The house is number 52, and at first visit you greet the door. Old teak, thick as a dictionary, varnish peeling off it in long pale tongues, iron bolts thick as a finger, and beside it a small blue enamel plaque with a white 52 on it, the kind the French left screwed to walls all over White Town. On the doorstep stone, there is an etching of a fish, worn smooth by two centuries of feet, give or take. Nobody is entirely sure how old the house is, only that it has been here about two hundred years, since the days when the street had another name and the house another number. I stood there with my heart still going like a drum, sweat in my eyes, and then the door opened slowly.

Inside the veranda there is an octagonal table of dark wood, tile panels inlaid in its top, and on the table a wide brass bowl of water with yellow flower heads floating in it, and two small brass figures flanking the bowl as if they had been assigned to watch the petals. A cast-iron bench with scrollwork arms. A palm rising past a white column. And beyond it all, framed by a round arch, green is the courtyard.

My body arrived before my mind did. This is how it usually goes with me. My mind was still back on the Promenade while my body was already here, cooling against the stone, dripping politely near a two-hundred-year-old threshold.

The courtyard is the heart of the place, and the heart has a tree growing through it. A big old tree with a thick gnarled trunk rises straight out of the dark stone floor and goes up through the open middle of the house, and the house has simply arranged itself around the white colonnade, round arches repeating, dark-wood French doors opening off it, a wooden balcony rail upstairs where the bedrooms lean down toward the leaves.

When the house was restored, the rule, I was told, was that no walls would be broken and no trees would be cut. The tree stayed. The building took its shape around the tenant. Underfoot, on the grey stone slabs, someone had drawn a kolam that morning: a white chalk mandala of loops and dotted geometry.

Deeper in, the walls go mustard-yellow, the ochre the whole town runs on, and brass lamps hang from chains at the height where lamplight is most forgiving, and there is a wooden swing hung from the ceiling, an oonjal, its seat worn to a soft shine by generations of sitting. My room was white and high-ceilinged and dark-floored, with an arched window behind white louvered shutters and a maroon handwoven throw folded across the foot of the bed, cream patterning worked through it, and no television anywhere in the building. The house offers itself, gently, as a place of quiet. Slowness. You come here to decelerate.

My confession in the shadow of a very peaceful swing is that I am terrible at stillness. Catastrophically bad. My brain at rest is a railway station at rush hour, every platform announcing a different departure, a coolie carrying off my attention in seven directions, somebody shouting about tea. I have sat on the cushions. I have used the apps, the ones where a man with a voice like warm milk tells you to notice your breath, and I notice my breath for seventeen minutes and then I am composing an email in my head. I hold still while my mind runs ultramarathons in the dark, badly, without water stations.

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Peter, I met in motion. He was sitting in the courtyard at breakfast with his reading glasses pushed up into his hair and ink on his fingers, blue-black, worked into the cuticles. This is Peter D’Ascoli, textile designer, long-time Delhi person, and, I would learn over the next two days, exactly the kind of person I somehow always end up talking to when I travel, the (interesting) ones who have lived three lives and will tell you about all three if you stand still long enough. Which, for once, I could do. It had started to rain.

We bonded by triangulating a city, as people do now. He asked if I had spent some time in Delhi, and within four minutes we were doing the circuit of the galleries, the art fairs and the whole looking-life. I told him I have been an art-weekend person since I was a teenager when my father spent time there, that I grew up on the NGMA rotunda and the Janpath pavement and the Lado Sarai gallery nights, that I have never once missed the art fair when visiting him, not even the February it poured on the Okhla tents and everyone’s shoes gave up, that I plan whole seasons around the shows at Bikaner House. He countered with decades of the same city from the making side of the wall with studios, weavers, printers, the people who produce what the galleries hang. He knew half the artists I loved and had opinions about the other half, strong ones, delivered happily. Two pals, basically, inside of an hour. It helps that he laughs at his own jokes before he finishes them, so you get a preview.

We had coffee under the ceiling fan in the morning, filter coffee in a steel tumbler, the rain gone and the courtyard steaming, and he told me his life. The courtyard smelled of wet earth, and faintly, maybe, of jasmine. He told me about his Long Island childhood and then his time in Manhattan at the Fashion Institute of Technology. And then I put my coffee down at the mention of his first job out of school, which was at twenty-one, with the Indian government, the Ministry of Textiles, and had years of traveling this country end to end, Kashmir to Kochi, working with craftspeople.

Then twenty years of New York with fashion houses, long days, Diane von Furstenberg for many of them, the whole high-gloss life, and then, he finally moves to India, to set up his studio in Delhi in 2006, block printing and hand embroidery and fabric for people who care about craftsmanship. He was in Pondicherry for the same reason he is everywhere in Tamil Nadu lately, to chase the old Coromandel story for his next piece. A man in his seventies, in motion since before I was born, collecting departures like others collect watches.

I spent the rest of that coffee, and if I am honest the rest of the trip, hunting for the phrase for what he is. Force of nature would have been the accurate but usual compliment, and it is wrong for him. Force implies resistance, something being pushed against. An enormous amount happens around him, a studio kept alive through its own brush with collapse, a book with a French publisher, a nose for wherever the next old cloth story is hiding, a rain-soaked afternoon converted, without any visible decision, into a lesson for a stranger. And it all happens with lightness, grace and almost no visible strain. Maybe, a river is closer. A flow of nature rather than a force of one. Later, on the way home, I half-remembered the Chinese term for it I’d read in a mystery book, wu wei, effortless action, action without forcing, which is probably the closest the dictionary gets.

I still prefer the pal version, the one I could say over filter coffee without reaching for a notebook: Peter is someone who has motion. Inner dynamism, momentum, a man resisting inertia and entropy without seeming to strain against them. This is someone visibly alive, and in movement.

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There under the fan with my coffee going cold. It added up to rootedness. A life made almost entirely of leaving, of trains and houseboats and airports and new cities, and what it built was the most rooted person I had met in years, rooted in craft, in a studio, in people, in a practice that starts again every morning with ink on the hands. He has a book coming out with Flammarion, he said almost shyly with photographs by Ambroise Tézenas, a great heavy volume on India’s decorative arts, devotion and sacred geometry and the whole gleaming sprawl of it.

The argument came up while we were talking craft, and then devotion, and I said the thing I posit around spiritually fluent people: that I am an ultra-marathon runner, and that running is the closest I get to meditation. Then I braced, because I have said this at dinner parties and seen the faces transform. Usually someone tells me, kindly, that it is not real meditation. “Real meditation is sitting.” “Real meditation is breath and stillness and the slow approach to zero”, and it is implied or sometimes stated outright that what I do is plain old exercise.

Peter snorted. “That’s their lens,” he said, waving a hand with ink on it. “It isn’t the absolute.”

His argument, reassembled from the wreckage of a very good hour.. the people who sell meditation as the path of zero, stillness as the only honest door, are describing one temperament’s route and calling it the entire map. “Spirituality”, he said, and here he did thump the table, once, gently, “does not hand you a single door.”

I concur it hands you doors for different kinds of paths like action, devotion, knowledge, stillness. Your own path walked badly beats someone else’s walked beautifully. Spirituality is also a word, I usually handle delicately. Everyone I know who says it loudly is selling something, and everyone who practices it tends to call it something else. But if the word means anything, I decided, there under the fan with the courtyard steaming, it means a quality of attention, rather than a department of life with visiting hours, Tuesday and Thursday, incense optional. I have it, briefly, at kilometre fourty, when I stop checking the road against my feet. The attention does not care where it happens. Only the brochures do.

Then he impressed, Flow, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, upon me with no ceremony. “Read it,” he said. “You’ll feel less like a fraud at dinner parties.”

I read it that week, between trips to Auroville, in the courtyard between rains, and here is the idea, paraphrased and perhaps slightly manhandled by me. Csikszentmihalyi spent decades asking people when they felt most alive: rock climbers, surgeons, chess players, dancers. The answer kept being the same strange state. It arrives when a challenge meets a skill at the right pressure. Too easy and you get boredom; too hard and you get anxiety; and in the channel between them, action and awareness merge.

Time changes speed, hours compressing or a single second opening up like a courtyard. The chatter of self-consciousness goes quiet, and every scrap of attention gets requisitioned by the task. The self gets absorbed. He has a word for when action is done for its own sake: autotelic.

Auto, self; telos, end. The doing is the point.

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I recognized it faintly, and in my body, not the head. The kilometre sixty of an ultra. The hour when the chatter stops. People imagine that hour arrives through teeth gritted, willpower clenched like a fist. It doesn’t. It arrives through occupation. There is a hill, my body, and a number on my watch, and the next footfall, and somewhere inside that arithmetic, the committee in my head adjourns, because everyone was needed on the floor. What is left is legs and breath and the road unspooling, and if that is not what the cushion people are after under a different brand name, I will eat my running shoes, which are, for the record, the most expensive objects I own.

I read a lot, the reading of a person with an indefensible habit, and somewhere in all of it, I arrived at my own working theory: the brain at rest, my brain anyway, does not become a temple. It becomes a waiting room, magazines from 2009, a television mounted too high. Motion is what opens the windows. On a long run my brain doesn’t atrophy; it arranges itself. Worries get filed by distance, each one carried a kilometre or two and then set down at the roadside like a stone cairn, and by the time I am home the day has a clarity it did not have when I left.

The strangest yield of all those kilometres, is well, oneself! Everyone treats the self like a set of keys you have lost and must find, and my entire athletic career is evidence against this. The self shows up when you are occupied. At kilometre sixty-five, or sixty-six if the markers are lying (and they often are), I meet a person who is not performing. She is not improving. She is just there, breathing, sweating into her own ears, mildly annoyed about a blister, and that person is the closest thing to a self I have ever reliably located. You want to know yourself, give yourself a job and stand back. This is also, I suspect, why the galleries never felt like a hobby separate from the running, why I kept showing up to Lado Sarai nights and Bikaner House seasons. A painting is a job for the attention. Fifteen minutes in front of a good canvas and I am more myself than after any weekend retreat, and it costs less, though the gift shops have taken real money off me over the years.

And I am in good historical company. On Mount Hiei in Japan, Tendai monks have for centuries practiced a walking pilgrimage that amounts to circling a mountain for a thousand days across seven years, in white robes, through snow, farther each year, a devotion measured in distances no race director would sanction.

I watched a woman in the Aurobindo Ashram one morning sit so still near another kolam, and a bird hopped up onto the low wall beside her, and I felt, admittedly, envy. Whatever room she was in, I don’t have the key. I also watched a craftsman lean over a block print for the better part of an afternoon, the body gone statue-quiet, the hand lifting and pressing, lifting and pressing, six hours of motion inside a frame of stillness. Or is it the reverse? Six hours of stillness inside a frame of motion, the print creeping down the cloth like weather.

Meditation, by my working definition, is whatever lets attention and the world touch without the commentary track, that little radio announcer in the skull who narrates and judges and wants a sponsor.

Evening at number 52 behind the door is when the house tells on itself. The kolam on the courtyard stone, so perfect at dawn, has by six o’clock been walked over a hundred times, by guests and staff, by me in my running shoes with my full unrepentant weight, and it has blurred into a pale ghost of itself, geometry going soft at the edges. Nobody mourns it. Before dawn tomorrow, in the blue hour, someone will sweep the stone and draw it again, dot by dot, loop by loop, rice flour or chalk powder pinched between fingers, and the ants and the small birds will take their share of it by breakfast, because a kolam is a prayer with a short shelf life, meant to be eaten, walked on, swept, redrawn.

Faith, I have come to believe, is the unlocked door you keep walking through without checking and a repeated showing-up. Mine works like my long runs do. I have done it so many times now that not doing it would feel like lying to someone I live with. It is mostly showing up for your own nature.

I am not a person who reaches for the cosmic register often, I get embarrassed, I start making jokes (see above, see everywhere), but standing in that courtyard at dusk, with the brass lamps lit and the leaf-light going out overhead patch by patch, I will permit myself this much: the tree is still growing. That is the house’s secret. The slowest motion in the building is also the largest one, a trunk thickening by millimetres a year, roots working under two-hundred-year-old stone, canopy rearranging the light. Nothing in the house is actually still. Stillness, it turns out, is one door. The house is made up of plenty other doors, and all of them are in use.

I left as I had come, on foot, in August air. The teak door swung shut behind me with its commentary, the bolts went home, and I stood on Rue Romain Rolland for a minute with my bag on my shoulder, looking back at the blue enamel 52, at a house standing perfectly still in the morning haze, mustard walls, white columns, two centuries of holding still and being, at the same time, entirely in motion, a flow of nature, standing still. The house stands still so that everything in it can move, and I move so that everything in me can settle.

The next morning I ran the Promenade again, 5:58, the sea slapping the rocks, the yoga men assembling, my watch on my wrist like an abacus, my breath counting itself without being asked. Four strides in, four strides out.

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Currently on my desk: a stack of fourth-graders’ science papers I promised to grade, which is incidentally the best reading I’ve done all week. Next to the stack, a Lego Spider-Man, still sealed, a gift from my brother, the standing arrangement being that he gifts, I assemble, and he supervises from the couch (though my Lego McLaren P1 he "supervised" last year was somehow finished by the time I got done reading the instruction manual, so I know how this goes). And my copy of Neuromancer, page 120-something now, real progress! Also, cyberspace was 1982's idea of the future, which makes the whole thing accidentally retro now.

This week’s find: a website of dubious legality that streams old shows nobody will put on the streaming platforms, whose name I won’t print for reasons the lawyer I don’t have (my mum) would strongly approve of. The first cool edge of fall crept in this week and brought with it the non-negotiable need for Buffy reruns, and I had forgotten how homemade the show feels. I haven’t been able to watch anything overproduced lately.

Songs for the first evening that needs a blanket: Paolo Nutini, "Candy" / Johann Sebastian Bach, “Concerto in D minor, BWV 1052” / Neil Young, "Old Man" / Taylor John Williams, "The Mates of Soul"

I am also in the back, knees somewhere near my ears, watching the streetlights thin out, and I am thinking about the fact that we have planned this entire expedition around a weather report for the sky. The Perseids peak this week. Everyone knows this now, because we have all seen the same video about it with the swelling music, and I have been saying life-changing since July. I say this about most things I’m earnest about (a swim, a person) so here we are, forty minutes out, cloud cover improving hourly, allegedly.

The playlist is collaborative, which is a nice word for a hostage situation, and switches between one person’s gym music and another person’s ironic sea shanties.

From the outside we must look like nothing, one tin box on a dark road, four warm bodies, one working charger between us, aimed at a campsite Tanvi found on a map. From the inside it feels like the start of a voyage.

I admit I had a plan for this night. Layers. A thermos. A screenshot of where the meteors were supposed to come from, prepared for the sky and its supposed seating chart.

Every expedition to see the universe begins with inadequate supplies.

A full inventory of what we brought to meet the sky - one blanket, technically two, but the second is decorative and has never met the outdoors and would have probably liked to keep it that way. Two bottles of water for four people, a ratio calculation that no one will address. A bag of chips crushed to gravel by the jack in the trunk, a couple of thermoses chock-full of coffee and the remainder of the gluten-free, vegan sandwiches that survived the journey. One flashlight that works and one that flickers like it’s trying to communicate with the dead. Mosquito repellent nobody applies until the mosquitoes have already done their damage. Four jackets of four different wrongnesses, including mine, which is somehow too thin and too hot.

Also: Tanvi’s binoculars, the kind with a neck strap which nobody in the car knows how to operate. Also: a star app I downloaded a couple of years ago. You point it at the sky and it names things. You point it at your own shoe and it names things there too, confidently.

Lay it all out on the blanket later, in the dark, and it looks like a yard sale for people about to be rained on. Every object is a tiny defense against the enormous. The flashlight gets turned on and we have entered into negotiations with the dark. The app makes me feel like if I can name whatever ‘it’ is, it can’t be as big as it possibly feels.

Nobody picks a knife fight with the night sky. Yet here we are, arriving with our assumed ‘blades’ in hand anyway. In doing so, we are simply honoring three hundred thousand years of foolhardy albeit indomitable human traditions of packing small things to meet the immense.

Before there was a plan and the peak-night forecast, there was just lying down.

Some summers ago, I would find a patch of ground that was more or less flat and get down on it and look up. A driveway still holding the day’s heat, the grass verge by the sports field, which smelled of cut green and faintly of someone’s dog. Once, memorably, the hood of a parked car, until the owner came out and I discovered how fast a body can become vertical.

You lie down with your spine flat against the ground (sometimes too hard, others too cold) and then, slowly, the neck gives up its long day of holding your head at the angle required by your book or phone, your whole face-forward life, and the head falls back the last inch. And then the world becomes a ceiling. Maybe not a ceiling but what is overhead stops being above and starts being out.

Before I knew the names of anything up there, I was just fascinated by the act of looking up at the sky. It’s travel without movement. The body holds still while the mind launches.

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You are no longer standing on a planet looking at the sky; you are stuck to the side of a rock, facing out, into it, held on by nothing you can feel.

Two weeks before the Perseids, I ended up at a house in Nandi Hills. The coziest home I have ever been welcomed into, with a kitchen the size of a cupboard. From the road it looks like a dollhouse that grew up without ever getting bigger. It also… looks like a tin box. I loved it immediately.

I lay on the roof that clear night, a thin carpet masquerading as a blanket under me, and put on Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, all swirl and honey, and looked up at a sky that was crowded in layers. Lowest, the planes, coming in slow and blinking toward the landing strip nearby, each one full of people at war with an armrest. Higher, the satellites, steady and unblinking. And behind everything, holding it all up, stars. Just stars, an idiotic number of them. Three kinds of light at three different speeds, and me, a traveler on a tin roof, underneath it all like a coin at the bottom of a fountain.

Somewhere on that roof, with that song about a girl in a sky still hanging in the air, I felt the old love of it sit up in me. Alive. Alive and well. It had not died during the busy years. It had only been waiting in the dark, glad when somebody looks up.

Small, I would think. I am extremely small. It took me years to notice that the smallness never erased me. It didn’t even shrink me, exactly. It seated me. I was small like a passenger in a seat, on a vehicle, underway. The body is a tin box with a heartbeat knocking around inside it. The little house is a tin box wearing a dollhouse’s face. The car is a tin box (ask anyone in the middle seat). And the planet is a tin box too, a round metal lunchbox rattling through something it cannot map, provisioned inadequately, no one entirely sure of the driver, all of us pressed face-first against the one window. We are not observers of the voyage. We are the cargo, and the crew, and occasionally, on clear nights, the passengers who remember to look out.

I loved that feeling before I had anywhere to put it. Then life got busy, and I started needing a reason to look up. An event. A forecast.

The roof should have cured me of the needing. Instead it led me to do what I do best. I made a plan out of it.

Ten minutes out, the road finally dark and the clouds behaving for once, Tanvi pulls onto the shoulder because somebody says wait, wait, look at that, in the tone there is no arguing with. We tumble out, doors open, hazards blinking, onto the gravel verge like kids let out of class.

And it happens immediately, and everyone gasps except me. A real one, apparently (bright, long, a proper one), the first of the night, and it happens while I am fussing with the app, which has frozen on a screen insisting my left sleeve is part of Pegasus. I hear it happen. Three people inhaling at once, and Juhi saying oh, oh, oh like the sky has shone personally for her, and by the time my head arrives where the other heads already are, there is nothing. Just the ordinary dark, doing its ordinary job, while the hazards blink on like the car is embarrassed for me.

I saw the gasps. That’s what I got. Three faces lit from inside by something I missed by half a second and ninety degrees. I want to tell you I took this gracefully. I said that’s fine, there’ll be more, in the voice of a person being extremely fine. We got back in the tin box.

The dark campsite Tanvi found — guaranteed darkness, I read the reviews, reviews of a field — turns out to be beside a road that has not finished deciding to be a road. We park. We unload the yard sale and begin our trek.

Here’s what I had pictured. Darkness like a held breath, silence, the four of us arranged tastefully on a hillside while the sky performed. Basically, the video with the swelling music. Instead, clouds. One long grey zipper of them, parked directly over the exact region of sky my app had circled, as if the sky had read my screenshot and objected. Headlights keep sweeping the road near the lake surrounding the campsite, so every few minutes it is briefly lit, and so are we. Someone needs the bathroom. There is no bathroom. There is a hedge, and a hierarchy of shame, and I will not say more except that the flashlight that works was requisitioned and the one that flickers was not.

And then the waiting. The others lie in a row on the blankets while I’m across from them, and the clouds take their sweet time with the zipper. Every so often somebody says there — did you— and somebody else says where, and by the time where has been established there is no longer a there.

Lying there in my small fury — Pegasus on my sleeve, already a meteor’s audience and not its witness — I started thinking about how old this situation is. A person, horizontal, willing the sky to their bidding, the sky declining to be hurried.

Because we are not the first group on this field, or near enough. Someone has stood within a mile of here on almost every clear night for as long as there have been someones. Somebody checking the sky before the harvest, somebody on a night shift, stepping out a back door with two cold hands around something warm, taking the sky in gulps. Somebody who couldn’t sleep, doing the arithmetic of their life against all that unmoved glitter. Somebody in love, climbing to whatever roof they had, because being in love makes you want a bigger room for it. Somebody lost, steering by it.

Somewhere around one in the morning, the song, Futile Devices by Sufjan Stevens plays. My mino, this time, playing it through its little speaker for anyone who wants it, the volume kept low like we’re all aware of being guests here. And it’s the strangest choice for the moment, and the only possible one, because the song is so small. A few minutes long. Mostly one guitar, played gently enough that you can hear the room around it, and a voice that sounds like it would apologize for taking up space. It is a small, delicate human sound aimed at a feeling far too large for it.

I sat with my chin on my knees and listened to all three minutes of it. You could fit the entire song inside one second of the sky. And yet it was the only thing all night that matched it’s enormity.

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Nobody was having a profound conversation. I would love to report otherwise, for my own mythology, but no. We ranked the snacks (the crushed chips placed last, which was contested). We had a long, stupid, wonderful argument about whether the lake had a far side and passed the water bottles in their doomed ratio. And ever so often somebody said did you see that and somebody else said you had to be looking exactly there, and the ones who hadn’t been looking exactly there groaned, and everyone resettled their shoulders into the blanket and resumed waiting.

