And then one morning, unremarkably, while I was looking at something else entirely, there was green.

That’s the thing about thresholds. They don’t announce themselves.

I’ve been thinking about the relationship between time and trust. Not as a philosophy, but as a daily practice that most of us are terrible at. We know, somewhere in the back of us, that things shift. That the heavy seasons have always eventually thinned. That we have survived every difficult version of ourselves so far. We know this. And still, in the middle of a long winter, the knowing does almost nothing. The knowledge is there and the comfort is elsewhere, and the distance between them is where most of the suffering lives.

There’s a word in Arabic — sabr — usually translated as patience, but that translation doesn’t quite carry the weight of it. Sabr is closer to steadfastness. It implies an active holding-on, a choosing not to collapse even when collapse would be easier. It is not the patience of someone who is fine. It is the patience of someone who is not fine and is staying anyway.

I think a lot of us are practicing sabr without knowing it has a name. I know I am. Or trying to. Some days I fail it completely.

I lose patience faster than I’d like to admit. When things don’t move, when situations don’t resolve, when the slow burn of difficulty sits in the chest too long, I feel it tip into something sharper. I’ve said things I didn’t mean. I’ve contracted when I wanted to expand. I’ve let the fire in me burn what deserved to be warmed instead. This is not a confession so much as an honest inventory. I am someone who knows the value of stillness and still fidgets. Someone who believes in the long view and still flinches at the short one.

But I think that’s allowed. I think you can hold a beautiful idea and be bad at it. I think the wanting to be better is itself a kind of becoming.

What I’ve noticed, in myself and in people I love, is that waiting for something to change often looks indistinguishable from being stuck. From the outside, and sometimes from the inside too. You can’t always tell if you’re enduring something necessary or prolonging something that should have ended. That uncertainty is its own weight. And no one talks enough about how exhausting it is to simply not know which kind of waiting you’re in.

But flowers don’t know either. The bulb underground in January doesn’t know if the warmth is coming. It just holds its particular form of life in the dark, without evidence, without reassurance, without anyone looking.

Maybe that’s the closest I can get to faith. Not certainty about outcomes, but a willingness to remain in the shape of something that can still bloom.

Grief is strange that way. When you’re inside it, it feels structural, like it is the building now, not something in the building. Like removing it would remove the walls. And so you walk around it carefully, live around it, set your routines around its particular geography. And then one day you realize you’ve stopped navigating around it. It’s still there, maybe, but it’s not the architecture anymore. You don’t remember when that changed. You were looking at something else.

I don’t think this is comfort, exactly. I think it’s just what’s true.

The last thought I can’t stop returning to is the simplest. Gratitude first. Then patience. Then faith. Not as a formula. More like a sequence that reveals itself in hindsight. You look back and think: oh, that’s what those years were. That’s what I was doing without knowing I was doing it.

Gratitude is the hardest to locate when you need it most, which is why I think it has to come first. Not because it’s easy but because it’s the only thing that softens the ground enough for anything else to grow in.

I’m still learning this. Imperfectly, repeatedly, sometimes embarrassingly. But the fact that it still matters to me, that I still want to be someone with more grace in the difficult moments, more steadiness when the heat rises, more room in me for what’s hard, that wanting feels like something. Not arrival. But movement. And maybe that’s enough to keep going with.

The plant on the windowsill is taller now. I don’t know what it’s called. I never looked it up. There’s something I like about that. Tending to something without fully understanding it, and watching it live anyway.

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 : )

we are made for the open sky!

May 20, 2026May 20, 2026 by Ajmal

We spend so much of our journey weaving soft little cocoons, convinced that the ultimate goal of living is to keep everything perfectly still and safe. We arrange our days to avoid the wind, collecting comforts and quiet routines, hoping to build a world that never shakes. But a bird isn’t defined by the stillness of its nest; it is defined by the absolute freedom of its flight. We are not made merely to be comfortable. We are made for the open sky. When someone ruffles our feathers , challenging our patience or softly disrupting our peace, our first instinct is to turn away. Yet these moments are actually beautifully disguised gifts. Rather than acting as a hurdle, that person serves as a gentle mirror. They show us the tucked-away corners of our own hearts that are finally ready for a little more sunlight and grace. Their presence is an invitation pointing to a locked door within you, suggesting it is time to open it. It becomes an opportunity to drop your heavy defenses and step into a much more spacious, forgiving version of yourself.In our desire to navigate this world well, we often rely entirely on the maps of others. We fill our pockets with the wisdom of podcasts, the quotes of philosophers, and the trending vocabularies of healing, carrying them around like precious stones. But a profoundly liberating moment arrives when you realize you no longer need to hold someone else’s lantern. Your own soul has a radiant light of its own. There is a quiet joy in finally setting down all the borrowed words and trusting the unwritten poetry of your own experience. You have lived and learned enough to trust your inner voice.Sometimes the wind blows just hard enough to scatter our perfectly laid plans. A chapter closes, a certainty shifts, and the path softly bends in an entirely unexpected direction. While it can feel disorienting, this is never a loss, it is a clearing. You cannot paint a new masterpiece on a canvas that is already full. When the familiar ground shifts, life is simply making room for your next season of growth.Take a deep, trusting breath in those open spaces of change and you will find a weightless solace. You were never meant to carry the exhausting burden of orchestrating the universe. When the walls of your plans gently give way, it is just the Almighty letting the sunshine completely in. It is an act of quiet mercy a Divine love that tenderly removes the ceilings we placed above our own heads, promising that whenever we finally let go, we are already entirely held.

grace in transience

May 15, 2026June 21, 2025 by Ajmal

There is a certain beauty in things that do not last. A sunset that fades into the night. A song that ends too soon. A season that slips away just as we’ve grown used to it. The very fact that they are fleeting makes them precious, because we know we cannot hold onto them forever. We often resist endings, wishing we could stretch time, keep things as they are. But what if the beauty is not in their permanence, but in their impermanence? What if their meaning comes from the fact that they are here for only a moment, asking us to truly see them before they go? Love is more powerful because we know time is fragile. Laughter feels lighter because it comes and goes. Even the most ordinary moments, sitting in the sun, sharing a meal, hearing a familiar voice, become extraordinary when we remember that nothing stays exactly the same. Endings are not failures. They are proof that something mattered. That something was lived. And though we cannot keep everything, we can pay attention while it is here. We can let things be beautiful, not because they last, but because they don’t.

our memory in others

May 8, 2026June 21, 2025 by Ajmal

We do not belong only to ourselves. There are versions of us scattered across the minds of others, shaped by the moments we shared, the words we spoke, the way we made them feel. To someone, we are the person who once offered them kindness on a difficult day. To another, we are the friend they lost touch with but still think about. To someone else, we are just a passing memory, a stranger they once sat next to on a train, a familiar face from years ago, a voice they can’t quite place but somehow remember. We have no control over how we are remembered. Sometimes, we exist in someone’s story as the hero. Other times, as a lesson. And in some cases, as the one who hurt them, even if that was never our intention. The way we see ourselves is only one version of the truth; the way others remember us is another. It is humbling to know that long after we have left a place, a conversation, a life, something of us remains. A phrase we once said. A moment that meant nothing to us but everything to someone else. We do not get to choose how we are remembered, but we can choose how we show up. And maybe, just maybe, that is enough, to move through the world with kindness, leaving behind memories that feel like light rather than shadow.