Tag: Wisdom

before the world teaches him the lines

Posted on 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

Posted on 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

Posted on 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!

Posted on 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

Posted on 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

Posted on 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.

the slow shaping of life

Posted on by Ajmal

Not every moment that shapes us feels significant. Some hours slip by unnoticed, quiet and ordinary, yet they leave marks we only recognize in hindsight. The evening spent alone with your thoughts. The morning walk where an idea first took root. The silent afternoons where nothing seemed to happen, but somehow, you changed. We expect transformation to be loud, to arrive with clarity, to declare its presence. But more often, it comes softly. Growth unfolds in the background, in conversations we almost forget, in books half-read, in quiet moments that pass without fanfare. The shaping of a life is slow, and often, it is invisible. It is easy to dismiss these hours. To think they are wasted. But sometimes, stillness is not empty. Sometimes, it is where understanding deepens, where resilience is built, where patience is learned. These unnoticed hours are the soil where ideas grow roots, where change begins quietly, beneath the surface. And one day, without realizing how, you will look back and see that those small, ordinary hours shaped you in ways you could never have planned. So let them be. Let the quiet moments do their work. Let the days that feel unremarkable unfold, knowing that even when nothing seems to be happening, something within you is shifting, becoming, preparing for what comes next.

beautiful, fleeting, ever-changing

Posted on by Ajmal

We spend so much of life trying to hold on. To moments, to people, to the things that make us feel alive. But everything we love is fleeting. Sunsets disappear into night. Laughter dissolves into silence. Even the brightest days slip into memory, no matter how tightly we try to grasp them.But maybe that is what makes them beautiful. Maybe things are not meant to last forever. Maybe their temporary nature is not a flaw, but the very thing that gives them meaning. A flower that never wilted would not remind us to stop and admire it. A song that never ended would lose the power to move us.The impermanence of life is not something to resist .. what i feel is that, it is something to embrace. Because what fades teaches us presence. It reminds us to cherish, to notice, to love without hesitation. The fleeting nature of things does not make them any less real. If anything, it makes them more precious.So let life be what it is .. beautiful, fleeting, ever-changing. Do not fear what fades. Instead, let it teach you to be fully here, fully present, before it slips away. Because in the end, the fact that it does not last forever is exactly what makes it matter.

the light that finds us

Posted on by Ajmal

Not all light arrives in grand ways. Sometimes, it does not come as a sunrise, bright and undeniable. Sometimes, it comes softly .. filtered through the cracks, slipping in unnoticed, touching us in ways we only recognize later.We often think of light as something we must chase, something we must earn. But light has a way of finding us, even in the darkest corners, even when we are not looking for it. A kind word on a difficult day. A song that plays at the right moment. The quiet comfort of knowing that the night will not last forever.Even in moments of uncertainty, light is never truly absent. It hides in the smallest things .. a flicker of hope, a memory that warms us, the simple act of breathing through the heaviness. Sometimes, we mistake darkness for permanence when, in reality, it is just a pause before something shifts.You do not have to force the light. You do not have to chase it relentlessly. Just hold on. Keep going. And trust that, in time, light will find you—exactly when you need it most.

when it’s meant to be yours

Posted on by Ajmal

We are always waiting for something. For answers, for change, for a sign that we are on the right path. We wait for the next chapter, the next opportunity, the next version of ourselves that feels more complete. But waiting is not just the space between where we are and where we want to be .. it is a lesson in itself. The world tells us to rush, to chase, to make things happen. But some things unfold only in their own time. A flower does not bloom because we demand it to. The tide does not rise any faster because we are impatient. There is a rhythm to life that cannot be forced, and some of the most beautiful things arrive only when we have the patience to receive them. Waiting is not wasted time. It is the space where we grow, where we prepare, where we become the person who will be ready when the moment finally comes. It teaches us stillness, trust, and the quiet art of allowing. So if you are in a season of waiting, do not fight it. Breathe in the slowness, embrace the unknown. Not everything needs to happen now. Some things take time..and time will bring them when they are meant to be yours.