A few people, side by side, pointing too late at things, narrating their misses, keeping each other’s smallness company. The sky stays exactly its size. What changes is that the smallness gets shared, passed hand to hand.

I should probably own up to why this has become urgent for me, why I kept checking the forecast all week, why I was refreshing the cloud map in the car like it owed me money. It’s not really about the meteors. It took most of the night to admit that, so I’ll say it now that it’s safe and dark.

My days have started to feel like a route. Not a journey. A route has a start and a destination and a series of timed segments, and it can be optimized, and mine has been. I wake and check the glowing rectangle, which tells me what to be behind on. I go to the place, I do the segments, I check the rectangle again in case the behind-ness has changed it’s pace. Somewhere in there the future stopped looking like weather and started looking like a road sign — this exit, then this one — and everyone keeps asking me what I’m doing next, which is a reasonable question that lands on me like a toll booth. Next. Then next. The honest answer would take an hour and involves a lot of staring, so I say something with a date in it, and they nod, and another sign goes up.

I am not unhappy. That’s the confusing part; misery would be tidier. I am fine. I am just increasingly aware that I have been organizing my one life around arrivals.

Ambition has a metabolism, it converts everything into evidence. Every day becomes a data point for or against the case that you are becoming someone, and the case never closes, because the court never adjourns, because you are the judge and the defendant and the stenographer, and the one verdict you cannot secure from inside the courtroom is the one you actually need, which is, you are allowed to exist without testifying.

So, chasing stars. Mostly it’s a refusal (small, badly organized perhaps) to not let the size of my life shrink to the size of my ambition. Under that sky, with my neck aching and nothing falling on schedule, my ambition did what it never does. It went quiet. Peacefully quiet, like a dog that has finally stopped barking at the door and lain down. I was not important out there. I cannot overstate the relief of this. The sky did not know my name, did not know my five-year plan, and I lay in my unimportance like it was a borrowed coat, wrong in the shoulders and warm everywhere else, and I thought that, this is the mercy. Feeling small had always sounded like a threat — you will not matter — and it turned out, at three in the morning, to be an offer, you don’t have to matter so hard.

The stoics used to practice this on purpose. Marcus Aurelius kept writing the size of the cosmos into his private notebook like a man leaving himself the same note over and over, because he knew he would forget it by morning. The view from above, the scholars call it now. My people have myths about it too — the Gita’s eleventh chapter is precisely this, Arjuna given one direct look at the actual scale of things and coming back from it rearranged. This practice is ancient and it is always the same, go and stand under something that dwarfs you, on purpose, until the courtroom in your chest adjourns for the night.

I spent the last few years believing that I only want to conquer the journey and it made me tired, and in a place sleep doesn’t reach. What I want instead — what the stars told me — is to remain a tiny traveler on a tin box, looking out whenever the window allows. To keep chasing, yes, but to practice standing under things that dwarf me, on purpose, with people I love.

And then.. in the part of the sky the clouds had finally, grudgingly unzipped — it went.

Then another. And another.

The first was a scratch of light, long and fast and faintly green at the edges, and it crossed far enough that my head turned on its own without any instruction. Before any of us could finish pointing, another fell. Then two more, in different corners of the sky, as if the dark had finally decided to stop rationing itself. Soon there were too many to narrate. The whole sky seemed briefly busy with departures, bright little exits opening everywhere.

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All four of us gasped this time. Four separate nervous systems with private trains of thought, and then the light went, and every one of us broke on the same instant. Somebody grabbed somebody’s sleeve. We kept pointing, kept laughing, kept saying there, there, as if our fingers could keep up with something that had already disappeared. For those few minutes, we were not four people lying near each other. We were just one look, repeated.

Some meteors crossed slowly enough to gather us all beneath them, long enough for the gasp to travel from one person to the next, and long enough for us to feel, together, the exact size of our own astonishment. So many meteors fell that even the pauses between them felt full.

We did not count them. The binoculars stayed around Tanvi’s neck. The app remained confused. The blanket grew damp beneath us. None of the devices knew what to do with abundance.

Maybe that was the mercy of it… there was finally too much to keep. All we could do was lie there with our faces turned upward, receiving more than we could hold.

We were only lying down while it carried us.

The drive back is the drive back. Colder, quieter, everyone’s phone at the percentage where they stop showing you the number. Juhi is asleep against the window within ten minutes (again), face squashed to the glass, and the rest of us ride in the low humming dark with the heater doing its one-sided best. Nobody puts music on, and then somebody does, very low — the song again, the small one, coming out of the tin car speakers smaller than ever.

I ride with my forehead against the cold glass and think about how absurd the whole arrangement is. That anything is alive at all. That I am — briefly, unrenewably — a temporary arrangement of cells and worries and friendships and hunger and memory and sight, moving through something enormous that does not know my name and never will, and that somehow, somehow, the arrangement includes noticing. The universe’s bigness is the least impressive thing about it. But somewhere in the middle of it’s bigness, on a damp field, four small creatures gathered around saying did you see that to each other, and meant it.

We get out to stretch and eat at a local Darshini. It’s six in the morning and the forecourt light is doing its best to erase everything above it. We get back in the tin box. Tanvi starts the engine. The sky keeps coming to the window to do the chasing.

p.s. — if there’s a sky where you are this week, and even one person willing to lie down next to you in the damp and point too late at everything, go. bring the blanket. bring the water in its doomed ratio. bring the app that will name your shoe. the devices will fail… that’s not what they’re for. go be small in company.

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Currently on my desk: a print from an artisan in Pondicherry, waiting on a frame. It’s part of a larger problem, because I’ve pulled every piece of art I’ve carried home from a trip and laid them all out on the floor to decide, finally, which wall gets which. The room is currently uninhabitable and I am very happy. Also, my copy of Neuromancer, page 30ish, still not sure what’s happening, deeply engrossed nonetheless. And a torn stub from a jazz show the other night that I keep forgetting to stow in my memoribilia box.

This week’s find: a telescope. The Seestar S50, the small smart one that points itself, stacks the frames, and hands you a galaxy on your phone like it’s nothing. Now I’m three tabs deep into the reddit forum where the serious astronomy nerds live, where the consensus is that this is the training wheels and the real thing is an 8-inch dobsonian the size of a water heater that you push around by hand.

Songs for standing on a terrace at 2am: Sufjan Stevens, “Futile Devices” / Sufjan Stevens, “Fourth of July” (the demo. only the demo) / Gerry Rafferty, “Right Down the Line” / Feist, “My Moon My Man” / Phoebe Bridgers, “I Can’t Wait” feat. Cameron Winter (stop hiding under a pseudonym coward, we know it’s you)

that is the original lyric of “yesterday” the most covered song in the history of recorded music, two-thousand-plus versions and counting as it existed for months while paul mccartney carried the melody around like a foundling. he’d woken up with the tune fully formed and was so suspicious of it that he spent weeks playing it for people and asking whose song it was, convinced he’d plagiarized it in his sleep.

and while he waited for real words to arrive, he needed something to hold the melody’s place, so the most valuable piece of intellectual property in pop music spent its infancy wearing breakfast. the melody had to exist albeit faintly ridiculous and even smelling of eggs, before it could become ‘yesterday.’

for about a decade, i was a person who was going to make things. i maintained this identity with real discipline as i read craft books, refined premises and of course, no one is surprised, made a museum out of my notes app that resembled the vault of a small central bank. at the end of the decade, the finished objects attributable to me numbered approximately forty two, and none of them were the ones in the vault.

i used to believe a thing must be good to deserve existence. it has been a painstaking revision of said belief that has led me to understand that a thing must exist first to have any chance of becoming good. since then, i have made an embarrassing quantity of things, some of which turned out pretty well, apparently by accident.

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we sit in the country of ideas with one five-star amenity. everything there is perfect. the unrecorded song has no pitchy take, after all. all those years of not-starting are buying us residency in the only nation on earth with no defect rate.

the part of your mind that imagines the finished body of work — gleaming and reviewed kindly — is your least talented organ. it has never made anything. much of what it calls “developing the idea” is anticipatory dread from rehearsing the failure so thoroughly, in such high resolution, that the actual attempt becomes redundant.

the toll for leaving that country is that your manifestation of the idea, the second it exists, is worse than it was as an idea. every time. the thing on the page is smaller than the idea in your mind, and dumber, and it has your fingerprints all over it in the least flattering way. there is a real grief in this. making something exist means watching it get worse in your hands. your nervous system may even register the demotion as evidence you shouldn’t have crossed.

i want to discuss this crossing, the threshold of making something exist from the version in your head to the version in the world because i think almost everything difficult about a creative life is compressed into that transaction, and because i have felt every possible way about it.

some people simply stay in the paralysis. the idea remains perfect by remaining potential. i have deep tenderness for this position because it isn’t laziness. i know these people, i’ve been these people, and they are often the ones who care most. their standard is so high, and their love for the imagined thing so real, that they cannot bear to watch it become ordinary.

some people, reacting against this, become soldiers about it. ship daily. trust the process. punish the resistance. i spent a couple of years here and made a lot of things, and it works, in the way that forced marches work. but there was an oppositional quality to it, almost a grimness. i was making things exist, but i was treating their “badness” as a tax, and you can only pay a tax resentfully for so long before the whole enterprise starts to smell like obligation.

and the third kind of people hold the balance between the two. they keep that reverent standard and unhurried attention, and marry it with the soldier's output. at some point, you can start to find the badness itself interesting. not redeemable. interesting. you stop adoring the perfect draft that doesn't exist and start attending to the imperfect one that does.

there’s a famous story from a book about art-making, of a ceramics teacher who graded half the class on the sheer weight of pots produced and half on producing a single perfect pot. at the end of the term, all the best pots came from the quantity side. the quantity kids were churning out flawed pots, staring at the flaws, and letting flaw number thirty inform pot number thirty-one, while the quality kids sat with their theories of the ideal pot and delivered, in the book’s phrase, elaborate theories and a pile of dead clay. everyone quotes this as evidence that reps beat theories, which is true. but i think the deeper meaning to unearth is what all that clay does to your relationship with badness. thirty flawed pots in, you stop experiencing the flaw as a verdict on you. it becomes information, then it becomes texture, then — if you’re lucky! — it becomes almost dear.

the numbers people have checked this at the scale of genius. the psychologist dean simonton spent a career running the stats on creative careers and produced the equal-odds rule: hit rate stays roughly flat across a career. the masters didn’t succeed more often per attempt, they attempted more. the years the greats produced their masterpieces were, on average, the same years they produced their most forgettable junk, and nobody (including the genius) could reliably tell which was which in advance. picasso left fifty thousand works, you can name probably eight.

even the outfits famous for quality run on this. ed catmull, who ran pixar, says it in creativity, inc. with honesty that early on, all of their movies suck. he calls the early cuts “ugly babies”, awkward and embarrassing to show, and describes pixar’s entire process as protecting the ugly baby long enough to raise it, through the braintrust, through screening after brutal screening. finding nemo sucked first. up sucked first, and started with a floating castle and two feuding princes before anybody found the old man and the balloons. the pixar magic you paid to see is not a way of making great films. it is a way of relentlessly fixing shoddy first drafts that existed.

“make it great” has its own craft and its own failure modes. i have almost never arrived at the intended destination of my original idea, and the arrivals have been consistently better than the intentions. still, connoisseurship of one’s own bad drafts has a limit. you will not always be able to make the thing exist. some seasons you will hoard ideas like a dragon and produce nothing and hate yourself mildly the whole time. some weeks you’ll polish one project endlessly, knowing better but doing it anyway. some days you’ll ship something lazy and feel the shame of having made a thing exist without loving it at all. i do all of these, still, at forty-whatever percent frequency. the final freedom isn’t a workflow that prevents them. it’s accepting every way you will relate to making.

i’ve always considered ‘done’ as a spiritual condition instead of an aesthetic one. the work is finished when you can give it away. everything held past that point is no longer about the work — it’s about you, and what you’re hoping the work will say on your behalf, which is a job the work never agreed to.

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because what i actually believe is that the world does not need your masterpiece. it has masterpieces! they’re doing fine, and the canon is not waiting up for you. what the world is genuinely short of — what i am short of, as a reader and a friend — is contact with actual minds, and the ugly first version is where the mind lives.

every over-polished thing converges on the same smooth voice. but the lumps are the person. when someone shows me a rough thing they made, still warm, faintly embarrassing, i feel like i’ve been handed something with a pulse. when someone tells me about the flawless thing they’re going to make, i feel like i’m at a viewing.

so the practice, as i hold it now, is small and unheroic. let the thing be born wearing scrambled eggs. let it be worse than the idea, on schedule, and try to be interested in exactly how it’s worse. keep the museum if you must — i’ve certainly kept mine — but make it a workshop with a museum in the corner, not a museum with a workshop in the basement.

somewhere there is a version of you who makes things at the rate you currently imagine them. the distance between you and that person is not talent, and it is not standards. it is a stack of ugly, necessary things, waiting very graciously to exist.

Present company -

Currently on my desk: a roll of portra 400 shot sometime in the spring that i keep meaning to get developed, a copy of east of eden with a cracked spine, devoured in six days, and a travel watercolor set, still sealed, purchased in a fit of optimism last week.

This week’s find: the beatles: get back. eight hours of the most documented band on earth being tired and lost.. and then, on camera, paul pulls “get back” out of thin air while everyone around him yawns.

Songs for making ugly things: Big Thief, “Not” / Bill Evans, “Peace piece” / Mk.gee, “Are you looking up”

P.S. If you found meaning in these words, please consider sharing with others who might like it. This space thrives on curiosity and connection.

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but disliking things stopped scaling. what’s happened to taste can be distilled to a business model. you, as a consumer of culture, are sold an infinity of instantly available choices.

this sales pitch is a lie. what you have is the illusion of infinite choice. in reality you are directed to one of several troughs based on which subspecies of audience the app suspects you are, and the trough this quarter has a prestige drama in it. everyone with an apple tv subscription or a proclivity for piracy has seen the show. six people at your last dinner party lit up at once when it came up, using the same three adjectives and maybe something in the back of your skull went hm, and then you suppressed that flinch like a professional.

that little recoil is the subject of this essay. that hm is the most economically significant feeling you have left. entire trillion-dollar apparatuses exist to sand it off of you.

now superiority complex is alfred adler’s coinage, and his theory was that performed superiority is a mask stretched over an inferiority complex. the guy who needs you to know his wine opinions and contempt for everything you love.. that guy isn’t above the crowd.

his superiority is a performance, which means it’s priced in the same currency as conformity with an audience. what i’m defending is the opposite. it requires no audience. it works in an empty room. it is just the refusal to be embarrassed by your own answer.

so i decided to treat my hm as a research question instead of a personality problem. i wanted to know, if my flinch is snobbery, or is it signal? how much of what i want did i actually choose? and what happens to taste when you route it through machines that are optimized to make everyone want the same thing?

there’s a dead frenchman you need to meet first. rené girard, literary critic, spent his whole career hammering one nail. you don’t want things because of the things. you want things because other people want them. he called it mimetic desire. desire isn’t a line from you to the object, it’s a triangle — you, the object, and the model, the person whose wanting taught you to want.

girard called the belief that your desires are your own “the romantic lie,” which is french for “the thing every marketing department on earth is counting on.”

and before you file this under continental philosophy… who cares, peter thiel studied under girard at stanford and has spent decades converting the theory into money. he credits mimetic theory for his early conviction that facebook, a machine for showing people what other people want, would be enormous. a framework for predicting what you’ll want before you want it is worth approximately one facebook. the people who built your feed have read their girard.

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wrote the best modern gloss on him last year, you’re overspending because you lack values. her argument is that overconsumption is a spiritual problem, not a budgeting one. all desire, girard says, is a desire for being — you never want the object, you want the fuller existence the object seems to promise.

she’s right, and i want to push her argument one room further. if overconsumption is mimetic desire expressed through a credit card, then the flinch which is an allergic reaction to consensus, is the antibody. it’s the body refusing the contagion before the mind gets talked into it. what we write off as snobbery is often just a person whose desire hasn’t been successfully outsourced yet. and in an economy built end to end for the outsourcing of desire, that’s not arrogance.

every real yes you own is propped up by a scaffolding of nos, and the nos came first. the hater is not the enemy of taste. it is the quality control department. an era that pathologizes disliking things is an era that has decided taste should be manufactured centrally and distributed, like a utility.

now. let’s game this out. pretend we’re a startup and our product is agreement.

not content. content is a commodity. there’s infinite content. content grows on content farms! what’s scarce, and monetizable, is the feeling that everyone agrees the content is good. we don’t sell you the show. we sell you the consensus about the show, pre-assembled, and then we sell your participation in that consensus back to the next guy as evidence. perpetual motion. the regulators cannot touch us because no individual part of this is a crime.

in 1907 francis galton — elitist, not a populist bone in his body — watched roughly eight hundred people at a livestock fair pay sixpence each to guess the weight of an ox. he collected the tickets and ran the numbers, expecting a comedy. the crowd’s collective estimate landed within about a pound of the true weight, better than the cattle experts. the wisdom of crowds is real. it’s why prediction markets work and why the room’s restaurant pick is usually correct. but the wisdom has one load-bearing condition. the guesses have to be independent. eight hundred people privately estimating an ox is a brilliant instrument. eight hundred people who heard each other’s guesses first is one loud guess with an echo.

now let’s look at what happens when you kill independence of thought.

there was a psychologist named solomon asch. in 1951, he put a normal person in a room with a bunch of actors, asked the room an insultingly easy question — which of these three lines matches a reference line — and had the actors all confidently give the same wrong answer before the real guy’s turn. a third of the time, the normal person went along with an answer he could see was false.

three quarters of subjects folded at least once. and when asch let people write answers down privately instead of saying them out loud? conformity basically evaporated. they knew. they just weren’t willing to be witnessed knowing. the product asch discovered is the social tax on visible dissent.

only problem with the pilot was unit economics. seven paid actors per mark does not scale. this is where we come in. the feed is the asch room with the actors removed and the marginal cost driven to zero. every trending tab is a room full of confederates saying the wrong line is the right line, except the confederates are free. you paid the social tax yesterday, so today you’re the collector. beautiful and self-financing. the ponzi scheme of vibes!

and if you want to know what this does to quality and to the actual question of whether the show is good, two sociologists ran that experiment too. 2006, salganik and watts, the musiclab study. they built parallel online universes with thousands of people, forty-eight songs by unknown bands, some worlds where you picked music blind, some worlds where you could see the download counts.

in the worlds with visible counts, hits got enormous, flops got buried, and which song became the hit went substantially random. same song was number one in one universe, number forty in another, purely off early luck compounding.

popularity, past a threshold, measures popularity. the one merciful footnote is that the genuinely best songs never fully tanked and the worst never topped the charts. quality survives. it’s just wearing so much noise you can’t hear it from inside a single universe. your dinner party cannot tell you whether the show is great or whether it’s the number one song from world four. nobody in any world can.

so here’s where you come in.

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asch found one more thing, and it’s the single point of failure in our entire trillion-dollar apparatus. one dissenter. one other person in the room saying the true line out loud, and conformity dropped by as much as eighty percent. not a movement.

one honest prick at the table saying “i watched it, it was fine, two good episodes,” and suddenly everybody else at that dinner remembers they have eyes. two of them will immediately confess they bailed in episode three. watch it happen. it’s like a dam going. the room doesn’t even get mad, it just gets better, because for the first time all night it contains information instead of an echo.

the machine has no defense against this. none. you cannot patch it. the edifice of the counts and the manufactured unanimity is load-bearing on nobody being willing to eat one awkward silence.

there’s a name for this at civilizational scale. the economist timur kuran calls it preference falsification which is publicly claiming to want what you privately don’t, kuran’s point is that entire regimes run on it. everyone assumes everyone else is a true believer, so everyone keeps performing, so the regime looks eternal… right up until it’s rubble.

every review aggregator score you’re checking before you form your opinion is, in part, a museum of other people’s cowardice.

the people at that table aren’t sheep and neither are you. the anthropologist joseph henrich argues that imitation is the human superpower. his book is full of european explorers who starved in landscapes where locals had thrived for ten thousand years, because the explorers had to reason from scratch and the locals had inherited the answers. a person who refused to catch wants from other people wouldn’t be authentic. they’d be feral.

wanting together is most of what a friendship is. nobody’s asking you to become the guy who hates everything on principle. the hater who rejects everything popular is still letting the crowd do the choosing, he’s just flipped the sign, like a teenager who thinks he’s escaped his parents by doing the exact opposite of whatever they say. that guy’s more enslaved to the trending tab than your aunt is, because he has to check it to know what to hate.

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contrarianism is conformity for people who think they’re too smart for conformity. girard said that too, more or less, in french.

the performed superiority complex of the contrarian or the wine guy needs the crowd’s eyes to exist. your real taste needs nobody. the test is simple. does your opinion survive an empty room?

all anybody actually wants is to like what they like and still get invited to things. that’s it. that’s the pathetic, tender demand hiding under every taste war on every website. and the miracle is that you can have it, for the price of occasionally being first.

say the line is the line. watch the show alone with your phone in the other room if you have to, like asch’s guys with their private answer sheets, and then report what you saw. somebody at the table has been treading water for an hour praying someone else jumps first.

be the prick. it’s the last free thing.

your superiority complex does not require you to be cold, or aloof. so trust the hm enough to examine it. want things slowly, and want them yours.

P.S. If you found meaning in these words, please consider sharing with others who might like it. This space thrives on curiosity and connection.

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This weekend, people queued in the dark to hear a poem that is two thousand eight hundred years old — seventeen and a half million dollars in preview tickets in a single evening, the biggest of the year, for a story whose ending every ticket-holder already knew.

The weekend, as it progresses, members of the same species file into churches and temples, pack a political rally, cross state lines in homemade armor for a comic convention, and sit down on cushions in silent meditation halls. Different buildings with the same motive. A creature going somewhere to be told what it all means.

