A journey through silence, suffering, becoming, and the strange freedom of finally being yourself.

Life is a celebration, not an event.

We are busy. Always.

We are so engrossed in the to-do list that celebration has also become an event for us.

We go someplace, check the to-do list, and come back to attain the old to-do list.

Life feels richer when you pay attention to little things already going right.

But we spend money on our events and feel obligated to make them worth it.

This makes us feel inclined towards materialistic things.

To grab more things at the time of letting go.

Doing nothing, being quiet, feels like paying a price.

Wasting time.

Trust the quiet seasons of your life.

Life has brought me to such a juncture that doing nothing pays well.

The less I do, the more results I get, and the happier I am.

It took a long, long time to embrace the quiet seasons of my life.

Silence is the only language I am fluent in.

By making noise, you anchor yourself into a moment that is already becoming the past.

And if anything at all, your time is not worth spending in the past.

Flow.

Clear is the stream that flows. Greater is the monk that goes.

***

Being in the past is being in reference to the context of something else.

Not being present in the present moment is, perhaps, an urge to be somewhere else.

Someone else.

Wishing to be someone else is a waste of who you are.

You become exactly who you think you are.

And yet, we spend so much of our lives thinking about becoming.

If at all, don’t think of becoming something or someone.

You are where you are.

Billions of people live in this world. Everyone will perceive you in their own way.

How many minds will you satisfy?

Your perception of me is a reflection of you.

I can’t live with a billion minds inside my mind.

Give up on this urge to show the world that you’re someone.

The stars that are shining are also burning.

When I no longer wanted to shine, I learned to catch the light.

This urge to merge.

To belong.

To be accepted.

To become part of something larger than ourselves.

And yet, perhaps the whole journey begins when you stop running towards it.

The day you stop pacing is the day you win the race.

***

It’s okay to wake up one day and feel completely over your life and redesign it from scratch.

We begin new every day.

We are new every moment.

But beginning again requires leaving something behind.

Close the window that hurts you, no matter how beautiful the view is.

Life is too short to be living miserably.

When you know the difference between what you want and what you need, you open a whole new world of possibilities.

A tree craving water will not satisfy its thirst with oil.

It grows its roots so complex because its need is simple:

Water.

Perhaps growing is not about wanting more.

Perhaps it is about finally understanding what you truly need.

This, too, is an act of self-love.

Someone initiating a difficult conversation with you is an act of love.

And sometimes, the most difficult conversation is the one you finally have with yourself.

The one where you admit:

This is no longer working.

Something has to change.

Maybe it’s time to take the stage if all the seats are taken.

Better to be cringed in someone else’s mind than caged in your own.

So you leave.

Not because you know where you are going.

But because you finally know you cannot remain where you are.

***

A wise hermit told me that I would lose my mind if I stopped writing.

If I was born to express this creative energy, I would have to honour the calling.

There was no other way around it.

Healing also means taking responsibility for the role you play in your own suffering.

But responsibility does not mean punishment.

There is nothing spiritual about suffering.

Pain does not automatically make us wiser.

Sometimes pain is simply pain.

And there has to be no reason for doing everything.

Like a child, lead a life without justifications.

Do something because it calls you.

Laugh because something is funny.

Create because something inside you wants to be born.

We must remain silly to survive the horrors of this world.

And perhaps we survive because of one another.

Come lie with me for hours, so we can talk thousands of nothing while it means millions of something.

Leave people lighter than you found them.

May the flowers grow in the saddest part of you.

***

And somewhere along the way, you discover something strange.

You were never supposed to become anyone else.

There is no one like you. You are the example.

The thing you were searching for was not outside you.

It was hidden beneath all the comparisons.

All the performances.

All the explanations.

Be a poem, even if no one knows how to read you.

Correctness is not style.

You don’t have to be understood to exist.

You don’t have to be approved of to be real.

You don’t even have to justify your strange, beautiful way of being.

In the end, we will all become stories.

So perhaps the question is not whether everyone will understand your story.

Perhaps the question is whether you were present while living it.

***

But every freedom demands something.

To become yourself, you may have to disappoint the version of yourself that everyone else preferred.

To find peace, you may have to let go of being understood.

To stop performing, you may have to disappear from a few expectations.

The highest form of peace is having no desire to be seen, validated, or understood by anyone.

That freedom has a price.

You walk alone sometimes.

You close beautiful windows.

You let go of beautiful views.

A path taken just for the beautiful views is the most dangerous path.

Because beauty can still be a trap.

The stars that are shining are also burning.

And perhaps shining was never the point.

Perhaps catching the light was enough.

Perhaps stopping was enough.

The day you stop racing is the day you win the race.

***

And then you return.

To the same mornings.

The same rooms.

The same people.

The same world that once demanded so much of you.

Nothing outside has changed as dramatically as you imagined it would.

There are still things to do.

Bills to pay.

Conversations to have.

Days when nothing remarkable happens.

But now you understand something you did not understand before.

Doing nothing is not always wasting time.

Being quiet is not always absence.

Not every moment has to become an event.

Not every silence has to be filled.

You return to the ordinary world and notice how extraordinary it has been all along.

A cup of tea.

A familiar voice.

A conversation about nothing.

Light entering through a window.

The simple fact that you are here.

Life feels richer when you pay attention to little things already going right.

***

So you return to where you began.

But you are no longer the person who began the journey.

You no longer need to become someone.

You no longer need a billion minds to agree on who you are.

You no longer have to shine for everyone to see.

You can simply catch the light.

You can flow.

You can be quiet.

You can begin again.

Trust the quiet seasons of your life.

Better to be cringed in someone else’s mind than caged in your own.

Be a poem, even if no one knows how to read you.

Leave people lighter than you found them.

And when the world finally asks you who you became, perhaps you will have nothing to prove.

Because the answer was never waiting at the end of the race.

It was present in every moment you stopped running.

Life is a celebration, not an event.

And then, quietly:

In the end, we will all become stories.