Now, why does an animal that has split the atom and sequenced its own code, and has photographed the ghost-light of galaxies eleven billion years dead still pay, in every century and every currency, to sit inside a story?

Storytelling is humanity’s oldest survival technique, older than agriculture and the wheel, and it is as crucial to the species as breathing. We cannot live as what we are, perhaps a blob of experimentation thrown in the vast universe or even under the assumption that we are a chemical accident. The mind refuses this. It builds meaning and a counter-world out of words — myth, omen, legend, larger purpose — and moves in.

The Oldest Thing We Ever Made Was a Plot

In a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, painted at least forty-four thousand years ago, hunters with animal heads drive wild pigs and dwarf buffalo toward a kill. It is the oldest known scene in art — figures in relation, action with direction. A plot. Whoever mixed that pigment lived before the sown field or the loom, and already needed the wall to say… this mattered, remember it.

Four thousand years ago, the first epic the species bothered to write down chose its subject. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, watches his friend die, panics at the preview of his own death, and walks to the edge of the world demanding immortality. He comes home with none. What he gets instead is the story itself. The first epic in human history is about a man who cannot accept a deadline, and its consolation prize is narrative.

From there the artifact repeats in every stratum. Rome would convene no assembly and march no army until sacred chickens had eaten in the approved manner; a bird on the wrong side of the sky could dissolve a government. On Homer’s Ithaca, two eagles tear at each other above the assembly and an old man reads them like a memo from Zeus. An omen, wherever you dig one up, is the same tool — a device for making the future legible to a creature that cannot stand an illegible future.

King Arthur was assembled in the twelfth century, largely by one imaginative cleric, and within generations kings of England were staging Round Tables and digging for his grave — a nation retrofitting itself a founder. Robin Hood grew from scattered ballads into a permanent English argument about justice. Every culture runs the same program with local casting. Anansi spinning webs of story in West Africa, the Monkey King rebelling against heaven, Raven stealing the light. The names change. The function seemingly never does.

The Odyssey — the poem those ticket-holders queued for — is simply the most self-aware artifact in the collection, because it is a story that watches itself being told. Its most famous adventures, the Cyclops and the Sirens and the descent among the dead, arrive as an after-dinner speech by the hero himself, a man singing for his supper with every incentive to embellish and a documented allergy to the truth — the first unreliable narrator, performing his own legend to an audience holding the keys to the boat.

Odysseus escapes a cave with an opponent anonymously, on a pun — my name is Nobody — and then, safe on the water, against the begging of his crew, turns back and shouts his real name across the waves, handing his enemy the address to which Poseidon should ship ten years of catastrophe. He trades the body’s safety for the story’s survival. Homer wrote that exchange down twenty-eight centuries ago, and the species has been repeating it ever since.

Homer’s dead (the shades) in the underworld cannot speak until they drink blood and the first ghost in line is Elpenor, the crewman who got drunk and fell off a roof, dead of nothing, famous for nothing. His single request? A burial mound on the shore with his oar planted on top, so that men to come will hear of me. The least of men, begging to be turned into a landmark. Even the dead are hungry, and what they are hungry for is being told.

Your Brain on Story

Twentieth-century science went looking for the engine under all this.

Jerome Bruner, the great developmental psychologist, spent the 1980s arguing that the mind runs on two operating systems, a paradigmatic mode that traffics in logic and proof, and a narrative mode that traffics in intention, character and consequence — and that the second one is primary, running always.

Melanie Green and Timothy Brock showed in 2000 what every propagandist already knew — a mind transported into a story stops counterarguing. The gates drop; beliefs walk in unfrisked. Uri Hasson at Princeton put storytellers and listeners into brain scanners and watched the listener’s neural activity fall into rhythm with the speaker’s — coupling, he called it — and in the best listeners the rhythm ran ahead of the story, the brain leaning forward into the plot like a child. The mind acts like a sieve for facts and a vault for plots.

Justin Barrett located the deepest gear in the mind which acted like a hyperactive agency detection device. A hiss in the grass costs you nothing to misread as a snake and everything to misread as wind, so evolution tuned the alarm toward false positives — and a mind tuned for false positives populates the whole world with intention. Faces in clouds, wrath in thunder… An omen is a false positive we decided to keep.

Viktor Frankl walked out of the camps in 1945 with the field’s most expensive data. The search for meaning outranks the search for pleasure and power both, and the prisoners who survived were disproportionately the ones with a story that required them alive… a manuscript unfinished or a child unmet.

Somebody Always Buys the Well

The oldest surviving human institutions are narrative institutions. Karen Armstrong, surveying the deep record, calls us “meaning-seeking creatures” and finds that from the very beginning we invented stories that placed our lives in a larger setting and gave us the sense that, against all the chaotic evidence, life had meaning and value. Mythology is as essential to survival as the hunting weapons.

Religion sells time travel. Émile Durkheim watched the congregation rather than the god and reported the trick from inside the machinery as simple steps: assemble the clan, sing the song, and “a sort of electricity” is generated, an effervescence that lifts every member past the ceiling of the self. The god of the clan, he concluded, is the clan itself, transfigured.

The oracle and the priest held the apparatus as the first professional class in recorded history licensed to interpret the story.

The nation inherited the license. Benedict Anderson defined it in 1983: the nation is “an imagined political community,” imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, “yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.”

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Two hundred million strangers who would not lend each other bus fare, weeping at the same anthem. On auditing the props — the “ancient” Highland kilt, the “immemorial” royal pageantry — we found invented traditions, most of them younger than the steam engine, antiqued like furniture to bind mass polities that had no other glue.

Yuval Noah Harari compressed this hypothesis in his widely acclaimed book. Any large-scale human cooperation, a modern state or a medieval church, is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination. Delete the story and the nation is a time zone with a tax code.

The nation’s masterpiece is the fallen soldier. Achilles received the contract — a long life in obscurity, or death at Troy and ‘kleos aphthiton’, imperishable fame, a phrase so old that linguists suspect it predates Homer by a thousand years. Die well and the poets will pay you forever.

In 1915 the British government showed what industry could do with that contract… the Bryce Report, an official atrocity narrative of the German march through Belgium, lurid, largely unverifiable, chaired by a beloved ex-ambassador for credibility, 41,000 copies shipped to America to move a neutral nation’s heart. It worked. After the war it collapsed under scrutiny — so thoroughly that a generation later, when the atrocity reports were true, when they came out of Poland with numbers no mind could hold, editors hesitated. The propaganda had salted the earth where the truth would need to grow.

Politics runs the same engine on a loop. The winning plot on every continent, in every century, is the oldest one in the drawer with a golden age, a fall and a redeemer.

And the fine print stays consistent across administrations. The psychiatrist Jonathan Shay sat with Vietnam veterans for decades and reached for the only book big enough — Achilles in Vietnam, then Odysseus in America, the ten-year voyage home reread as the clinical file of every soldier returned to a country that had no story for him. His veterans washed up danger-addicted and unrecognizable to their wives, wandering the interstates the way the king wandered the sea. The nation writes epics for its dead and leaves its living to drift with no bard assigned. Kleos for the fallen, silence for the returned.

New Gods, Same Congregation

Then, in the twentieth century, the apparatus changed hands again — and this transfer happened recently enough that we can watch it frame by frame.

In 1949 a literature professor named Joseph Campbell boiled every myth on earth down to one sentence: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” He thought he had found the skeleton of the human soul.

What he had actually written was the most profitable memo in the history of American commerce. George Lucas read Campbell in the seventies, poured the monomyth into Star Wars, and credited the professor publicly from Skywalker Ranch.

Hollywood took note of the grosses. In 1985 a Disney story analyst named Christopher Vogler condensed Campbell into a seven-page memo that photocopied itself through every studio in Los Angeles, until the hero’s journey stopped being an observation about myths and became a manufacturing standard. Call to adventure, refusal, mentor, ordeal, return with the elixir as the franchise.

And where the old gods were laid off, comics hired them. In 1938 two Jewish teenagers in Cleveland put Moses in a rocket and called him Superman — the dying world, the basket in the reeds and the child raised by strangers under a new name.

The fandoms behave like faiths because they are faiths in every measurable respect.. canon and heresy, schism and communion. Below them the folk layer keeps regenerating on its own. The species never stopped writing scripture. It changed distributors.

From the studios the standard metastasized into everything with a logo. The founder’s journey in the pitch deck or the brand story in the onboarding deck. Hell, even the transformation arc in your local protein powder ad. Campbell’s monomyth now sells sneakers, cryptocurrencies, presidential candidates and breakfast cereal, and an entire consulting priesthood — the French critic Christian Salmon called it out two decades ago, storytelling as a management technology, narrative deployed to sedate where argument would provoke — bills by the hour to teach middle managers the structure of the quest.

My favorite artifact, from inside this industry, is its own favorite statistic. That a fact wrapped in a story is twenty-two times more memorable than the fact alone, attributed in ten thousand keynotes to the great Jerome Bruner. The catch here is that Bruner never wrote it. The number appears nowhere in his work.

Diligent people hunted the citation for years and traced it to a marketing video where it is stated as fact, sourced to nothing — and from there it propagated, keynote to keynote, deck to deck, an unkillable folk-numeral. The storytelling-industrial complex runs on an invented legend about the power of legends. The oracle’s chickens are eating exactly as prescribed.

Penelope’s Loom

Penelope’s trick is the cleverest masterpiece in the Odyssey. Besieged by 108 suitors eating her house down to the beams, she announces she will remarry when she finishes weaving a shroud — and weaves by day, and unweaves by night, for three years. Denied the sword, the ship, the assembly and the microphone, she controls the plot of the entire poem with textile, because the loom was the one narrative instrument the world allowed her. Whoever holds the loom holds the world.

It took two thousand eight hundred years for a woman to be handed this particular loom. In 2017 Emily Wilson published the first English translation of the Odyssey by a woman — line for line, matching Homer’s count, in plain iambic pentameter — and the opening verse falls like a blade: “Tell me about a complicated man.” The translation is perfect, and it is so because of what she refused to add. Her predecessors, translating the young slave women of the household, reached for “sluts” and “whores” — words with no basis anywhere in the Greek, sexism imported by translators and stamped HOMER at customs for four hundred years.

Wilson translated dmoai as what they were: slaves. Girls. They called it the feminist translation and Wilson pushed the label off the table — it is anti-feminist, she said, if it means women translators get put in a gender box while their predecessors’ choices pass as neutral. Her edit ran in one direction only, subtraction. Four centuries of other men’s politics scraped away, and the poem left standing there, holding its own dead.

The men of this record shouted their names at cyclopes and died for the syllables. Penelope never raised her voice. She just made sure the story could not end without her.

As Necessary as Breathing

Forty-four thousand years of evidence, and every exhibit is the same exhibit — people have always wanted something to believe in, and storytelling is the technology that supplies it. The one tool the species has ever had for surviving its own sentence.

So yes, the stories will be used.. by the priest, the party, the brand and even your algorithm, as they always have been, because a need this old is the most valuable real estate on earth. Audit every story you are handed. Ask who is holding the loom.

Somewhere else, in the front row a species settles into its seat to hear, for the ten-thousandth time, about a man lost at sea who wants to go home — and leans forward, already ahead of the plot, hungry and unashamed.

Tell me about a complicated man. Tell me again.

Present company -

Currently on my makeshift desk at a cafe: my trusty, yellow umbrella that saved me from a downpour, a half-torn wristband from a lecture earlier today, and a glass of what used to be a a half-decent matcha - just ice now, giving itself up in slow droplets.

Songs that were pals for research and stringing thoughts: Credence Clearwater Revival, “Have you ever seen the rain” / Louis Armstrong, “It’s been a long, long time” / Lucy Dacus, “Come out”

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i sat down this morning to finish my mandated writing for the 75 hard challenge, this time for substack again, before i head out for the fine sunday ahead of me.

and found myself spending approximately forty minutes trying to write an essay about whether the cultural rehabilitation of the man bun is a symptom of the same post-irony condition that gave us normcore — and i am not joking, i have three paragraphs. the world does not award me with nearly enough credit for not putting my thoughts out into it. i will be adding restraint as a skill on linkedin.

so now i’m just going to write down a list and bolt out the door for my dinner date. should be easy enough since i love lists. my notes app is essentially one continuous list interrupted occasionally by a paragraph. they make my world go round.

one of the other goals i set for myself at the start of this 75 day exercise along with the daily draft and the obvious bodily restrictions was to listen to at least one full album or soundtrack end to end. something i'd been meaning to get to or hadn't heard before. the rule is simple - no skips or shuffles. the whole thing, in sequence, the way someone assembled it to be heard.

it has been five days. here is what the five days sounded like.

day one was illinois by sufjan stevens, 2005, asthmatic kitty records, an album i have owned in some form or another for fifteen years and have never actually heard end to end, which is the thing about beloved records — you absorb the famous tracks through cultural osmosis and never sit down with the actual object. the album is twenty-two tracks long and is the second installment of a project sufjan eventually abandoned, where he was going to make an album for every state in the united states. it is a baroque pop album with the orchestral ambition of an early twentieth century song cycle and the emotional architecture of a person who was raised in a strict evangelical household and has not entirely worked out what to do with that.

what struck me listening to it is how much of the album is held together by piano. you think of sufjan as a banjo person, an oboe person, a someone-who-plays-too-many-instruments person, but the piano is the spine. on casimir pulaski day, which is the song about a teenage friend dying of bone cancer, the piano is so simple it is almost embarrassing — a small repeating pattern in the right hand under a left hand that barely moves. i sat down at the piano at the studio after the song ended and learned the pattern in about ninety seconds. ninety seconds. and the song destroys me every time. the pattern is so simple it cannot lie. you cannot dress up a six-note loop. you cannot hide behind technique.

the drumming on illinois is almost not there. there is a brushed snare here, a soft mallet on a tom there, hand percussion, bell tree, but the album resists rock drumming entirely. the closest it gets is on the predatory wasp of the palisades is out to get us, where a kit pulse comes in toward the end, but even there it is what jazz players call timekeeping rather than playing. as a drummer, sitting through an album that does not require a drummer is a useful reminder that drumming is not a moral good. some songs do not want drums. illinois is largely an album of songs that do not want drums, and sufjan, who arranged everything himself, knows this and respects it. come on! feel the illinoise! has its opening section in five-four time, which i did not consciously notice the first dozen times i had heard the song through cultural osmosis. five-four. nobody bothered to mention that one of the most beloved indie songs of the 2000s is built on a time signature most listeners cannot identify, because critics talk about the orchestration and the lyrics and the religious anxiety and never mention the meter.

day two was the soundtrack to haider, vishal bhardwaj, 2014, his adaptation of hamlet set in kashmir and the third of his three shakespeare films after maqbool and omkara. bhardwaj is a film director who is also a serious composer. he writes his own scores, the music in his films is never a separate department from the writing. the haider soundtrack is the densest of the three and the one most committed to its place, which in this case is kashmir, with all of the sufiyana mausiqi and kashmiri folk forms that belong there.

the centrepiece is bismil, sukhwinder singh’s voice over a percussion arrangement that is essentially a retelling of hamlet’s play-within-a-play as a dance number. the percussion is what i kept rewinding. there is dhol, there is dholak, there is what i am fairly sure is a duff, and they are layered into a polyrhythm that you can hear breathing if you put headphones on and stop trying to understand the lyrics. as a drummer the thing that fascinated me is that the polyrhythm is not symmetric. the dhol is doing it’s bit, the dholak is doing a related but offset bit, and the duff is filling the space between them.

i went looking for whether anyone had written about the drumming on bismil specifically, and what i found was a lot of writing about gulzar’s lyrics, a fair amount about sukhwinder’s vocal performance, and almost nothing about the percussion. this is the standard problem in film music criticism in india and not only in india. nobody writes about the rhythm section. the rhythm section is the entire engine of the song and it gets passed over because the conventions of music writing are wired toward melody and lyric, and percussion does not melt into a quotable phrase the way a lyric does.

aao na, on the same album, is more pianistic. the piano in hindi film music is usually colour rather than structure — you bring it in for a particular emotional register, soft, european, somewhat aching — and aao na uses piano exactly this way.

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day three was the self-titled ray charles record on atlantic, 1957, compiled from singles he recorded across the previous five years in sessions ahmet ertegun put together when he realised he had something rare on his hands. it is the album with i got a woman on it. i got a woman is one of those songs that everyone has heard without knowing they have heard it, because elvis recorded it, kanye sampled it on gold digger. mostly because it is one of the founding documents of soul music.

what ray is doing on the piano on i got a woman is taking a gospel song and stripping the religious language out and putting a woman in its place, which got him in tremendous trouble with the gospel community at the time. the piano playing itself is the gospel piano he had grown up with — the call and response, the chord voicings in the right hand that are basically a one-man choir, the way the left hand walks through the bass line without ever being a bass line. as a pianist who grew up doing rote western classical training, i can tell you this kind of playing is fundamentally not what western classical training teaches you to do. western classical piano training teaches you to read a score and execute. gospel piano teaches you to listen to a singer and reply. ray’s playing on this album feels like conversation. i could practise for thirty years and not produce a left hand like that.

mess around, written by ahmet ertegun under the pseudonym a. nugetre, is the one that should be required listening for anybody learning blues piano. it is what jazz pianists call a boogie pattern in the left hand under a right hand that is essentially imitating a horn section. you can hear the entire history of new orleans piano in two minutes and forty seconds. fats domino comes out of this. dr john comes out of this. half of the british invasion piano playing comes out of this. ray was twenty-two when he recorded it.

day four was the soundtrack to little shop of horrors, the 1986 frank oz film, music by alan menken, lyrics by howard ashman. this is before menken and ashman became the menken and ashman of the disney renaissance — before the little mermaid, before beauty and the beast, before aladdin. little shop is where they figured out their sound.

what they were doing, musically, was a remarkably precise pastiche of late fifties and early sixties girl group pop and doo wop, filtered through a broadway sensibility. the three urchins function as a greek chorus and a motown backing trio at the same time. skid row (downtown), which is the show’s opener, is the song i kept replaying. the bass line is essentially a doo wop bass line, the harmony stack on the urchins is straight out of the shirelles, but the chord changes underneath are doing their part like doo wop never did — there are passing diminished chords, key changes inside verses. there is a kind of broadway-trained harmonic sophistication smuggled inside what sounds like a simple pop song. menken is one of the great chord-change writers of the late twentieth century.

drumming-wise the soundtrack is fascinating because the drumming is doing two jobs at once. it has to be the rock and roll backbeat the pastiche requires, and it has to support the dialogue and stage business that broadway drumming has to support, which means hitting marks. the session drummer on the recording is doing both at once, which is genuinely hard. broadway drumming is a separate discipline from rock drumming and the people who can do both are crazy (good). you can hear the discipline most clearly on dentist!, where the kit is essentially a comedy instrument — the fills are punctuation for steve martin’s vocal performance.

suddenly seymour gets all the attention because ellen greene’s vocal performance is one of the great vocal performances in the musical theatre canon of the twentieth century, and i will not argue with this. but the song that does the most musical work is skid row. the romantic duet is the album’s emotional peak. the chorus is the album’s architecture.

day five (today) was sound of silver, lcd soundsystem, 2007, dfa records, which is the album i have probably listened to more times than any other on this list and yet, again, never end to end without skipping somewhere.

the drumming. i have to talk about the drumming. pat mahoney is the drummer in lcd soundsystem and he is one of the most important drummers of his generation. can you tell i have a thing for him? because i do. on all my friends — which is the song everyone knows, the seven-and-a-half-minute build that starts with a single piano figure repeating and accumulates instruments and voices until the song is almost crying — mahoney plays a single hi-hat pattern for the entire seven minutes. the hi-hat does not vary. the snare comes in late and stays inside the pattern. the kick drum does not break. for seven and a half minutes the drummer plays the same rudiment and the song does not get bored because around him everything else changes. this is the hardest feat for a drummer.

mahoney’s drumming on this record, according to the critics and the consensus is that he is tryng to mimic something close to what jazz drummers like paul motian or jim keltner did, which is play the song rather than play the kit. mahoney studied jazz before he joined lcd soundsystem and the discipline of jazz timekeeping is what makes the all my friends hi-hat pattern bearable. a drummer with rock training would have got bored at minute two and added a fill. mahoney does not add the fill.

someone great, the song about james murphy’s therapist dying, is built on a drum machine rather than a live kit, and it is interesting that the album moves between live drums and programmed drums depending on the emotional register. the live drums get the songs about being alive. the drum machine gets the songs about loss.

new york, i love you but you’re bringing me down is the piano song. it is a slow-build piano ballad that turns into an explosion in its last minute, and the piano writing is straightforwardly indebted to early-seventies john lennon piano ballads. murphy has said this in interviews. it is not subtle and it is not trying to be.

i tagged each of the five albums by genre as i was writing this, because not only am i a list nerd but also a data nerd. (no one in the audience is shocked)

across five albums the genre tags included - indie folk, baroque pop, chamber pop, hindustani classical, kashmiri sufi, hindi film music, rhythm and blues, soul, gospel, jump blues, musical theatre, doo wop, dance punk, electronic, indie rock. fifteen genres in five days, which is, if you do the math, three genres a day.

this is what being a large nerd with what we will charitably call attention regulation challenges looks like, attempting to fix the attention by adding another structure to my life, which is the most adhd intervention for adhd that has ever been devised.

five days in, i can sit through a whole album without wanting to draw a correlation to another album that leads me to jumping into another artist’s work. this is not impressive. it is what my ten-year-old self did on every train or plane journey she ever took without thinking of it as a discipline.

tomorrow’s album is going to be aja by steely dan. perhaps. i will let you know in a week.

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but, i want to start with the hair.

it is not the most interesting thing about anthony bourdain by a long shot but it is where i started, at a wee fourteen years old, scrolling through whatever was playing on the food network on a tuesday afternoon and finding a tall american man with silver-streaked hair eating something out of a plastic bowl on a street corner in vietnam. the hair told me he was old enough to have lived and young enough to still be moving. on television, hair is a kind of clock. you watch a person age in compressed time, season after season, the dark giving way to silver.

i should also say that i came to bourdain already wearing a leather jacket. a cheap one bought from a market in mumbai because i had been enamored with rock music since an age my mother found slightly alarming and had decided that the leather jacket was the closest i could get to what i was trying to be.

bourdain walked into rooms like a rock star. he also walked into rooms and sat on the floor, with the same gravitas. this was not a precedent set in the food television i had seen before — that there was no hierarchy of room. the dirty kitchen and the three-star dining room received the the same shoulder drop and the same ease.

i found kitchen confidential approximately six years later, in a bookshop in mumbai that stocked imports. the book is about kitchens. it is also about the aliveness that comes from working inside a system so brutal and physical that there is no space for anything except the next service. bourdain writes about professional cooking the way i have come to write about music. as the place where the noise stops, where the overcrowded interior is forced to resolve itself into the single demand of the kitchen, where your hands know what to do before your mind has caught up. he did not use this language. he used considerably more profanity.

what kitchen confidential did was refuse performance. the food industry, like every industry that touches the public, is built on performance. the pristine kitchen and a seamless service. the chef who never sweats too. bourdain took a cleaver to all of it. he could see and feel that the performance was a lie and that lies make for bad writing. he wrote the truth about what he knew best, and the truth was chaotic and funny and a little horrifying and completely alive on the page.

it helps to remember that he was not supposed to become famous. kitchen confidential began as a new yorker piece in 1999 called don’t eat before reading this. he was forty-three. he was the chef at brasserie les halles in manhattan, anonymous, broke, in debt, working a station at lunch service like everyone else. the costume he later wore so well, the leather jacket, cigarette and the studied weariness, was not designed. it was discovered in retrospect, after the book sold and the television came, after the version of him that lived on screen began to require maintenance.

the people whose voices i trust most are the people who were not constructing a brand when the brand happened to them. they wrote the thing they had to write and the world responded with an offer that could not be refused. then the offer became the job and the job had its own gravity and they had to figure out how to remain a person inside the gravity. bourdain spent the next eighteen years inside the gravity. he was a careful and ungrateful steward of it.

when i read his accounts, i was already developing a suspicion that the most interesting writing was the writing that refused the comfortable version of the story, that went somewhere the writer had not planned to go and reported back honestly. bourdain merely confirmed the suspicion. then no reservations came to india on the travel channel in the mid-2000s and parts unknown arrived on cnn international a few years later, and if you were the kind of indian teenager with cable television and a restlessness, you found him eventually.

the kolkata episode of no reservations is one of the finest pieces of television about india i have ever seen. bourdain went in 2006, with the food writer nondon bagchi as his guide, and the two of them did not pretend they were going to a city without an intellectual life or a stomach. they took the indian railways second-class. they watched a cockfight in rural bengal. bourdain ate kachuri and aloo bhaja under the howrah bridge at the mullick ghat flower market, where the air is heavy with marigolds and the men loading flowers onto their heads carry weights that would have ended a smaller body. he played cricket on the maidan and ate jhal muri from a vendor on the edge of the green, and he compared it, with the deadpan that was his most useful trick, to eating nachos after a baseball game. he went down the hooghly into the sundarbans on a slow boat and ate prawns and bhetki cooked with so much mustard oil that he said it was practically a diesel marinade. he liked it. he ate it twice.

what struck me, watching it then and watching it again now, is that bourdain treated everyone he ate with the same way. the grandmother making her morning paratha and the chef in paris received the same quality of attention from a man who was aware that what he was watching was meaningful and worthy of being taken seriously. he never condescended. he never performed cultural sensitivity in the way that television about other cultures usually performs it — the slightly too-wide eyes, exaggerated reverence and the ‘thank you’ said three times when once would have done. he sat down and ate and asked questions that came from having read the books beforehand, and he listened to the answers.

i have been working at the question of how to bring serious attention to whatever is in front of me without flattening it into the shape my career or my aesthetic requires, since i started writing in any sustained way. bourdain embodied an answer without ever theorising it. attention is not a finite resource to be rationed according to the status of its recipient. it is the most renewable thing you have, and it grows by being used.

medium raw is the better book. i know kitchen confidential is the famous one and i understand why. the energy of it, revelations and the pleasure of the industry insider burning it all down. but medium raw is the book of a person who has had ten years to think about what they have done and what it cost and what they are not sure they got right. it is more vulnerable. it is angrier in the way that vulnerability makes you angry. the prologue alone, in which he tries to account for who he has become since the first book sold, is more difficult and more interesting than most of what he wrote before. there is a chapter called so you want to be a chef that is essentially a long, exasperated letter to the kids who came up to him at signings telling him that kitchen confidential had made them want to become cooks. he loved them and he was furious with them and he could not figure out how to say both things, so he said both things, badly and beautifully, at length.

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he writes in medium raw about the gap between the person he performed on television — the world-weary rock star chef, leather jacket, cigarette, no fucks given — and the person he actually was, which was considerably more frightened and tender than the performance suggested. this gap is the most interesting thing about him and it is what television necessarily obscured. the television needed the character..

i find this gap interesting because i know it from the inside. the person who writes these essays is real. the person who writes these essays is also a construction, a ‘self’ assembled for the purpose of this kind of communication, and the construction is not false but it is also not the whole story. bourdain was more honest about this than most people who operate at his scale, which is part of why the ending was so devastating and part of why it was also, in retrospect, not entirely surprising. the gap between the performance and the person is expensive to maintain. he maintained it for a very long time.

there is a moment in his career that i think about often. in 2006 he went to beirut to film an episode of no reservations and the israel-hezbollah war broke out three days into the shoot. he and his crew were stuck. they watched bombs drop from the balcony of their hotel. they were eventually evacuated by the us marines. the episode that came out of this trip was unlike anything food television had produced. it was a man on a hotel balcony admitting that the format he had been working in was insufficient to the world he was inside. after beirut he stopped pretending the show was about restaurants. he started letting it be about whatever was actually there. this is what i mean when i say his career was an honest one. when the format broke he let it break and reported back from the wreckage.

back to the leather jacket.

bourdain’s jacket was also armor. the rock-and-roll aesthetic that he carried was always armor. it is the costume of the person who has decided that vulnerability will be expressed as toughness and it will be done so thoroughly that nobody can accuse you of sentimentality even as you are being entirely sentimental.

his writing is very sentimental. this is the secret of kitchen confidential that people miss because the profanity and the bravado are louder. underneath the bravado is a person who loves food with a thoroughness that is the same as devotion, who loves the people who make it with a seriousness that is the same as respect, who is constitutionally moved by the encounter with skill and care and the quality of something made well. he wrote about the bone marrow at fergus henderson’s st. john in london and about the bread at poilane in paris with a religious vocabulary he otherwise refused. food was the one place he allowed himself the full register of feeling without ironising it. it was where the tenderness had permission.

what i keep returning to, years after first finding him on a tuesday afternoon in front of my television, is the question of where he was most himself. the answer i have arrived at is with strangers. the person he had no history with and no image to maintain in front of brought out the quality of attention that was his most genuine self. in the the iran episode of parts unknown, filmed in 2014, bourdain sat in the hills of darband, above tehran, eating with jason rezaian and his wife yeganeh salehi, a journalist couple who would be arrested at their tehran home a few weeks later, on july 22 of that year. jason would spend five hundred and forty-four days in evin prison. bourdain became one of his most consistent advocates and, after his release, published his memoir through ecco. the dinner you can watch on television was a meal between three people who had no idea what was coming, eating slowly in the late afternoon, and the quality of bourdain’s attention to them is what the camera catches without trying.

or the bun cha he ate with barack obama in hanoi in may of 2016, at a small, easy-to-miss restaurant called bun cha huong lien on a side street in the french quarter. the two of them sitting on low blue plastic stools, eating grilled pork over cold vermicelli, drinking hanoi beer from green bottles, the entire meal costing six dollars, which bourdain paid. the most powerful man in the world and the man who had built a career on refusing power were having dinner across an unbridgeable amount of biography, conducted at a level the secret service could not interrupt. the table is now encased in glass on the second floor. they preserved it the way you preserve a relic.

with strangers he had no performance to maintain, he was just a person eating with another person, which turned out to be what he was best at. i have always felt most like myself with people who have no investment in who i am supposed to be. the foreign, the older or the different — the person who did not grow up in my context and therefore cannot hold me to it. there is freedom in being unknown. bourdain found that freedom everywhere he went. he spent his whole career chasing it, which was also a career spent eating very well, which seems to me like a reasonable way to have lived.

i think about him when i think about softness as resistance, which i have written about before and which i still believe. the choice to remain open, even porous, to the world even when the world makes a compelling case for sealing yourself off is not a passive choice. it is the most active one i know. bourdain made this choice every time he sat down with a stranger and asked a real question and listened to the actual answer. he made it for thirty years. that he did not always make it for himself, in the privacy where it would have mattered most, is part of the cost of the work, and it is not a cost i know how to argue away. it does not have a clean moral. it has a man who paid it.

what i take from his life, beyond the books and the television and the hair and the jacket, is the importance of finding, somewhere private and sufficient, the person who knows the whole story. the person you do not have to perform for. bourdain found this occasionally. in his daughter ariane, who was eleven when he died and whom he wrote about with a tenderness he extended to almost no one else. in eric ripert, the chef at le bernardin who had been his closest friend for two decades and who was with him in alsace at the end. in the rare interviews where the character briefly stepped aside and the person came forward and answered the question that was actually asked. but it does not erase the thirty years of attention he paid to the world, which is the longest and most generous attention anyone in his line of work has paid in my lifetime.

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before we begin, an aside. of sorts.

i have added a clause to 75 hard, which i am doing with my friends, who i love and who are also clearly unwell. everyone else is curbing their social media consumption. my substitution was 45 minutes of writing every day for 75 days, because i do not know how to moderate consumption without replacing it with creation. the choice for me has always been make something or slowly lose my mind, and i would like to keep my mind.

i’ve always described my writing process as a form of exorcism because i write sporadically, slowly and until the thing is out and it just must be out, which means 45 minutes will not produce the finished essay. what i’m hoping this will create is a playground for my mind to explore the tangents or the half-formed thoughts that haven’t made it to the page or live in my drafts because they didn’t feel sufficiently ready to be fleshed out. on day one i wrote a thesis. on day two it already feels like something meant to be dumped here, even in it’s sapling state. 75 days of wandering, finding tiny territories — and at the end of it, a map to my mind!

see you (mostly) every day.

today and frankly on most days, i want to talk about art.

it is in trouble and i do not think we are taking that seriously enough.

a great deal of contemporary cultural production lately has resigned itself to producing the gist. the summary, the five-minute video that tells you what the book means so you don’t have to read the book. and who can forget the glorious ai-generated synopsis that delivers the argument without the experience of encountering it.

i’m of the stance that these are symptoms of living in an attention economy that has systematically devalued the time required to encounter art fully, and that has made depth feel like an inefficiency and slowness feel like a failure of optimisation.

art is what hasn’t resigned. the painting that requires ninety seconds of standing still before it opens is not ‘inefficient’. it’s performing a marvel and evoking in the body of the person looking, an experience that cannot be summarised.

the novel that takes three hundred pages to earn its final paragraph is also not padding. you cannot extract the meaning and discard the form. the form is the meaning. it is what distinguishes art from content.

to support art, then, is to support the conditions under which slow looking remains possible. this includes the obvious. like funding the artists, sustaining the institutions, keeping the venues lit.

these are necessary yes, and yet, they are not sufficient. the insufficiency is what no one in arts philanthropy wants to discuss directly because doing so would require admitting something uncomfortable about who the field has always imagined its audience to be.

the standard diagnosis of the crisis in arts attendance remains unchanged. the people are not coming. people are not reading. people do not have the cultural literacy to engage with serious work. the solution, therefore, is education, outreach, access initiatives, programming that meets people where they are and walks them toward the work.

the obvious moves all assume the bottleneck is supply. they fund more production, institutions and venues on the implicit theory that if you build enough of these, an audience will assemble.

but, the audience is already here. they are mostly broke.

the lifelong reader who works two service jobs and hasn’t bought a hardback in five years. the kid in a city without a working library card who reads back covers in a bookstore he can’t buy from. the cab driver who can recite faiz ahmed faiz in three languages and has never been inside the gallery he drives past four times a day. the nurse whose copy of middlemarch has more annotations than any seminar in the country.

these are not ‘undereducated consumers’ waiting to be taught. they are unsubsidized lovers. already in possession of the trained eye and capable of the slow looking. they are simply priced out of practicing the love they already have.

i want to stay with the cab driver — who was my chatty companion for a rather long commute — for a moment because he is the figure who most precisely exposes the absurdity of the field’s self-understanding.

faiz ahmed faiz is among the most important urdu poets of the twentieth century; his work sits at the intersection of romantic lyric tradition and marxist political commitment in a way that produced some of the most formally beautiful and politically devastating poetry written in any language in his century. mujh se pehli si mohabbat. bol ke lab azaad hain tere. hum dekhenge. these are not poems that yield to the quick reading. they endow the reader with the classical urdu metre, the knowledge of the ghazal form, the historical context of partition and the progressive writers’ movement and the specific political repressions faiz wrote under and was imprisoned for. the cab driver who can recite them in three languages has done years of slow work to get there. he has, by any honest measure of cultural cultivation, done more of that work than most of the people who sit on the boards of the institutions he cannot enter.

the institution would like to reach him. it runs outreach programmes and posts on instagram. it offers, once a year, a free admission day during which the driver, who is working, cannot come.

the misallocation is so complete it would be funny if it weren’t also, for the driver and the millions of people like him, a daily act of exclusion dressed up as generosity.

what makes this absurd, as a misallocation of resources, is that the trained perceiver is not only a consumer. they are a transmitter.

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every conversation they have about a book, every recommendation, page folded over for somebody else, line read aloud at a kitchen table, are units of audience-formation that no museum app and no podcast and no five-minute explainer can replicate. the discount on their movie ticket costs less than a single instagram ad and produces more of an audience than the ad ever could. when you subsidize the trained eye you are not buying a single ticket. you are funding a small distributed school.

the whole discourse has rightly identified the frictionless conversion of money into cultural capital as broken. the next natural progression in solving this is having systems in place that direct resources toward people whose cultural capital is already accumulated, to relieve the friction between what they can perceive and what they can practically attend to. this conversion works because the money is not trying to buy the eye. the eye is already there. the money is buying the eye time. it is also buying the eye permission, and transit, and a babysitter, and the energy left after a twelve-hour shift, and the social legitimacy required to enter a building that has spent decades signalling not-for-you.

it does not happen because arts philanthropy is built on an assumption that the cultivated class and the moneyed class are the same.

the entire structure of the field — the boards, the galas, the grant committees, the curatorial residencies, the expanding-access initiatives that route money downward from the cultured to the uncultured — depends on that overlap holding. the gala donor and the seminar graduate are imagined as the same person, or adjacent persons, which licenses the field to build itself around their comforts and social codes, while describing this arrangement as cultural stewardship rather than class reproduction.

if the overlap dissolved and the field had to admit that the genuinely cultivated were largely elsewhere, mostly broke, often invisible, working the night shift, driving the cab, annotating the paperback in the staff room — then the field would also have to admit that its function is partly social and partly self-flattering. that the appropriate direction of flow is not downward from the gala to the uncultured masses but sideways, from the gala to the night-shift reader who has been doing the work for thirty years without subsidy or recognition.

almost no arts patronage flows in this direction. the funding goes to producers. the underclass of trained perceivers — the demand-side condition without which all that production is simply generating into a void — receives free-museum-day gestures and not much else.

‘free museum day’ of the week or month is the perfect emblem of the misunderstanding. because the field still imagines the audience as someone to be made, rather than someone to be reached. this phenom has been so long-standing that the field has mistaken its own social reproduction for public service.

the deepest support art could receive right now is the recognition that its real constituency is the people who are already persuaded, and broke, and waiting. everything else is a gala for people who have already decided what culture is for — and found a way to monetize that decision — conducted in a building that the people who actually love the work cannot afford the afternoon to enter.

in india, the irony is almost too on the nose. a country that produced faiz, that has raga and kathak and a literary history in a dozen languages that would embarrass most of the western canon — and the infrastructure for sustaining the people who carry that knowledge is nearly nonexistent. the cab driver who knows faiz by heart has no institutional support. the classical musician who trained for twenty years under a ustād earns less than the venue that books him. the regional language poet whose work has no english translation will not be reviewed, will not be funded, will not be found. the cultivation exists everywhere. the money follows almost none of it.

and the solution is not more institutions. it is reorienting the ones that already exist. boards that actually reflect the communities they claim to serve. grant committees that do not require the applicant to already speak the language of the funder. programming decisions made by people who did not all go to the same five universities. criticism that does not route everything through a western canonical framework before deciding if it counts. the audience that art has been looking for has been there the whole time. it was just never the one anyone thought to look for.

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the first time i sat behind a drum kit, i didn't notice. the sound was too much and my hands were too busy fumbling to create some semblance of music that wasn't muscle memory yet, to register what was happening in my own palms.

the low-grade constant hedging of the body and this very apologetic way of occupying space i’d been carrying so long i’d mistaken it for a personality trait — stopped. just like that. the sticks in my hands and the hands suddenly and completely sure of themselves, and i remember, sitting at a slight remove from all of it post the session, thinking, “so this is what that feels like”.

the wand chooses the wizard. in the wizarding world… and yes, i am going there, bear with me, the child walks into the shop full of intent and preference and all their carefully rehearsed ideas about who they are, and the wand looks at all of that and decides something different. the wand knows a thing about you that you have not yet been told.

what it means in practice, i’ve come to realise is that the innate ‘youness’ in you exists before your understanding of it. a frequency you are already emitting. and the right instrument or room or person, hell, even the right city — recognizes it and responds.

i was the last to know about the drums. this seems to be a pattern with me and the things that matter most.

before all of this, there was a piano.

i started young enough that i cannot tell you when it began, only that it was always there, the way some experiences have simply been conditions of my childhood rather than events inside it. the music room at school was where i became, for the first time and in a way i would spend the next decade trying to replicate, entirely present. not performing presence, not assembling the appearance of a perfect child for the benefit of the adults in the room. actually, completely, embarrassingly there.

my brain is not, by its nature, a room that stays still. it never has been. i know this now with the clarity of a diagnosis and i sort of knew it then with the helpless confusion of a child who could not understand why the inside of her head felt like several conversations happening simultaneously in a space designed for one.

the inside of my head was never empty which is its own problem entirely. there was always a book i was halfway through and a debate argument i was quietly constructing and a sprint interval my legs were already planning and four other things besides, all of them alive and demanding and refusing to wait their turn. the world wanted me to sit still and attend to one thing at a time and i had approximately seventeen things that felt equally urgent and real and worth the full force of my attention. in retropsect, the exhausting daily work was the performance of a child whose attention needed to be only at one place, for the benefit of every adult in the room who needed to believe that focus looked the way they thought it looked. i was good at it. the hiding became its own curriculum and i was a good student.

what they do not tell you because the story about adhd is always a story about deficit — is that the same wiring responsible for the noise is also responsible for the hyperfocus. the pattern recognition that arrives so fast it bypasses the usual checkpoints. the ability to walk into a new room, context, new body of information, and absorb it whole, make connections between things that have no obvious business being connected, hold multiple threads simultaneously and find, at the intersection of all of them, something that the more linear mind would have taken considerably longer to reach. the adhd brain is not a broken version of the neurotypical one. it is a different beast entirely, capable of things the “standard” model is not, provided it is given the right stimulus.

the music room was the right stimulus. i just did not have the language for why.

and then i sat down at the piano and the noise stopped.

not gradually, too. my hands on the keys and my brain, for the first and for a long time the only time, with somewhere precise to put itself. the music demanded all of me and in demanding all of me it resolved the problem of there being too much of me for one place to hold. i was not distracted at the piano. i was not performing focus. i was simply in it, the way you are in water, surrounded and held and asked by the medium itself to move differently.

the recitals were the best days of my life. i know the expected qualifier is the acknowledgement that i was young and have lived more since. but, standing in front of people and producing something, making sound arrive in a room that had not contained it before, giving people something to feel that they had not come in carrying — nothing i have done since has felt more essentially like what i am for. creation as its most honest. not yet complicated by industry or audience or the question of whether the thing i am making will find its people. just the music and the room and my hands and the evidence, irrefutable and warm, that i had made something real.

i was a maker before i was anything else. before i understood that writing could be a life or that the way i saw things was not simply an ordinary vision but a clear and arguable slant — before all of that — i was someone who sat in a music room and produced things from nothing.

then life reorganised itself without consulting me, and the music room receded. the piano became something i had done rather than something i was doing. and the making, the texture of aliveness that making produced in me, went somewhere i could not immediately find.

what i did not understand then, and understand now with a clarity that has a cost to arrive at, is that what the piano had been doing for my brain was not incidental to the joy of it.

the conditions under which my brain operates at full capacity are not, as it turns out, mysterious. i have known them my whole life. i simply lacked the framework to understand that what i was experiencing in the music room was not a gift that belonged only to music but a set of conditions that the music was creating — total sensory engagement, immediate feedback, pattern and variation in a ratio that keeps the brain exactly calibrated between boredom and overwhelm, which is not just pleasurable but kind of regulatory. and for a brain like mine, something closer to necessary.

the piano gave me all of this. when it went, i lost all of it. and i spent a very long time not knowing what i had lost, only that something was harder than it used to be, that the noise inside had gotten louder, that the strategies i was using to manage the daily work of being a person inside my own head were effortful in a way they hadn’t always been. i wrote. writing gave me pieces of it, the absorption, the making and yes, the satisfaction of a sentence that lands correctly. but writing is slow and the feedback is delayed and there is no rhythm in it the body can feel from the outside. it was not enough.

and then the drums.

here is what the drums do that i cannot adequately explain without sounding like someone who has found religion, which perhaps i have.

the drum kit requires your whole body and your whole mind simultaneously and in relationship to each other, which means there is genuinely no space for anything else. this is not leading to a weird metaphor about mindfulness or presence in the aspirational, scented-candle sense of those words. very mechanically, you are doing four independent things at once with four independent limbs and they are all in service of a single rhythm and the moment your attention migrates even fractionally, the whole thing falls apart and you know it immediately because you can hear it. the feedback is instant. the consequence is audible. for a brain that struggles to sustain engagement without immediate and sufficient return, it is a solution. the kit itself enforces the focus by making the cost of losing it impossible to ignore.

what nobody mentions about rhythm specifically — and i find this omission almost criminal — is what it does to the adhd brain beyond the regulation. rhythm is pattern made physical. it is information arriving in a form the body can process before the conscious mind has to do anything with it, which means the brain that usually spends its energy managing the gap between stimulus and response gets to skip that step entirely. the pattern is already inside you. the body already knows where the beat goes. and in that knowing, in that moment of the brain and the body being in agreement without negotiation, is where you strike gold. i have had insights behind a kit that i could not have manufactured at a desk; thinking that rhythm unlocks is not the slow careful thinking of someone building an argument brick by brick but the faster, more associative thinking of someone who has been given permission to move at their actual speed. it is, in the most literal sense, a sharpening.

i had forgotten what it felt like to be in my body and in my mind at the same time and finding them in agreement with each other. the piano used to do this. i had almost forgotten that it did, until the drums gave it back to me like a face from a photograph you haven’t looked at in years.

i am a better thinker after i play. the work come easier, the arguments arrive with more of their structure already intact, the quality of attention i can bring to a page is higher. i used to attribute the good days to luck or sleep or the angle of the light peering into my room. i know now what it actually is. drums regulate me for hours afterward, the way running always does too but more musical, more mine.

there is a version of this piece that is only about the drums and what they have given back.

but the fuller truth is that what i am really talking about is the difference between consuming and creating, and what it does to a person to spend too long on the wrong side of that line.

we are in a cultural moment that has perfected the architecture of consumption. the feed and the algorithm that has learned your frequency with an accuracy that should disturb us all more than it does. it is frictionless and it is total and it will take all the time you give it without ever giving anything back except the sensation, briefly, of having been stimulated. i am not exempt from this. i have lost hours i am not proud of to it. there is a depletion that comes from consuming without making to me, a flatness that accumulates quietly until it is not quiet at all.

the music room never felt like that. the piano never felt like that. and the drums, now, never feel like that. i leave the kit spent in the best possible way, the way you are spent after you have given something rather than simply taken.

the drum is also a political instrument.

every culture that was ever colonised had its drums confiscated early; the colonial project understood that sound is power, rhythm is how people stay coherent, stay connected across generations and distances and deliberate erasure. take the drums and you take the memory. take the memory and the work of fragmentation becomes so much easier. there is the question of whose hands are permitted to hold the sticks at all. tony allen reinvented what rhythm is allowed to be and is still, in many rooms, an afterthought in conversations that would not exist without him. questlove has built an entire intellectual and critical practice on the foundation of percussion and still has to make the case, repeatedly, in spaces that should require no such argument, that the drummer is a thinker. that the person holding the rhythm is not the support act for the real musicians but is, in fact, where the music lives or dies.

and then there is the smaller version of this same argument, which is, who is handed an instrument and told to “go and become themselves”, and who is handed a syllabus instead. the rooms where that permission is given are not distributed evenly. the girl gets the flute, the piano, something that sits still and makes no mess, does not take up more space than it is supposed to and mostly does not announce itself. sheila e. is one of the finest musicians of the twentieth century and spent the better part of her career being discussed primarily in relation to the men she worked with, as though the drumming itself was secondary to the biographical footnote of who had handed her the opportunity

the drums announce themselves. they do not permit ambiguity about whether you are present. you are here or you are not, and if you are here everyone in the building knows it.

i spent a long time being the kind of smart that took up very little space. the drums are where that project ends. behind the percussions i am not legible or convenient or managing anyone’s comfort. i am just exactly as loud as the music requires.

i am still, in every session, finding out what that means. i am still, in every session, that child in the music room who has just discovered that the inside of her head can be quiet, that all the noise can be organised into something with shape and intention and feeling, that she is not too much for the room she is in but enough for it.

present company -

currently on my desk: a couple of pain & inflammation meds that are together functioning as a very unwelcome reminder that i cannot sit behind the kit for another month minimum. resting the left foot after injury and no bass drum. (my intrusive thoughts might take me back sooner)

also on the desk: a heavily annotated copy of count of monte cristo that i have complicated feelings about and cannot stop reading, a not-so-heavily annotated copy of gone with the wind, cain’s jawbone - the dastardly crossword book that was nearly destroyed by my hands this afternoon because it is diabolical, and a kodak 35mm film camera (my fifth child now) that a very dear friend passed down to me before she moves out of the neighbourhood. some things you want to hold before you use them.

what is on the rotation while the foot heals and the kit sits there judging me: tony allen, afro beat 2000 / sheila e., a love bizarre / d’angelo, africa / questlove’s voodoo anniversary mix, which is doing a reasonable job of making me feel like i am playing when i am not.

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dear universe,

you and i made a pact. long before i had language for it or the audacity to name it, we had already struck the bargain. i imagine you bowed. like a gentleman should; you took my hand and kissed the back of it the way they do in old stories where the terms are unspoken but understood, and nobody pretends otherwise. that is how i choose to remember it. that is how it happened, in the only version of events that matters.

mine.

i was born already arguing with you. came out of my mother furious and curious, both at once, which is the only way i have ever known how to be.

we are old friends or lovers or enemies depending on the season, the hour, how badly you’ve broken me lately or how magnificently i’ve surprised us both. on most days we are two forces meeting a wall. i push, you push back, and we call this a life. but on the other days — the days i live for without knowing i am living for them — we are in a dance so perfectly tuned it would make the gods jealous.

after years of turmoil and unending love, probably one more than the other at any given time, the ratios shifting in ways i’ve stopped trying to track, we decided, finally, to shake on it.

you will give me yourself. i will give you my art.

my art is everything that passes through me and comes out changed. my pen. my music, my body in motion. the communities i build with my bare hands and refuse to let dissolve. the ideas i smuggle into rooms that were not expecting them. everything that originates in me and lands in the world as evidence that i was here and paying attention.

a fair exchange? perhaps not. but we hammered it all the same, with full knowledge of the terms, and i have never asked for a renegotiation. a life in which i take from you without giving back, consume your beauty and your violence and your impossible generosity and produce nothing in return, is the only poverty i am afraid of.

— ✦ —

term one. on joy.

you will give me your good, the full indecent abundance of it. the light at 6am that catches the dust and turns it gold. the weight of a person i love falling asleep against your shoulder. i will savour it without apology, i will refuse to let it pass through me without being changed by it. i will dance to it, write to it, make music to it, run until my lungs are raw with it. and then — this is my half — i will find the words that land in the body rather than just the brain, and i will say, look. look at what is being offered. i will be shameless about my joy and show them that this is what it looks like to want things without apologising for it. and it will be contagious. it will become a door left open that someone else can walk through when they thought all the doors were locked.

term two. on rage.

give me your anger, seismic and ancestral. all the fury of systems that outlived their usefulness by several centuries and are still somehow in the room, setting the terms, pretending they are inevitable rather than simply entrenched. give me the grief of it too, because grief and rage are the same animal on different days and i have use for both. in return i will give you rebellion with architecture — the kind that builds something in the place of what it dismantles. that looks at ancient groupthink, because age has been mistaken for legitimacy since the beginning of recorded history, and decides to construct, in opposition, something that actually works. communities that do more than gather. tables long enough that nobody has to fight for a seat.

term three. on beauty.

you will give me your sights and every colour you have. i will devour it like a meal i have been hungry for all my life, and then i will do the only ethical thing with it. spend my life insisting that your wonders do not keep. there is no later for the things we are always deferring to later. i am always willing to look. this is the one promise i have never broken. the time we have here is little. and all your colours need to be consumed before the soul-flattening version of life takes over and makes me forget that I was supposed to be enjoying you.

term four. on love.

you give me love, i give you my community. nothing i will have made, not one body of work or word or essay or note, will compare to the people i will gather. the ones i will adorn with whatever gifts i have, and show up for with a salon that exists for thinking together, for the collision of minds that still believe collision is generative rather than dangerous. the finest thing a person can do with love is make it into something people can live inside. i will build it with both hands open.

term five. on suffering.

you will give me your bad. you always do and have shown no restraint in this department; i have stopped expecting you to. here is my half. i will remain kind. i will remain gentle and soft and open. it is the most demanding practice i know. every time the world makes a compelling case for becoming defensive and strategically unavailable, i will choose the other thing. the world would prefer i harden, become armoured and sensible about the whole thing. my softness in the face of your worst is the most defiant thing i own. it will be a choice i make every single morning.

term six. on the body.

you give me my limbs and my senses and i intend to use them until there is nothing left to use. i will run until the ground knows my name. i will fall and get up with scabs and the soreness that comes from having actually tried. i will push this body the way you push something you are grateful for, which is completely, without reservation, all the way to its edges and occasionally past them. i will swim and climb and claw not because i’m the most brave but because the alternative — the carefully preserved, unlived body — is a tragedy I cannot stomach. i want to arrive at the end with nothing in reserve, having spent every gram on something that mattered. the body is not a vehicle for the mind. the body is not secondary. it is the first and most honest form of knowledge i possess and i will not waste it on caution.

term seven. on purpose.

you give me the ache of a purpose, so i give you the work. and it’s output when i am working from the deepest, least defended part of myself. you gave me a why; i give you back a life that knows the unreasonable hunger that comfort alone cannot touch. the entire project of my life is the slow and sometimes violent work of carving out the shape of the thing i am in a world that would prefer me more convenient. it is the only project worth the years it takes. a constellation of things i create and ideas i sent forward into the world before it knew it needed them. i will build toward the kind of life where everything i touch is slightly better for having been touched by me.

— ✦ —

here is what i have come to understand about creation. it is the ultimate act. it is my chosen form of devotion and worship. it is also, i’m aware, the toll.

like all things that hang in the balance and expect a price for survival, the work demands payment. i pay it willingly because it is fair. i am given a life; i give back a life’s worth of making. i am a vessel, and the gifts moving through me are not for me alone, which is simultaneously humbling and the least lonely feeling in the world.

we are in a strange moment. the more awake a person becomes — the more they feel and think and notice — the more possible it becomes to be undone by the scale of what is broken. knowledge is a curse and it is also the most extraordinary gift in existence. i will create despite it and because of it. because the alternative, a life sealed against beauty and the risk of caring, is not a life i am capable of choosing. i create because it terrifies the part of the world that needs everyone to stay small. i create because there is no more political act available to me than insisting that my way of seeing is worth something.

i cherish this life with a ferocity that embarrasses me sometimes. the sand and the waves and the sentence i wrote last tuesday and the feeling of crossing a finish line on legs that wanted to quit and didn’t. the people i gather and the conversations that go somewhere real. the only way i know how to survive is to strike a balance that is true to me and true to the world at the same time. i would not have it any other way.

so here we are. the deal still standing, as far as i am concerned.

i will suck the marrow out of the life you gave me — the brutal and the bewildering — and I will lick it clean off the bone and come back for more, because that is who I am, that has always been who I am, and you knew this when you bowed and took my hand and we sealed it.

i give you my all. the work. the words. the miles. the room i fill with people who are learning to be free. the softness i refuse to surrender. the vision only i have, the unrepeatable way i see you, that nobody else will because i am the only one looking through these very eyes with this very strange accumulation of love and grief and appetite and nerve.

i see you. only i see you, this way. in return, you give me a life worth the seeing.

give me your all. i always have. i always will. until the marrow is gone and the bone is clean and the pen is out of ink — and even then, knowing me, i’ll find something else to write with.

yours, defiantly and completely,

a.

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I've been sitting with a confession for weeks now, turning it over, suspicious of it. Waiting for the catch.

Here it is. I am, without question, the happiest I've ever been. And as a result, creating has never felt this easy.

This terrifies me. Because for most of my life, I’ve lived by a rule I never consciously chose but completely believed. That the real work or what I will call the important work in the grand scheme of my life had to be born of suffering. That it would arrive only through the desperate clawing for what I did not have. So I cultivated an inner life that was forever restless, as if turmoil were a prerequisite for meaning. Everything suspended, always, in service of the work.

I built an entire identity around this belief. And now I’m sitting here, happy and creatively overflowing, and I don’t quite know what to do with the contradiction.

That my creativity does not demand suffering as its raw material.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The American Dream, or: How I Became What I Was Trying to Escape

Here’s something else I need to confess, because it connects to everything that follows.

I spent years quietly subscribing to what I saw as a particularly capitalist way of understanding worth. The relentless productivity gospel. The idea that my value maps directly onto my output, that rest is something I have to earn, and the correct response to any creative or professional lull is to work harder.

Capitalism didn’t invent this logic from nothing. The Protestant work ethic states that labour itself was morally virtuous and that prosperity was evidence of God’s favour. This predates industrial capitalism but provided its philosophical infrastructure. By the time Adam Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations in 1776, the idea that individual productive effort was the engine of social good had been building for centuries. It needed a face. It got the American Dream.

The American Dream, in its original 1931 formulation by historian James Truslow Adams, wasn’t about getting rich. It was about something stranger and more seductive. The idea that “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” The belief that where you started wasn’t where you had to end. That effort, sufficiently applied, could transform circumstance.

By 2025, this has metastasised into something that would be unrecognisable to Adams. The average American worker is 400% more productive than they were in 1950, according to Economic Policy Institute data, but real wages have barely kept pace. We’ve accepted the logic of infinite productivity as a personal virtue entirely divorced from its original promise. The work was supposed to deliver a better life, not consume it.

And despite my ideological objections to all of this, I look at my own life and find, with something between amusement and horror, that I have been its perfect candidate. The obsessive work habits, guilt about unproductive Sundays. All this and the quiet belief, never fully examined, that I hadn’t yet done enough to deserve rest.

I thought I was rebelling against a system. I was instead executing its logic with precise efficiency. This matters for what comes next. Because this same logic that value requires suffering and that good work comes from hard places also colonised how I thought about creativity.

The Patron Saint of Suffering

The story goes like this. The artist is someone who transforms pain into beauty. Who metabolises their own damage into work that outlasts them. They earn their art through lived suffering.

It’s not a new story. Van Gogh, obviously, always Van Gogh, the patron saint of the suffering artist myth, the man whose ear we remember almost as much as his paintings. Virginia Woolf, filling her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse. Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, the entire morbid canon of the 27 Club. Artists whose suffering we’ve romanticised into a narrative about the price of genius.

The story we tell is that their pain was the source of their art. That they created because they suffered, and that their suffering made the creation authentic, gave it weight, made it mean something.

We tell this story so often that it starts to feel like a natural law. Great art requires great pain.

But we made an error. We saw correlation and called it causation.

By romanticising the damage, we forget to ask whether these artists created despite their suffering, not because of it. Whether the pain was an obstacle they worked around, a thief that stole years of potential work, or the fuel that powered it.

What if generations of creatives have internalised the belief that they need to be broken to make something beautiful, and what if that belief has broken them? On further inspection and research, I found that the mythology of the suffering artist isn’t a description of how creativity works but a prescription that has caused immeasurable harm at times, like artists refusing treatment, avoiding stability and seeking out pain because they’ve been told it’s the only path to authenticity.

I think about all the work we’ve lost. The albums never made because the artist died too young. The novels never written because the writer couldn’t survive their own mythology. The paintings, the films, the scientific discoveries, the inventions—all the things that would have existed if we’d told a different story about what creativity requires.

We do this to living artists, too. We demand that they suffer for our entertainment, and then we consume their pain as content.

There’s a famous pop star—you know who I mean, I don’t need to name her—who has been told her best albums have come from heartbreak and the dissolution of relationships.

We’re saying that for her to make the music we love, she has to be miserable. We’re making her suffering a condition of her value.

This is obscene and something we should refuse. And yet I catch myself thinking it too. When an artist I love releases an album that feels lighter, more content, I notice a small jab of disappointment in myself. A sense that they’ve lost their edge.

I hate that I think this. I’m trying to unlearn it.

When the Mine Runs Dry

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying suffering has no relationship to art. I’ve made work from my own dark places. Some of my best writing and projects has come from excavating pain since I was thirteen years old, from going into the depths and bringing something back. There’s a truth in that. Difficulty can be generative and wrestling with hard things can produce insight.

But excavation only goes so far. You can only mine the same wounds so many times before the vein runs dry. And it’s extractive, treating your own pain as a resource to be exploited rather than an experience to be healed.

There is a kind of art that requires pain as its precondition. I don’t want to dismiss this. The elegy or the witness poem. The memoir of surviving something unsurvivable. These exist and they can only be made by people who have been through the fire and come out the other side with language intact.

But there is another kind of art—equally real, equally necessary—that requires something else entirely. Spaciousness. Time. The ability to look at a thing without flinching because you’re not in the middle of it anymore. The gentle quality of attention and material that becomes available when you’re not in survival mode.

I did this for years. I strip-mined my own suffering for material. And it worked, for a while, until it didn’t. Until I found myself in a strange position.

Happier than I’d ever been, and terrified that the happiness would kill my creativity.

News flash. It didn’t.

That’s what I want to tell you. That’s the thing I’m still marveling at, which contradicts everything I was taught to believe.

I am the happiest I’ve been in my adult life. I am loved. I am stable. I have work that matters to me and relationships that nourish me and a sense of possibility that I haven’t felt since I was a child. And I have never—never—been more creatively alive.

The ideas come faster than I can catch them. I fall asleep thinking about projects and wake up with solutions to problems I hadn’t consciously been working on. I write more easily, more fluently, with less of the grinding resistance that used to characterise my process. The work feels less like extraction and more like overflow—not pulling something out of myself but letting something flow through.

I don’t know how to explain this except to say. I think I was lied to. I think we were all lied to. I think the story about suffering and creativity was never true, or was only partially true, and the partial truth was weaponised into an ideology that has caused tremendous harm.

What Gets Made in the Light

Let me tell you about some artists who created from fullness rather than lack.

My darling, Henri Matisse, in his seventies and eighties, bedridden and unable to paint, invented an entirely new art form. He called it “painting with scissors”—large-scale paper cutouts in vivid colors, shapes that seemed to dance across the walls of his studio. This was not work made from suffering.

This was work by a man who described his artistic goal stemming from “an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter... a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair.” The cutouts—works like The Snail and The Blue Nude—are among the most joyful objects in the history of art. They were made by a man who was physically limited but spiritually expansive, who had found a way to create that didn’t require anguish.

Toni Morrison wrote Beloved while working full-time as an editor at Random House and raising two sons as a single mother. This was not a woman in romantic torment, not a figure of dramatic suffering. This was a woman with a job and children and a disciplined writing practice, who woke early to work before the rest of her life demanded her attention. And she produced one of the greatest novels in the American canon.

The stability gave her the container. The routine gave her the space. The fullness of her life fed the fullness of her work.

The scientists understood this differently. Darwin spent years developing his theory of evolution at Down House in Kent, in what was by most accounts a comfortable domestic life—a happy marriage, children he adored, a garden he tended obsessively. He was often ill, yes, but the conditions of his intellectual work were stability, routine, and enough. On the Origin of Species was the product of two decades of patient, sustained thinking from a man with a good life.

Marie Curie’s discoveries accelerated when she had collaborators, community. When she had her Pierre working alongside her. Her Nobel Prize—the first of two—came when she was, by her own account, deeply in love and doing the work alongside someone who matched her intellectual intensity.

Creation as partnership. Creation from being held.

I think about what these examples have in common. All of these people faced obstacles and setbacks. But they lived a life that could hold the creative work. A container sturdy enough to support the making.

This is what I didn’t understand for so long. I thought creativity required emptiness—a void that demanded to be filled, a wound that demanded to be expressed. But maybe creativity requires the opposite. Maybe it requires fullness.

A life so rich that it overflows, that it can’t help but spill into making.

The empty vessel has nothing to pour out. The broken vessel can’t hold anything at all. But the full vessel—the one that’s been filled with love and rest and experience and attention—that vessel runs over. That’s where the work comes from.

The Economics of Suffering

Maybe we’ve over-romanticised suffering as a prerequisite for good art. Maybe having a life worth living is not a distraction from the work. It is the work’s condition.

I’ve been reading about the economics of creative work, trying to understand how we got here.

The data is grim. Artists in India earn a median income well below the national average. The majority of working artists have no health insurance through their creative work. The gig economy has made stable employment in creative fields increasingly rare, while the myth of the passionate artist who doesn’t need money has been used to justify poverty wages.

And yet artists keep making work. They keep suffering for it. They keep believing that the suffering is necessary, even noble.

What would it mean to refuse this? To insist that artists deserve stability, deserve healthcare, deserve lives that aren’t organized around economic precarity? To believe that creative work might actually be better—not worse—if the people making it weren’t constantly afraid?

There’s a chicken-and-egg question here that I keep turning over. Did we start believing that suffering produces creativity, and then structure our lives and systems to make artists suffer? Or did capitalism need a story that made suffering productive, and conscript creativity into that narrative?

I suspect it’s both, feeding each other in a loop that’s hard to interrupt.

The economic system needs workers who will endure miserable conditions. It needs people who believe that their suffering has meaning, that it’s building toward something, that the pain is the price of future reward. And the myth of the suffering artist serves that system perfectly. It tells creative people that their hardship is not a bug but a feature—that economic precarity, lack of healthcare, impossible hours, constant rejection, all of it is somehow necessary for the work. It transforms systemic failure into individual virtue.

Meanwhile, artists internalize the myth and start to believe that their pain is what makes them special.

This is how ideology works. It makes us police ourselves so thoroughly that external enforcement becomes unnecessary.

What Creating from Fullness Actually Feels Like

I am trying to describe something I haven’t seen described very often, which is why it took me so long to trust it.

Lately, the work is coming from somewhere different. Fuller. Steadier. More loved than I expected to be at this point in my life, and more secure in what I’m trying to make and why.

And instead of making the work smaller—instead of dulling the edges, removing the stakes, making things safer and therefore less interesting—it has made the work wider. More spacious. Softer in the places where softness serves, braver in the places where bravery is needed.

I am, right now, more pregnant with ideas than I have ever been. More projects I want to tinker with and build. More essays half-formed in notebooks and sentences arriving in the shower, on walks, in the middle of conversations, at 2am, demanding to be written down before they evaporate.

This is not what I was told to expect from happiness.

I want to be careful here. I’m not saying that all difficulty is bad, that struggle has no value, that we should pursue frictionless lives. Some resistance is necessary. Some challenges make us grow. The swimmer becomes stronger by pushing against the water, not by floating in a void.

But there’s a difference between chosen difficulty and imposed suffering. And mostly, between the resistance you seek out because it makes you better and the deprivation that’s forced on you by a system that doesn’t value your work. The first is training. The second is abuse.

And I think we’ve confused them. We’ve told artists that all their suffering is the first kind—meaningful, productive—when much of it is actually the second kind—pointless, destructive and imposed by a society that has failed to support creative work.

I think about what it would mean to tell a different story. To celebrate the artists who create from contentment as loudly as we mythologise the artists who create from anguish. To build systems that support creative lives rather than systems that demand creative suffering.

This feels almost utopian. And naive. The cynic in me wants to dismiss it as wishful thinking, as a privileged fantasy that ignores the real conditions of creative labour.

But I keep coming back to my own experience.

For the first time in my life, I believe that the happiness is not temporary. I believe that what’s steady can sustain creation just as well as what’s broken—and maybe, if we’re being honest with each other, better.

The question was never “how much pain do you have to offer?”

The question was always just, “what do you have to say?”

Turns out, when you’re not in the middle of suffering, the answer gets clearer.

Present company -

Currently on my desk: one almost-filled traveler’s journal and a rolled-up print of Matisse's Blue Nude II that I keep meaning to frame but haven't yet.

This week’s find: Love Story: John F. Kennedy Jr. & Carolyn Bessette on FX. I don't usually do parasocial about other people's love, but they've been my favorite edgy NY couple since I first saw that grainy photo of them arguing in Washington Square Park. This retelling captures perfectly how being watched ruins intimacy. Completely hooked.

Songs for excavating thoughts: Fleet Foxes, "Mykonos" / Stevie Wonder, "Cherie Amour" / Geese, "Cowboy Nudes"

P.S. If you found meaning in these words, please consider sharing with others who might like it. This space thrives on curiosity and connection.

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a single act of courage can create a network effect across your entire identity. why listen to me about courage? well, i just started learning to swim. it’s humbling in the way that only complete beginner status can be.

i am, at this very moment in my life, the worst swimmer in Bangalore. this is not self-deprecation. it’s a factual assessment based on observable evidence. three weeks ago, i enrolled in swimming lessons at a pool near Indiranagar, and every tuesday and thursday morning at 7 AM, i lower myself into the shallow end and proceed to flail around like a startled fish while children—actual children, seven and eight years old, missing their front teeth—glide past me with the effortless grace of small dolphins.

last thursday, a girl who couldn’t have been older than six stopped mid-lap to watch me attempt a freestyle stroke. she had goggles pushed up on her forehead and a look of genuine concern on her face.

“you have to relax your hands”, she said.

i thanked her. she swam away. her technique was flawless.

i’m doing this because i have a goal that sounds, when i say it out loud, slightly unhinged. i want to complete an ironman triathlon. a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride, and a full marathon. i can’t currently swim the length of a pool without stopping to gasp at the wall like someone who’s been rescued from a shipwreck. the distance between where i am and where i want to be is so vast it’s almost abstract, like trying to comprehend the national debt or the size of the universe.

what i've noticed though is that first decision to show up at the pool, despite knowing i'd look ridiculous has started changing how i approach other scary things. the second swimming lesson felt less mortifying than the first. asking my instructor to repeat basic techniques for the fourth time stopped feeling shameful. and slowly, other areas of my life where i’ve been avoiding looking incompetent has started feeling more approachable.

gaining courage has strangely been about developing a different relationship with fear itself. albert bandura called this phenomenon "self-efficacy"—the belief in your capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainments. doing something that scares you and surviving it, rewires your brain to trust your own agency.

not confidence exactly, which is general and diffuse, but something more targeted which is the conviction that you can do this very thing, in this situation, despite not having done it before.

what bandura found was that self-efficacy doesn’t develop through affirmation or positive thinking or telling yourself you’re capable. it develops through what he called “mastery experiences”—actually doing the thing that scares you and discovering that you survived. the doing is the proof. the body learns what the mind can’t be talked into believing.

but the part that fascinated me was that bandura also found that self-efficacy transfers. a mastery experience in one domain bleeds into others. the confidence you build by doing one hard thing makes you more likely to attempt a different hard thing, even if the two things are completely unrelated.

the swimmer becomes braver in conversations. the person who learns to speak in public becomes braver in relationships. the mechanism is not linear. it’s not that swimming teaches you communication skills or that public speaking teaches you about love. it’s that each act of courage recalibrates your relationship with fear itself. you learn that you can be afraid and act anyway. and once you know that—once your body knows it, not just your mind—the knowing applies everywhere.

the loop is deceptively simple: you act. you learn. you grow. you act again. a multiplier emerges, you're more you than you were yesterday.

i love doing hard things. i want to be honest about this, because I think it matters— that difficulty is not just something to be endured but something that can be genuinely enjoyed, sought out and even savored.

i love the feeling of my brain working at capacity. i also love the physical sensation of effort… my muscles straining and the body pushed to its edges. i love the moment when a problem that seemed impossible begins to yield, when the first crack appears in the wall and i know, i just know, that if i keep pushing, the whole thing will open up.

this is not masochism or some grim protestant work ethic (no matter how much i’ve been accused of both) dressed up in modern language. i’ve always believed it’s something closer to play. the deep kind that children engage in naturally, where the difficulty is the fun and the challenge is what makes the game worth playing.

somewhere along the way, we learn to avoid difficulty. we learn that struggling means we’re not good enough, confusion means we’re not smart enough. we develop elaborate strategies for staying in our comfort zones, only doing things we’re already good at, for presenting competence to the world and hiding the mess behind it.

and in doing so, we cut ourselves off from the primary mechanism of growth. because growth doesn’t happen in the zone of competence. growth happens in the zone of flailing (yes i’m only into water puns now)—the pool where you can’t swim, the project where you don’t know what you’re doing.

i’ve been thinking about this in terms of my work with children.

for the better part of last year, i’ve been using alternative learning methods to teach kids—and what i’ve observed, again and again, is that the children who struggle most are not the ones who lack intelligence. they’re the ones who lack agency. the belief that their actions matter, that they can affect their own lives.

when i first started working with one of my favourite students now, he wouldn’t answer questions in class. not because he didn’t know the answers—when i asked him privately, one on one, he was sharp and curious, full of observations. but in the group setting, he froze. he’d been told so many times that he wasn’t good enough to compete, that the gap was too wide to close, and he’d internalized all of it. the fear was not about the material, here. it was about himself…his right to take up space, to risk being wrong and to attempt something difficult in front of others.

one day i gave the class a creative assignment. “draw something that doesn’t exist.” anything—an animal, a world. no right answers. no way to fail.

he drew a fish with wings. it was detailed and careful, the scales individually rendered, the wings somewhere between a butterfly’s and an eagle’s. when I asked him about it, he spoke for three uninterrupted minutes about where this fish lived, what it ate, how it migrated between oceans and mountains depending on the season. the class listened. no one laughed (!!).

after that, he started answering questions. not all of them, not immediately. but something had clearly shifted. the creative act and the experience of making something from nothing, of putting his imagination into the world and having it received had given him evidence. evidence that he could take a risk and land safely.

in teams and relationships, courage becomes infectious. amy edmondson’s work on psychological safety reveals a truth that someone has to go first. that first voice, first admission of uncertainty sets a tone. their courage can ripple into the culture, creating permission for others to be equally brave.

i’ve witnessed this in brainstorming sessions and also in difficult conversations with friends. one person’s willingness to say the unsayable creates space for everyone else’s truth. a small act—standing up to ask a question—lowers the bar invisibly for everyone else.

this is how courage multiplies beyond the individual. it becomes a collective force, transforming an entire ecosystem around them.

in game theory, there’s this concept called “coordination problems”—situations where everyone would benefit from taking action, but nobody wants to move first because of the risk involved. it’s why crowds of people will walk past someone who needs help. it’s also why so many potential friendships never begin.

the first mover changes the payoff matrix for everyone else.

someone has to go first. it might as well be you.

not because you have all the answers or that you’re the most qualified or the most certain. but because going first—speaking up, reaching out, admitting uncertainty, offering honesty—creates the possibility of something better than everyone waiting in careful silence.

the first mover advantage of courage isn’t really about advantage at all. it’s about service and being willing to bear the weight of uncertainty so that others don’t have to.

the cost of not going first compounds silently. unlike the courage that multiplies outward, the fear of going first creates its own vicious cycle. the longer everyone waits, the harder it becomes for anyone to move, the more the silence calcifies into something impenetrable.

avoidance grows, internalizes shame and literally shapes our lives around what we didn’t do. it’s the anti-multiplier, creating a smaller and smaller world of perceived safety that is actually no safety at all.

but courage expands life. it operates on the principle that discomfort is temporary but regret is permanent. each brave act adds to our repertoire of evidence that we can handle whatever comes next.

some of the most radical acts of courage happen in the realm of ideas. intellectual courage—the willingness to think differently, change your mind—might be the rarest form of bravery in our polarized world.

it’s the courage to admit “i was wrong” when your identity feels tied to being right. to question assumptions that everyone around you takes as gospel. it’s how progress happens and how we evolve beyond the limitations of our current thinking.

flow states, those darling moments of effortless creativity we all chase require intellectual courage. it’s creativity’s hidden secret: we don’t just need technique—we need guts.

every artist knows the terror of the moment before you begin, when the gap between your vision and your current ability yawns before you like a chasm. courage is what carries you across that gap, one imperfect stroke at a time.

there’s a relationship between courage and creativity that I think we don’t talk about enough, maybe because we’ve sentimentalized both words to the point of uselessness.

creativity, in the way I mean it, is not about art. it’s about the willingness to produce something that didn’t exist before—an idea/solution or a connection between two things that no one had connected. this requires courage because the thing you produce might be ugly, might be laughed at, or reveal something about you that you’d rather keep hidden.

every creative act is an act of exposure. you are saying that this is what my mind does when left to its own devices. this is my interpretation, my offering.

i think about all the writers I admire who went first—who wrote about things nobody was talking about yet and trusted their vision enough to move before they had proof it would work.

joan didion writing personal essays in a landscape dominated by objective journalism. james baldwin writing about race and sexuality when both were considered too controversial for mainstream literature.

neither waited for permission or waited for the market to be ready. they went first, and in doing so, they created space for everyone who came after.

if courage compounds, then we can deliberately invest in it. here’s how (a working list i plan to add to):

ꕥ micro-bravery: send that text. ask the question. observe the tremble and do it anyway. build a ledger of small victories.

ꕥ fear dialoguing: name the fear explicitly. ask yourself: “what matters more—comfort or growth?” usually, the answer clarifies your next step.

ꕥ reflect and integrate: after each act of courage, journal/note what changed. how did you feel before, during, after? what did you learn about yourself? let this inform your next move.

ꕥ model courage: share your failures and fears with others. let it be safe for them to follow your lead into vulnerability.

ꕥ practice intellectual courage: say the unpopular thing. ask the question you think you shouldn’t. admit uncertainty in places that demand false confidence.

courage isn’t moral ornamentation after all, it’s a nervous system upgrade. it shapes our minds, expands our identity, rewires our instinct toward possibility rather than protection.

i think about that email i sent last tuesday, how it opened a door I didn’t even know existed. how that small act of courage led to a conversation that changed how i think about my work. how that conversation gave me the confidence to pitch an idea i’d been sitting on for months.

this is how it works: courage begets courage begets courage. each brave act adds to your evidence file that you can handle whatever comes next. each small risk taken makes the next one feel less like a risk and more like an invitation.

it’s late now. next week i’ll be at the pool at 7 am, lowering myself into the water with the dread of someone who knows exactly how bad they are at what they’re about to do.

the children will be there, gliding past me. the water will be the same—cold and chlorinated and indifferent to my ambitions. but i’ll be different. slightly. incrementally. four lengths better than I was last week.

and the thing i’ve learned—the thing the pool keeps teaching me, the thing the kid and his fish with wings already knew—is that the difference between the person who acts and the person who waits to feel ready is not talent or luck.

it’s the willingness to begin before the beginning makes sense.

i’ll let you know when I get to five.

Present company -

Currently on a borrowed desk at a friend’s place in Delhi: my work laptop, a half-torn wristband from a Lumineers show i haven't been able to throw away, and a dog-eared graphic novel about my beloved Arvo Pärt.

This week's find: the matcha at hinoki slow bar in humanyunpur. if you're in delhi, order it iced. sit by the window. don't check your phone.

Songs for excavating thoughts: Riechenbach Falls, “Racing Mount Pleasant” / The Temptations, “My Girl” / Dexys Midnight Runners, “Come on Eileen”

P.S. If you found meaning in these words, please consider sharing with others who might like it. This space thrives on curiosity and connection.

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Dear friends,

Two months ago, I went to a show at a bar in Ridgewood, one of those places that doesn’t have a sign outside, just a heavy door and a bouncer who looked at me like I might be lost. Inside, the room was maybe thirty feet long with the ceiling low and the lights red. A band I’d never heard of was setting up—three women with instruments I couldn’t identify, pedals and cables snaking across the floor like vines. The crowd was sparse. Maybe thirty people. A man in a work jacket leaned against the wall with his eyes closed, already swaying to nothing.

The band started and the sound was enormous, a wash of feedback and drums that I felt in my bones. The woman at the microphone sang in a language I didn’t recognize. Later someone told me it was Portuguese, and that she had been playing basements for years. I didn’t know any of this at the time. I just knew that I was standing in a room with strangers and felt her music in a way that couldn’t be captured by the phone in my pocket, something that existed only because we were all there, breathing the same air and letting the sound move through us.

I thought about this show when I read the latest essay from a digital magazine I adore, about the death of cool. The argument was familiar. We’ve lost the capacity for genuine subcultural experience. Everything is commodified. Everything is content. The underground doesn’t exist anymore because the internet has flattened all hierarchies of taste, and now a sixteen-year-old in suburban Ohio has the same access to obscure music as a crate-digger in Berlin, which means obscurity itself has lost its meaning.

Something in the writing nagged at me, a question the essay never asked. Have you walked into a room where something unexpected was happening and let it change your night? Or are we all just refreshing our metrics, watching the likes accumulate on our posts about how nobody likes anything anymore?

There’s a feedback loop here that’s worth naming. If you spend your days online, immersed in the discourse about culture rather than in culture itself, you will come to believe that the discourse is the culture.

The sociology of the cycle is well-documented. Artists move to a cheap neighborhood because they can’t afford anywhere else. They make work in converted warehouses and basement venues. The work attracts other artists, and then the curious, and then the wealthy curious, and then the real estate developers who see an opportunity. Rents rise. The artists leave. The neighborhood becomes a lifestyle and a place where people pay twelve dollars for a cortado and congratulate themselves on their taste.

“This has happened so many times..”, say the New Yorkers. SoHo in the seventies, Williamsburg in the nineties, Bushwick in the aughts, that it feels less like a pattern than a law of nature. The heat death of every scene.

I think about the jazz clubs in Harlem in the 1920s, which I know only from books and photographs and the testimonies of people who weren’t there either. The speakeasies where Black musicians invented a new American art form while white audiences came uptown to experience something dangerous, something other, something that made them feel alive in ways their own culture couldn’t. The clubs got famous. The prices went up. The white audiences multiplied. And eventually the thing that had made the scene vital, the risk and the intimacy, was replaced by a performance for tourists.

This is the story we tell about every scene that gets discovered. The gaze destroys the object. And the moral is always the same. Authenticity cannot survive contact with capital.

But I wonder if this story has been told too clean. If it flatters us, the people who tell it, by letting us believe that we would have been different from the tourists, that our gaze would have been purer somehow. The finance bro at the gallery opening has become a stock figure, shorthand for everything wrong with contemporary culture. He’s there for the status, not the art, buying access to a world he doesn’t understand in a Patagonia vest and talking about his portfolio and ruining it for everyone who actually cares.

I’ve met this guy. I’ve been at the openings where he shows up with his friends from the fund and scanning the room for someone important to talk to. There’s something dispiriting about watching art become a lifestyle accessory, a marker of cultural capital for people who could just as easily be collecting watches.

But I’m suspicious of how much weight this figure is asked to carry. He’s become a way of explaining why culture feels diminished without having to examine our own complicity. We blame the finance bros for killing the scene, but we don’t ask why the scene needed their money in the first place, why artists can’t afford to live in cities, and why the infrastructure that once supported experimental work has been systematically defunded.

And we don’t ask whether the scene was ever as pure as we remember. The jazz age speakeasies were owned by gangsters. The seventies punk clubs were financed by drug money and trust funds. The eighties art world ran on cocaine and corporate sponsorship. There was never a golden age when art existed outside the economy, when creators made work untouched by commerce or class. The fantasy of purity is just that—a fantasy, useful for nostalgia, useless for understanding how culture actually works.

I was in a checkout queue last week and overheard two teenagers talking about an album I love, a record I’ve listened to maybe fifty times. One of them was explaining it to the other: you have to listen to the whole thing in order, it’s like a movie, the seventh track is where it all comes together. I wanted to lean over and join the conversation. I wanted to tell them about the first time I heard it, in a friend’s car driving through the foothills of Himachal, how we didn’t talk for an hour, just let it play while the trees went by. I didn’t say anything (I’m not a monster), but I sat there with this warm feeling in my chest, the feeling of culture working the way it’s supposed to, one person handing something to another, no algorithm involved. This is how I found most of the things I love. Not reviews or playlists, but through someone I trusted saying you have to hear this, you have to read this, you have to see this. The chain of hands is long and invisible. It’s how meaning travels.

Cool is a marketing category. This is the thing I keep coming back to, the thing that seems so obvious I’m almost embarrassed to say it.

Cool is a way of sorting culture into hierarchies that serve the interests of the people doing the sorting—the critics or the “tastemakers” and mostly, the brands. Cool things are worth paying attention to. Uncool things can be ignored. And the people who get to decide what’s cool accrue power from the deciding, which is why they’re so invested in the category, why they write endless essays about its decline.

My friend Devi makes music in his apartment, layering vocals and synths on software he taught himself to use. He has maybe four hundred followers on Instagram. He plays shows to rooms of twenty, thirty people. By the metrics that the culture industry uses to measure success, he barely exists.

But he’s making work that moves me—dense, strange compositions that sound like nothing else I’ve heard and, does the thing art is supposed to do… make the world feel briefly larger and more possible.

Is what Devi does cool? I don’t know. I don’t care. The question feels beside the point. He’s not trying to be cool. He’s trying to make something true, and sometimes he succeeds, and the people in the room when he succeeds know it, and that is enough.

This is where the discourse loses me. It measures vitality by visibility. It assumes that if something isn’t being talked about, posted about, it must not exist. But culture has never worked that way. The metrics capture what’s measurable, and what’s measurable is almost by definition what has already crossed into the realm of the commercial and the branded. The thing that hasn’t crossed over like the basement show, the small-press book, the gallery that survives on grants and stubbornness, doesn’t register. It’s invisible to the tools we use to see.

And so we conclude that culture is dead, when what we really mean is that our instruments can’t detect it.

But meaning doesn’t work that way. Meaning is not a scarce resource that gets depleted when too many people have access to it. A song doesn’t become less meaningful because a finance bro heard it at a rooftop party. A novel doesn’t lose its power because it went viral on TikTok. The assumption that it does—that wider access dilutes value—is a scarcity logic borrowed from economics and misapplied to art. It’s the logic of the luxury good, where exclusivity is the point. But art is not a luxury good, or shouldn’t have to be just to exist.

The culture writers who mourn the death of cool are mourning something real, but I don’t think it’s culture. It’s the gatekeeping. The old systems that allowed certain people to confer status on certain things have broken down, and the breakdown feels like loss to the people who benefited from those systems. But the breakdown is not the same as the death of the thing itself. Culture keeps happening. It just doesn’t need permission anymore.

My grandmother doesn’t know what cool is. She has never heard of the discourse. She doesn’t have Twitter or Instagram or any way of knowing what the culture writers think about the state of the arts.

But she has taste. Strong, funnily unapologetic. She likes certain ragas and not others. She can tell you exactly why that singer’s ornamentation is too busy, why another’s silence between phrases is just right. She has opinions about the decline of cinema that she will share at length if you let her, tracing the shift from the films of her youth to the present with a precision that would shame most critics.

Her taste was not formed by algorithms or influencers in any publication. It was formed by decades of attention to the things that moved her and trying to understand why. It’s an embodied knowledge instead of a position. She doesn’t need anyone to tell her what’s good. She knows her own taste.

I think about her when I read the essays about the collapse of taste, the flattening of hierarchies. And I think that the systems of cultural authority were always partial. They always excluded more than they included. My grandmother’s taste was never legible to them, and she never needed them, and she’s fine.

But there is a darker thing happening, something that worries me more than the death of cool or the loss of gatekeeping authority.

It’s what happens when artists internalize the gaze.

I’ve watched it happen to people I love. They start out making work that’s strange and specific and doesn’t care whether anyone understands it. And then, slowly, they start to notice that they’re being watched. They see the metrics and the comments. They realize that people are trying to put them in boxes and categorize them so they can be understood and marketed with other things that already exist. The work then starts to bend toward the audience. The edges soften. The strangeness gets filed down into something more palatable and shareable.

I don’t blame them. The pressure is immense. We live in a world that tells artists they must be their own publicists, brand managers and even their own content strategists. The platforms reward consistency and frequency. To survive as an artist now often means to think like a marketer, to anticipate what will perform and optimize for reach.

But there’s a cost to this, and the cost is the work itself. Because the thing that makes art matter—the thing that separates it from content, and brand extension—is precisely its resistance to the logic of the market. Art is not efficient. It doesn’t optimize. It follows paths that make no sense to anyone except the person following them, and sometimes not even to them until much later, if ever.

The problem with being an artist is that you see paths where there are none. You make connections that other people can’t see, that might not even exist outside your own perception. This is what we call vision, or genius depending on whether the work succeeds or fails. And other people will judge you for it. They will ask why you’re wasting your time on something that doesn’t sell, doesn’t fit into any existing category.

And if you listen to them, if you take their advice, you might find an audience. You might build a following, get the brand deals, achieve the metrics of success. But you will have abandoned the thing that made your work yours. You will have traded your vision for visibility. And the world will have lost something it didn’t know it needed.. a path that only you could see, the door that only you could open.

I went to another show last month, a different bar, a different neighborhood. This one was in Bed-Stuy, a small room above a restaurant, reached by a narrow staircase that smelled like jerk chicken. The band was four guys from Queens, all of them in their forties, playing a kind of jazz-funk fusion that shouldn’t have worked but did. The audience was maybe fourty people—some young, some old, some who looked like they’d been coming to shows like this for decades.

There was a moment, about an hour in, when the bassist started a groove and the drummer locked in and the two horn players traded phrases that built and built until the room felt like a single organism, breathing together, held in the same suspended moment. I looked around and everyone was feeling it, the woman next to me with her eyes closed, the old man in the corner nodding his head, the bartender who had stopped pouring drinks to listen.

I want to end with something my friend said to me a few months ago. We were at a gallery in Shanthinagar—not one of the fancy ones, a small project space run by artists, the kind of place that survives on grants and stubbornness. The work was video art, projections on the walls, abstract and slow. We were the only people there.

“The internet verdict would say this is dead,” Naman said. “Empty room. No buzz. No one cares.”

We watched the videos for a while. Light moving across a surface. A voice murmuring something I couldn’t quite hear.

“But we’re here,” he said. “We care. Doesn’t that count?”

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. A tree falling in a forest makes a sound whether or not anyone hears it. A show in a small room matters whether or not it gets written up. The people in the room know it matters. The artist knows it matters. And that knowing is where culture actually builds and lives.

Not in the essays about what’s dying or dead. In the room. In the car. In the moment when the bassist starts a groove and the drummer locks in and everyone breathing together becomes, for a few minutes, the same body. The death of cool is a story we tell ourselves when we’ve stopped trusting our own experience. The cure is not to opine about what’s wrong. The cure is perhaps to go to the show, read the book and look at the painting. The cure is to stand in a room and let the sound move through you, and to know that this will go on long after the discourse has moved on to its next obituary.

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I am writing this from my parent’s house in Bhubaneswar and the roses in my mum’s garden have started blooming in that wonderful December way. It is a day before Christmas. The bougainvilleas at the nursery near Jaydev Vihar Square are stacked in clay pots along the roadside, their red leaves almost too bright against the gray concrete. My friend and I bought three this morning and arranged them on the veranda next to the tulsi plant and she tells me it feels like a small act of religious diplomacy.

I grew up in Odisha but spent my formative years inside the tall white walls of Catholic schools, where Christmas wasn’t a holiday I observed passively from the outside. The sisters at St. Vincent’s in Berhampur, the Jesuits at Loyola in Bhubaneswar, they wove the season into us so deeply that even decades later and living miles away, I still feel a stillness descend over me every December.

This letter is my attempt to sit inside that feeling and trace its shape. As always, I’d love to hear what you think.

Love, Ananya.

St. Vincent’s sat at the end of a narrow lane in Berhampur, behind a gate painted blue that a watchman opened each morning at 7:45. I was four years old when I first walked through it, holding my mother’s hand, wearing a white pinafore with a Peter Pan collar that she had ironed that morning on a folded bedsheet on the floor. The nuns wore habits then, white cotton saris with blue borders, and they moved through the corridors with their rubber chappals silent against the red oxide floors.

December at St. Vincent’s began with the roses. The convent had a garden behind the chapel where roses grew in colors I have not seen since—my favourite being a white variety so pure it looked like paper. Sister Rachel, who taught us moral science and had a mole on her left cheek that I found fascinating, would cut them herself in the early mornings and arrange them in brass vases near the altar. By the second week of December, the whole school smelled like incense and the faint chalk dust that never quite left the classrooms.

We practiced carols for weeks. O Come All Ye Faithful, which none of us understood but which felt holy in our mouths. Silent Night had a melody so familiar it barely required thought, our small voices pooling together in the assembly hall where the windows were always open and the crows sometimes interrupted. Away in a cradle, I sang the same to my baby cousin once and made her cry, though I was never sure if it was the song or my voice.

The Christmas program was held on the last day before the winter holidays, in the courtyard under a shamiana that the school rented from a wedding tent supplier. Parents sat on white plastic chairs. Fathers in their office clothes, mothers in silk saris they saved for occasions, grandmothers with jasmine in their hair. We performed the nativity play, the same one every year, with a plastic baby Jesus borrowed from the chapel and a donkey made of cardboard that someone’s father had painted. I was a shepherd twice and an angel once. The angel year, I wore a white frock my mum had stitched and silver tinsel wrapped around my head like a halo. I remember the tinsel kept slipping, and I spent the entire performance pushing it back with one hand while holding a candle with the other, terrified I would set my hair on fire.

After the play, we received gifts. Small packets wrapped in red crepe paper, handed out by a man dressed as Santa Claus whose Hindi accent slipped through when he said ho ho ho. Inside the packets: an orange, a few glucose biscuits, a pencil. I don’t remember wanting more.

In the third grade, we moved to Bhubaneswar, and I transferred to Loyola, a Jesuit school. The shift was seismic in small ways. Loyola was larger, louder, full of boys who ran and shoved in the corridors in a way that felt foreign after the quiet discipline of the convent. The priests were not nuns. They wore plain white cassocks and had names like Father D’Souza and Father Thomas, and they called us ‘child’ in a way that made me feel seen and slightly nervous.

But Christmas was still Christmas.

The Loyola Christmas was grander, more theatrical. The school had a proper auditorium with a stage and red velvet curtains that a man operated from a small room in the back. The nativity play here was a production—costumes sewn by the home science department, a real crib built by the senior boys, a star made of yellow chart paper and fairy lights that hung from a wire above the stage and swayed gently whenever someone walked too fast beneath it.

What I remember more than the performance is the rehearsals. We practiced in the late afternoons, when the light came golden through the high windows of the auditorium and the air was cool enough that we didn’t sweat through our uniforms. The older students—the ones playing the wise men, the innkeepers, the angels—talked to us like we were colleagues. One boy, who played Joseph, taught me how to hold the plastic baby Jesus so it looked natural. “Cradle the head”, he said, demonstrating with a seriousness that made me want to laugh. Like it’s real.

After rehearsals, we drank Frooti from small tetra packs that the school provided, sucking the last drops through the tiny straws until the boxes collapsed. We sat on the steps outside the auditorium and watched the sky turn pink. Someone always had a packet of Parle-G, and we passed it around, the biscuits softening in the humidity. I think of those afternoons often. The easy proximity. And a sense of being part of something larger without having to name it.

The Catholic calendar shaped my childhood in ways I didn’t fully understand until I left. At school, we lit candles on the Advent wreath each Monday—one the first week, two the second, and so on—and Father Thomas gave short homilies about patience and hope that I mostly tuned out but that lodged somewhere anyway.

At home, we were Hindu. My mum did puja every morning, the small brass bell ringing through the house at 7 AM. My dad fasted on Thursdays for reasons I never fully grasped. But Christmas was ours too. Not in a religious sense but in a celebratory one, the way Diwali belongs to everyone in India regardless of what they believe. I baked a cake every year—a simple vanilla sponge with chocolate icing. The cake was always slightly dense, always delicious. We ate it on Christmas morning with tea.

I hung a single red sock on my bedroom door, a sock my father had bought from a street vendor. Santa Claus didn’t come to our house, but my parents filled the sock anyway: a packet of gems, a small toy, once a book of Spiderman comics that I read until the pages fell out. The ritual mattered more than the contents.

On Christmas Eve, my mother took me to midnight mass at the cathedral near Satya Nagar. The cathedral was always packed, the pews overflowing, people standing in the aisles and spilling out onto the steps. I loved the chaos of it. And the incense so thick it made my eyes water. The choir singing in Odia, the language transforming hymns I knew into something unfamiliar and beautiful. The moment when the priest raised the host and the bells rang and everyone knelt, even the people who had been talking a second before, even the babies who had been crying. A hush so complete it felt like the whole world had paused.

I wasn’t Catholic. I never took communion. But I knelt with everyone else, and in those moments I felt something I still can’t place like a door cracked open to a room I couldn’t see. I still don’t.

Loyola gave me a facility with Christianity that sometimes surprises people. I know the difference between the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin Birth, a distinction that confuses even some Catholics. I have read the Gospels multiple times, and I find in them a strangeness and a beauty that moves me. The lilies of the field. The woman at the well. The disciples falling asleep in Gethsemane while Jesus sweated blood, which has always struck me as the most human detail in the whole story that even people who loved him couldn’t stay awake for him in his worst hour.

The Jesuits taught us to think. That was their gift and their danger. In moral science class, Father posed hypotheticals that had no clean answers. A man steals bread to feed his starving family—is it wrong? A soldier follows an unjust order—is he responsible? We debated these questions with the earnestness of twelve-year-olds who believed that the world was a puzzle that could be solved if we only thought hard enough.

I don’t believe that anymore. But I’m grateful for the training. I’m grateful for the instinct to ask why, to sit in ambiguity, to resist the comfort of easy certainty. The Jesuits gave me that. So did Christmas, in its way. A holiday that asks you to believe in impossible things—a virgin birth, a God who becomes a baby in a cow’s feeding trough.

I left home and Christmas became a different thing. I have spent Christmases in the country where I barely noticed the day passing, too caught up in work or travel or the low-grade exhaustion that December brings.

But the body remembers. Every year, something in me stirs when the carols start. I hear a cover of a Christmas Hymn in a coffee shop and I am suddenly eight years old again, standing in the auditorium with my classmates, the fairy-light star swaying above us.

No matter where I am—whatever city, whatever country, whatever state of my life—I find a midnight mass. It has become the one ritual I refuse to let go.

The past few years, it has been Bangalore. The shops string up lights and the bakeries sell plum cakes wrapped in red cellophane and the old Methodist church on 100 Feet Road fills to bursting on Christmas Eve. The congregation there is different from the one I knew as a child—more young professionals than grandmothers with jasmine, and more phones recording the choir than hymnals held open! But the bones are the same. The incense. The bells. The hush.

Three years ago, I walked to that church alone at 11:30 PM, weaving through the crowds on the pavement, past the chaat stalls and the men selling balloons and the families taking photos in front of the lit-up cross. Inside, I found a spot near the back, squeezed between a woman in a green silk sari and a young man who kept checking his watch. The choir sang Hark! The Herald Angels Sing in a key slightly too high, and the priest’s homily was long and meandering and hard to hear over the crying babies. None of it mattered. When the bells rang and we knelt, I closed my eyes and felt the same presence I’d felt as a child. The same door cracking open.

Last year, my best friend came with me for midnight mass. He is not religious in any formal way—his Sundays are for cricket and lazing around, not mass—but he held my hand when we walked in. Afterward, on the walk back, he said: I didn’t know you did this. I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t know how to explain it, the pull of a ritual that isn’t quite mine, the comfort of kneeling in a place full of strangers who are all, for a few minutes, looking in the same direction.

After midnight mass, we throw a party. This, too, has become a ritual.

It started small—just my friends and a few of their friends and neighbors, drinking rum cake and cheap wine on a Hyderabad balcony while the church bells faded. But it has grown. Last year, there were seventy people in my apartment: friends and cousins and, second cousins and friends of friends. The music was too loud and the neighbors complained and someone spilled red wine on the sofa and no one cared.

What I love about these parties is the democracy of them. Everyone brings something. My friend makes her signature chocolate mousse, which she learned from a YouTube video years ago and has since perfected. Another brings his pressure-cooker cake, still slightly dense, still delicious. Someone brought a pavlova last year, the meringue collapsing slightly in the Bangalore humidity, and we ate it with our fingers and declared it perfect. Someone always brings too much alcohol and someone else always brings not enough, and by 2 AM we are raiding the kitchen for mixers, making do with Sprite and mango juice and once, memorably, coconut water.

The party sprawls. People end up in clusters—on the deck, in the kitchen, cross-legged on the floor of the living room where the sofa has been pushed aside. Conversations layer over each other: a friend and a colleague arguing about cricket, my cousin and her boyfriend debating where to travel next year. I drift between groups, refilling glasses, stealing bites of food, listening. At some point the music shifts from carols to Bollywood, and a friend pulls everyone up to dance.

I think Christmas makes people soft. Or maybe it gives them permission to be soft, which is not quite the same thing. At these parties, I have seen my friend—a man who speaks mostly in grunts and sports statistics—put his arm around another and sway with her to a song. I have seen another, who is not a hugger, hug someone in the kitchen when he thought no one was looking. I have seen old grievances set aside, at least for a night. My cousin who hasn’t spoken to her friend in months will sit next to her on the balcony and share a cigarette.

The softness is temporary. By January, the old distances will probably return in the humdrum of life. But for one night, in a crowded apartment in Indiranagar with too much wine and not enough chairs, something loosens. People arrive as themselves—tired, complicated, carrying their own private weights—and for a few hours, they put the weight down.

I teach a class on Saturdays, online, for children in a government school. It started when a friend connected me with an NGO that needed volunteers, and it has continued in fits and starts ever since. The children are between seven and fourteen, most of them the first in their families to attend school past the fourth grade. We are supposed to be working on English comprehension now, but the lessons often veer. They want to know about my job. They want to know about my latest trip and most importantly if I met any movie stars.

The past two weeks, they wanted to know about Christmas.

It started with a boy named Sanjay, who is twelve and has a gap-toothed grin and a habit of unmuting himself at random moments to share observations. Akka, he said last Saturday, interrupting a lesson on subject-verb agreement, why do Christians have a tree inside their house? I laughed and abandoned the worksheet. We spent the rest of the hour talking about Christmas.

Their questions were wonderful. “Why is Santa Claus fat? Does he get stuck in the chimney?” ‘Why do people give gifts?” “Is Jesus the same as God or different?”

The week of my the last class before my trip home, they made me cards. The NGO coordinator had given them chart paper and sketch pens, and they held them up to the camera one by one. MERRY CHRISTMAS AKKA in wobbly letters, decorated with stars and bells and trees. One girl had drawn a Santa Claus with a mustache, which she explained was because her father has a mustache and she thinks Santa should too. Raju drew a snowflake, six-pointed and symmetrical, and told me he had looked up how to draw one on his cosuin’s phone.

I don’t know why these small offerings move me so much—the effort of it, the care, the fact that they thought of me. When I thanked them, my voice cracked, and Sanjay unmuted himself to ask if I was crying. A little, I admitted. He grinned. “That’s okay, akka”, he said. “My mother cries at everything also”.

This year I am here, in Bhubaneswar, and Christmas will be quieter than Bangalore. No party, no seventy people crammed into an apartment, no pavlova collapsing in the humidity. Just my parents, and a few cousins and relatives who will stop by in the afternoon. My cake. The plastic tree with its flickering lights.

I arrived three weeks ago, red-eyed from the flight, my suitcase stuffed with gifts I’d panic-bought at JFK. My parents picked me up at the airport, my father waving from behind the barrier, my mother already crying because I hadn’t been home in over a year. The drive home was quiet, the streets empty, the streetlights casting long orange shadows on the pavement. I fell asleep in the back seat and woke up in the driveway.

The house is the same and different. My tiny library with books now dusty from not being cared for anymore and, my room with the same blue bedspread I remember from high school, slightly faded now, the cotton soft from years of washing.

On my way home yesterday, we passed the cathedral near Satya Nagar, and I asked the driver to stop. I don’t know why. I chalked it upto instinct. The cathedral looked smaller than I remembered, the white facade streaked with gray, the gate propped open with a brick. Inside, a few women were arranging flowers near the altar—marigolds and roses, the same color I remembered from St. Vincent’s. A man was testing the sound system, his voice echoing off the high ceilings: testing, testing, one two three.

I sat in a pew near the back and let the quiet settle over me. The light through the stained glass windows made patterns on the floor—blue, red, gold. I thought about the midnights I’d spent here as a child, the incense and the crowds and the hush when the bells rang.

I thought about all the people this season has brought close to me, in ways I couldn’t have predicted. The strangers I’ve knelt beside at midnight mass in cities I was only passing through. The family members who soften for one night a year. The children on a screen who wanted to know why Santa is fat.

I sat there for a while. Long enough that my mother called asking where I was. Long enough that the women finished with the flowers and left, nodding at me on their way out. Long enough that the man with the microphone gave up and the cathedral fell silent, just me and the dust motes floating in the colored light.

I don’t know if I believe in the things I learned at St. Vincent’s and Loyola. I don’t believe in virgin births or moving stars or a God who becomes a baby in a feeding trough.

But I believe in the gathering and the way a holiday can pull people together across distances they didn’t know they could cross.

Mostly, I believe in this—I am here, it is almost Christmas, and the bouganvilleas on the veranda are impossibly red against the morning light.

I let it stay.

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When I was twelve years old, drunk on the hubris that comes with unlimited free time and a newly discovered Goodreads account, I set myself a challenge: read 150 books in a year.

I did it. Once.

That singular triumph has haunted me ever since. Every January, I dutifully set my Goodreads challenge to 150 books, as if the ghost of my preteen self… the one who could devour three classic lit books in a weekend, read through math class, at the dinner table and under the covers with a flashlight (much to my mother’s dismay) might somehow possess my adult body and make it happen again.

It hasn’t. That victory happened four times total, all of them more than a decade ago, back when my brain hadn’t yet been colonized by the general exhaustion of being a person with responsibilities.

This year, I read 77 books. Five of them were carried over from last year, a detail that feels important to confess. Seventy-seven is respectable. It’s more than most people read. It’s probably evidence of a life still oriented toward books despite everything working against that orientation, or so I tell myself.

But it’s also exactly half of what I promised myself, what I promise myself every year with the same stubborn optimism of someone who keeps buying lottery tickets.

I could change the goal. Make it achievable. Set it to 80 or 90 and actually meet it for once. But there’s something about keeping that 150 that feels necessary as a reminder of who I was, and still want to be.

How I Read This Year

The thing about reading 77 books while working full-time, freelancing, maintaining friendships and occasionally remembering to eat vegetables is that it requires a strategic ruthlessness about time.

I stopped waiting for the perfect reading conditions this time like the free weekend or the mythical moment when I’d have “time to really focus.”

I read in the park, in the auto, sometimes on the metro, standing pressed against strangers, my book held at an angle to avoid elbowing anyone. I read between meetings, ten minutes here, fifteen there. I kept a book in my bag always, a talisman against waiting rooms, delayed flights and the dead time of being early to something.

The Champaca Vasanth Nagar store became my unofficial reading room. Those afternoon hours at their tables, surrounded by books I hadn’t read yet and might never read, created a kind of literary greenhouse effect. I was more likely to actually read when I was near more books. Something about the ambient possibility, I suppose.

I also made peace with abandonment. If a book wasn’t working by page 80, I put it down. Life is too short and my reading goals are already too ambitious to spend time on books that feel like homework. It also freed up space for the books that actually wanted to be read.

What helped most, though, was keeping my reading separate from optimization. I didn’t track reading speed or try to maximize books per hour. I read literary fiction, philosophy alongside sci-fi, poetry alongside doorstoppers about science. I also allowed for mood reading, for whim, for the book I picked up on a Saturday morning because the blurb spoke to me.

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What I Read This Year

1. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers - Found family in space. The plot meanders, but that’s the point. It’s about the journey, the small kindnesses between crew members, the way home is people and not a place. Comfort food in book form.

2. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan - Devastating in its restraint. Keegan writes about moral courage with the precision of a surgeon. Every sentence does exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. Read it in one sitting and sat with it for days after.

3. James by Percival Everett - A retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s perspective that’s both a meditation on freedom and a masterclass in voice. Everett doesn’t flinch from the violence of erasure. Brilliant and necessary.

4. If I Were Another by Mahmoud Darwish - Palestinian poetry that’s both particular and universal. Darwish writes about exile like it’s a country you can visit but never leave.

5. Bread of Angels by Patti Smith - Patti Smith writing about art and hunger and Paris. Her sentences have a quality of devotion that makes you want to live more attentively. I underlined half of it (like all her other work).

6. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson - Nelson writes about gender, family and desire with startling clarity. Her writing takes some time getting used to, but changed how I think about categories.

7. The Conscious Brain by Steven Rose - Dense but rewarding. Rose writes about consciousness with the humility of someone who knows how much we don’t know. Made me think differently about the relationship between mind and matter.

8. The Bhagavad Gita - My first real foray into Eastern philosophy, picked up on a whim after years of circling around it. I’d always been intimidated by sacred text worried I’d miss something essential without the proper context. What moved me most was how it reframes anxiety about the future as fundamentally an error.

9. Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico - Italian novel about a couple trying to optimize their life through technology. Quietly unsettling. Makes you question the whole quantified self movement while being oddly compelling about it.

10. Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie - Finally read it. The controversy makes more sense now, but so does the dazzling artistry. Rushdie’s maximalism either works for you or it doesn’t. For me, it mostly did.

11. Orbital by Samantha Harvey - Six astronauts, one day in orbit. Harvey turns the mundane into the profound. The way she writes about Earth from space made me cry on the metro, which was inconvenient but worth it.

12. A Thousand Mornings by Mary Oliver - Oliver’s poems are small doors into wonder. I kept this on my nightstand and read one poem each morning. Some days that was the only beautiful thing that happened, and it was enough.

13. The Metaphysical Poets - An old beat-up copy annotated by a stranger in the 70s. Their marginalia became part of my reading experience, a conversation across decades about Donne and Herbert. Found it at a used bookstore in Mumbai and it felt like fate.

14. The Nightmare of Black Island by Mike Tucker - Doctor Who tie-in novel. Pure escapism. Sometimes you need aliens and time travel and no emotional stakes whatsoever. This delivered.

15. Sula by Toni Morrison - Morrison’s prose still stops me cold. The friendship between Sula and Nel is one of literature’s great complicated loves. Morrison refuses to make either woman right or wrong. They’re both. That’s the whole point.

16. The Vegetarian by Hang King - Should be required reading for anyone who thinks they understand the female body or desire or autonomy. Disturbing and gorgeous. Han Kang writes violence like poetry.

17. Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong - Vuong’s debut poetry collection. Each poem is a wound dressed in beauty. The way he writes about war, queerness, and his mother… I had to keep putting it down to breathe.

18. Book Lovers by Emily Henry - Romance that’s also about being a woman in your 30s who’s prioritized work over relationships and is maybe starting to regret it. Funny, smart, emotionally honest. Henry gets it.

19. Time is a Mother by Ocean Vuong - His second collection, written after his mother’s death. Grief made lyric. I ugly-cried in a café reading this. The barista pretended not to notice.

20. How to Build a Car by Adrian Newey - Finally finished this after three years of sporadic attempts. Newey’s obsession with aerodynamics is infectious and brilliant.

21. Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert - Gilbert’s love letter to creativity. Some of it feels a bit woo, but the core argument that creativity deserves your devotion landed when I needed it to.
    

22. Cixin Liu - The Three Body Problem series - Hard sci-fi that asks: what if we’re not alone, and what if that’s terrifying? Liu’s ideas are massive, his characters less so, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Dark Forest theory for months.
    

23. Bear Town by Fredrik Backman - A small Swedish town, a hockey team, sexual assault and how communities protect their own. Devastating and hopeful in turns. Backman writes grief better than almost anyone.
    

    

24. Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson - Murder mystery that’s also a metafictional romp. Clever without being annoying about it. Read it on a flight and disturbed my seatmate with my laughter.
    

25. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin - A love story about two game designers that’s not really a romance. Zevin writes about creative partnership, ambition and how we hurt the people closest to us. Gutting.
    

26. Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors - Three sisters scattered across London, LA and Paris reunite in New York after their fourth sister Nicky’s death. Mellors writes grief and addiction with specificity.
    

27. The True Subject by Faiz - Urdu poetry in translation. Faiz writes revolution and romance with equal passion. Reading him feels like remembering something you never knew.
    

28. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (reread) - Reread in an annotated edition marketed specifically to scientists and engineers. The annotations transform the reading, notes on galvanism, contemporary scientific debates about the nature of life, the actual experiments Shelley would have known about. The scientific footnotes make clear how thoroughly she’d researched, how seriously she engaged with the cutting-edge science of her era.
    

29. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson - Bryson makes science accessible without dumbing it down. His enthusiasm is contagious. I learned more about the universe from this than from my entire formal education.
    

30. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney - Two brothers, grief, messy relationships. She’s gotten better at writing men, better at writing desire. The ending made me want to throw the book and hug it simultaneously.
    

31. The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo - Japanese detective fiction. Atmospheric, intricate, satisfying. Made me want to read all the Kindaichi cases, though I haven’t yet.
    

32. The Creative Act by Rick Rubin - Rubin on creativity as spiritual practice. Some of it feels obvious, but sometimes you need someone to tell you the obvious things beautifully. Useful for creative blocks.

33. Daredevil: Born Again by Frank Miller - Graphic novel. Miller’s dark, gritty reinvention of Daredevil. Morally complex take on the character. The art still holds up.
    

34. Star Wars Episode 1 by Terry Brooks - Novelization of The Phantom Menace. Nostalgia read. Better than the movie, which isn’t saying much, but Brooks adds emotional depth that Lucas didn’t film.
    

35. The Dark Tower Volume 1 by Stephen King - Started King’s magnum opus. The gunslinger chasing the man in black across the desert. Weird, sparse, compelling. I need to read the rest.
    

36. The Details by Ia Genberg - A fever-dream novel structured as four portraits: Johanna, Niki, Alejandro, Birgitte. Each section named after someone who left an indelible mark on the narrator’s life. Genberg poses the question ‘are we are just composites of everyone who’s touched us?’

37. This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone - Love letters between two time-traveling agents on opposite sides of a war. Gorgeous prose that feels like poetry. Read it in one night and immediately wanted to reread it.
    

38. Ways of Seeing by John Berger - Art criticism that changed how I look at everything. Berger on the male gaze, on reproduction, on advertising all so very relevant, even today.

    
    

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39. Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag - Essays that argue for experiencing art rather than explaining it. Sontag’s intellectual confidence is bracing. Makes me want to think harder and write better.
    

40. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell - O’Farrell imagines Shakespeare’s wife Agnes after their son’s death, and the play that emerged from that grief. O’Farrell makes the unknowable known through precise attention to physical detail. Devastating and exact.
    

41. Serious Concerns by Wendy Cope - British poet who writes about ordinary life with wit and tenderness. Cope makes domesticity profound without being precious about it.
    

42. Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis by Wendy Cope - More Cope. Her poems about relationships are devastatingly accurate. “Bloody men are like bloody buses” lives rent-free in my head.
    

43. Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin - Two couples, domestic comedy. Colwin writes happiness as complex and interesting, which is harder than writing misery. Made me want to cook elaborate meals for friends.
    

44. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Helman - Dystopian novel about women imprisoned underground. Haunting and strange. Helman never explains what happened, which makes it more unsettling.
    

45. Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood - Memoir about growing up with a gun-loving, conservative Catholic priest father. Lockwood’s prose is incandescent. Made me laugh and wince in equal measure.
    

46. In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat by John Gribbin - Quantum physics for laypeople. Gribbin explains the uncertainty principle in ways that made me feel less uncertain about my own life, somehow.
    

47. Quantum Physics for Poets by Leon M. Lederman & Christopher T. Hill - More quantum physics. This one’s more poetic, less technical. Confirms that nobody really understands quantum mechanics, which is comforting.

48. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh - A woman spends a year trying to sleep her way through depression in early 2000s New York. Moshfegh writes numbness better than anyone. Darkly funny and deeply sad.
    

49. City of Djinns by William Dalrymple - Dalrymple’s love letter to Delhi. Made me homesick for a city I’ve only visited and want to see it with fresh eyes. His historical digressions are as compelling as the main narrative.
    

50. Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton - De Botton applies philosophical ideas to everyday problems. It’s practical wisdom that doesn’t feel reductive. Good for existential crises at 2 AM.
    

51. A Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich - World history written for children but sophisticated enough for adults. Gombrich’s narrative throughline makes millennia feel coherent.

52. The Yellow Book by Amitava Kumar - Kumar writes his father’s death through photographs, fragments, the spaces between memory and documentation. The yellow book is both literal object and metaphor for everything we try to preserve against time.
    

53. How to Forget by Meera Ganpathi - Essays about memory, trauma and what we choose to carry. Ganpathi writes with the precision of someone who’s thought deeply about forgetting.
    

54. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson - The authorized biography. Jobs was brilliant and terrible, often simultaneously. Isaacson doesn’t shy from either. Made me think about legacy and what we sacrifice for “greatness.”
    

55. Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read by Suresh Menon - Essays about cricket, literature, and the spaces between. Menon writes like conversation and the book is surprisingly profound.
    

56. A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby - Four strangers meet on a roof on New Year’s Eve, all planning to jump. Hornby makes suicide funny without making it a joke. The perfect balance.

    

57. All Fours by Miranda July - July’s novel about a woman’s midlife crisis/awakening. Weird and wonderful and unlike anything else I read this year. The sex scenes are surprisingly tender.
    

58. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar - Cyrus, a young addict in recovery, researches historical martyrs while trying to figure out what’s worth dying for, or living for. The way he braids the sacred and profane creates this strange aching beauty. What moved me most was his refusal to make addiction noble or purely destructive. It just is. A debut that announces a major talent.
    

59. Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka - Kafka’s love letters. Reading someone else’s intimate correspondence feels voyeuristic but illuminating. His anxiety was cosmic even in romance.
    

60. Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali - Turkish novel about obsessive love. Ali writes longing like a physical ache. The kind of book that makes you want to write letters you’ll never send.
    

61. Collected Essays and Interviews 1998 - 2012 by Arundhati Roy - Essays spanning decades. Roy’s moral clarity is uncompromising. Reading her makes me want to be braver in my own political thinking.
    

62. Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy - Roy’s first memoir, written after her mother’s death. This isn’t the Roy of sweeping political essays, it’s much rawer, more vulnerable. Roy makes her painful childhood funny without making it less painful. A masterclass in refusing victimhood while honoring the wound.
    

63. Stoner by John Williams - Save me beauty in mundanity. Academic novel about an ordinary life lived with quiet dignity. Williams makes the unremarkable remarkable through sheer attentiveness.
    

64. Good Material by Dolly Alderman - Romantic comedy about a comedian processing a breakup. Alderman gets the millennial relationship anxiety exactly right. Funny and aching.

65. Notes to John by Joan Didion - Keeping aside conflicted feelings about the posthumous publishing, beautiful narration of the unfinished fragments Didion wrote after her dear husband’s death. Reading her grief feels like an intrusion and an honor simultaneously.

66. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner - Spy thriller about an American agent infiltrating French eco-activists. Kushner writes intelligence, both the spy kind and the intellectual kind, brilliantly.

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67. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut - Vonnegut’s satirical apocalypse is gorgeous perfection. “And so it goes” remains the perfect response to absurdity.
    

68. The End of Everything by Katie Mack - Astrophysics about how the universe will end. Mack makes cosmological death surprisingly readable. Weirdly comforting.
    

69. Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq - Twelve stories spanning three decades, translated from Kannada, about Muslim women in southern India. Deepa Bhasthi’s translation preserves the colloquial richness, the regional specificity. Reading voices from Kannada literature for the first time felt like a door opening.
    

70. Small Boat by Vincent Delacroix - Memoir about sailing alone across the Atlantic. Delacroix writes solitude without romanticizing it. Made me understand why people seek that kind of aloneness.
    

71. A Psalm for the Wild Built by Becky Chambers - Novella about a tea monk and a robot in a hopeful future. Chambers specializes in gentle sci-fi that doesn’t require catastrophe. Soul food.
    

72. Fermat’s Enigma by Simon Singh - The story of proving Fermat’s Last Theorem. Singh makes advanced mathematics thrilling. I understood maybe 70% but loved 100%.
    

73. The Big Bang by Simon Singh - Singh on cosmology. His enthusiasm makes complex physics accessible. I now understand the Big Bang slightly better, which counts as growth.
    

74. Where Stories Gather by Karuna Ezara Parikh - Poetry about diaspora, belonging and home. Parikh writes identity with nuance.
    

75. In Defense of Witches by Mona Chollet - Feminist reclamation of the witch as symbol. Chollet traces misogyny through witch hunts to modern microaggressions. Angry in the best way.
    

76. 100 Essential Things You Didn’t Know About Maths and the Arts by John D. Barrow - Exactly what it says. Barrow finds connections between mathematics and art I’d never considered. Perfect for reading in small chunks.
    

77. The Scaling Era: An Oral History of AI 2019-2025 by Dwarkesh Patel with Gavin Leech - Speculative oral history about AI’s development. Reading it in 2025 feels uncanny…some predictions already coming true, others wildly off. Good snapshot of how we’ll remember this moment in tech.

Breakdown

Literary fiction dominated at 30% of my reading—23 books that I’d classify as ‘serious’ contemporary literature. No surprise there. But what did surprise me: poetry came in second at 13%. I didn’t plan this. I just kept reaching for poetry when prose felt too dense.

Twenty different cultural backgrounds represented across 77 books with diverse storytelling.

The translation ratio tells its own story though: 79% originally in English, 21% translated. I want that number higher next year.

55% women authors, 43% men, 2% non-binary. This feels about right for where I am—I actively seek out women writers, but I’m not doctrinaire about it. The best book is the best book, regardless. Though I notice the science books skew male (Simon Singh, Bill Bryson, Steven Rose), while the memoir and poetry skew heavily female. Genre has its own gender patterns.

Only 4 debut authors this year. I was clearly drawn to established voices. There’s less risk in that, but also less discovery. Next year, I want more debuts. More first books by writers finding their voice in real time.

Eight books that were explicitly about reading, writing, or making art: The Argonauts, Against Interpretation, Ways of Seeing, The Creative Act, Big Magic, Bread of Angels, Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read, The Details.

What This Means for Next Year

Looking at these stats, here’s what I want to shift:

• More translations (goal: 30% instead of 21%)

• More debuts (at least 10)

• More non-Western authors

• Keep the poetry habit (10 collections felt right)

• Try again to make it to 150 (a girl can hope)

The spreadsheet is one way of knowing the year. The memory of how it felt to read each book is another. Both matter. And that’s what I’m carrying forward: accumulated evidence that reading continues to be the best way I know myself, and to be more than just myself.

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Currently on my desk: Another book (well, sort of). It’s my very first audiobook! On the Audible app of my phone plays Chapter 4 of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary.

Songs for excavating thoughts: Baby Rose, “That’s All” / Mel Tormé, “Happy Together” / Tom Waits, “Big In Japan”

If you are reading this, it is already too late.

Not because the house is on fire, or the ink has run dry, or because the internet—which is an elaborate system of wires and loneliness—is malfunctioning again. It is too late because you have already tried to think your way out of your life. You have already read too many books on decision theory. You have already tried to map the world into quadrants, matrices, and frameworks with arrows. You have likely used the word heuristic at a party.

My condolences.

You are probably not reading this in a calm meadow or under a tree with a large hat and a lemonade. You are probably reading this with three tabs open. One of them is about decision fatigue. One of them is about microdosing. The third is, presumably, about Greece.

But I am not here to blame you. I am here to join you.

We are a curious kind who think that with enough knowledge, one can defeat pain. That with enough frameworks, one can avoid being embarrassed in front of someone they admire. That with enough insight, one can navigate betrayal, heartbreak, failure, and dread like a GPS. These people are the mental modelers. The framework fanatics. The grid lovers. The ones who try to organize their despair into Notion dashboards.

I, too, have charted cost-benefit matrices for leaving jobs I hated. I have scribbled Venn diagrams about the difference between self-worth and performance. I have tried to optimize my morning routine so effectively that I forgot to wake up.

But then, one day, I lost my models. Not metaphorically. Literally.

They were in a small Moleskine notebook. I had written every pithy insight from every book, podcast, and tweet I had encountered. Last week, in a moment of tragic hubris and a poorly secured tote bag, I left it in an Uber to Nowhere-In-Particular. It was never returned.

And so, without warning or ceremony, I found myself dropped headfirst into what one might call Real Life.

chapter 1: in which nothing makes sense, and that is correct

In the absence of my mental models, I was left with reality.

Have you ever tried to be present for an entire Tuesday without resorting to analysis?

It is horrifying.

A Tuesday is filled with ambiguous texts from friends, strange feelings in your chest, Teams messages that contain neither information nor warmth, and long afternoons in which your primary decision is whether to make tea or simply perish.

Without a model, I could not make sense of anything. I did not know whether I was “winning” the day. I had no performance metrics. I was simply… living.

At first, this induced a full-blown existential panic. If I could not name the pattern, how could I control it? If I could not understand why I felt a pang of shame when my colleague complimented me, how could I eliminate it? Without a mental model, how would I optimize?

But soon, another sensation crept in.

Relief.

Like when you realize the dinner party has been canceled and you can eat your packet of chips in a pyjama set. There is a reason why monks shave their heads and mathematicians disappear into cabins and children build imaginary cities in cardboard boxes. Sometimes losing the map is how you start to feel the terrain again.

chapter 2: in which mental models fail to prevent humiliation

The primary utility of mental models, for many, is the avoidance of humiliation. We want to anticipate disappointment. We want to preempt rejection. We want to understand failure before it happens, so that it won’t hurt when it does.

This is charming. And wrong.

Consider the following: you can study game theory for seven years and still be surprised when a friend tells you they’re getting back with their ex, who works in crypto. You can memorize Kahneman and still impulsively buy a scented candle because it made you feel like a French woman named Elodie. You can design your life like a product, and still feel a mysterious emptiness when someone asks how you are and you say “Busy,” and they say “Cool,” and you realize that’s the end of the conversation.

No mental model protects you from being a person.

It is as simple—and as devastating—as that.

chapter 3: in which we examine the illusion of control

When I had models, I felt safe.

I used phrases like “second-order consequences” and “emergent complexity.” I believed that if I just modeled the system well enough, I could navigate it. I was a sailor, the world was a map.

But then I remembered: maps are not the terrain. Maps are static. The world moves.

I once had a teacher tell me, “You can’t learn to swim by reading about water.” I thought he was being smug. Now I think he was being kind.

People don’t act like models predict. They forget. They cry. They make decisions based on love, or hunger, or a dream they had in 2003. Courage is not a decision tree. It is a moment. A leap. A trembling hand that presses send.

So I stopped trying to model everything.

I stopped using “scripts” in hard conversations. I stopped trying to interpret every silence. I stopped viewing my life as a “portfolio” and started thinking of it as a garden: sometimes blooming, sometimes bare.

chapter 4: the beauty of stupid questions

“Head empty” is not a declaration of ignorance. It is a state of reverent openness.

To live without mental models is to admit: I do not know.

This is, unfortunately, terrifying for people who pride themselves on being the Smart Friend.

But “I don’t know” is where the good things live. Children say “I don’t know” all the time. They ask, “Why is the sky sad?” and “Can ants fall in love?” and “What if the moon is just shy?”

These are not efficient questions. But they are real ones. Mary Oliver said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” You cannot pay attention when you are busy narrating your life like a PowerPoint presentation.

Head empty is not a failure to think. It is a refusal to pretend certainty.

chapter 5: the wisdom of being a fool

In medieval times, the Fool was the only person allowed to tell the truth to the King. Not because the Fool was wise. But because he had nothing to lose.

The Fool is not burdened by prestige, or certainty, or pride. The Fool can say the unsayable. The Fool can dance through the castle and say, “Sire, you look tired, and that sword seems compensatory.”

In a world of experts and analysts and panel discussions, the Fool is the only one asking: “Does anyone else feel kind of sad and full of longing all the time?”

To go head empty is to go full Fool. To admit: I know nothing, but I’m paying attention.

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chapter 6: what to do instead

If you are not using mental models, what should you use?

Use your senses. Use your spine. If it curls in on itself when you enter a room, perhaps don’t work there. Use your hands. If you like the way they move when they are shaping dough or writing poems or fixing machines, perhaps do more of that.

Use your mouth. Not just to say clever things, but to say, “I love you,” or “I’m scared,” or “I don’t want to go to the networking dinner.”

Use your eyes. Notice who softens when you enter. Who hardens. What changes.

You may think this is insufficient. You may want a spreadsheet. A grid. A way to know.

But you already know. You’ve always known.

chapter 7: the great undoing

People think growth is additive. That you learn and acquire and accumulate until you become complete.

But the deepest growth is subtractive.

You peel away the frameworks. You unlearn the performances. You burn the costume you wore to seem palatable. You drop the model and sit in the mystery. You cry in bathrooms and laugh in inconvenient places and text your mother things you haven’t said aloud.

You realize you do not need a five-year plan. You need a five-second breath. You realize that not everything needs to be content. You realize that your pain is not a data point. You realize that a day can be worthwhile even if it produced nothing. You realize that being alive is embarrassing, and that’s okay.

chapter 8: final thoughts that are not final

There’s an ache that comes with trying to explain yourself all the time. It is the ache of thinking your way through your own life. It is the ache of performance. The ache of cleverness.

This essay is not a model. Or a theory. It is a hand, extended. You can take it or leave it.

You can keep building your pyramid of frameworks. Or you can step outside, into the mess. Into the strange, humming beauty of being a person. Head empty. Heart open. No models. Just this.

P.S. If you found meaning in these words, please consider sharing Mind Maps with others who might be wrestling with similar questions. This space thrives on curiosity and connection.

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Present company -

Currently on my desk: A chipped mug that says "World's Okayest Thinker”, last week’s post-it note that simply reads: “spine first, brain later” and, a shell my friend picked up from a beach back home

In the background: Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (for when I need my thoughts to stop interrupting each other) / Maggie Rogers’ Begging for Rain (for crying gently without cause) and Gustav Holst’s Venus, the Bringer of Peace (for slow walking and wide looking)

🌱 Suggested prompts, should you be in a wandering mood:

• What is something you stopped understanding when you tried too hard to explain it?

• What are the things you only realize when your phone is dead and your hands are idle?

• What’s one sentence that found you at exactly the right time?

June 18, 2025

This morning, sitting on my parents' terrace with my first cup of tea as the sun crept over the horizon, I could not stop thinking about a conversation that I’d been carrying around from the week before—something a colleague had said over coffee that I couldn't shake. He's someone I respect, both professionally and personally, but that afternoon he'd looked up from his cup and said something between sharing work woes that stopped me cold: his life felt like something that had happened to someone else.

This happens more often than we admit though. It's common in people around me who often did everything right: ivy-league schools, prestigious jobs, carefully plotted career trajectories. One day they wake up to find themselves in lives they never consciously chose.

It reminded me of something Carl Jung once said about how if we don't become conscious of who we are, the world will tell us who we are. The idea had been sitting with me, turning over in my mind like a stone I couldn't stop worrying between my fingers.

But let me step back for a moment.

We all form our identities in unique ways. Like the old idea of a photograph slowly developing in a dark room, the image of who we are emerges gradually, and often in reverse order: first the obvious sharp outlines - our job titles, our roles, our social markers - and only later, if we're paying attention, the subtle shadows or gradients that give the image depth.

I've been obsessed with this question of self-definition since reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Frankl observed that even in the most dehumanizing conditions, there remained a space small but crucial. This space is occupied by stimulus and response. A space where we could choose who we were going to be.

This space is what interests me. Not the philosophical idea of it, but the lived reality: how do we find it? How do we use it? How do we keep it from collapsing under the weight of external expectations?

A Strange Kind of Archaeology

A year ago, I started keeping what I call an anti-journal. Instead of recording what I know or what happened, I write down what I don't know. Questions that won't leave me alone. Certainties that have become uncertain.

The practice came from reading about ‘negative capability’ - the capacity to remain in uncertainties without irritably reaching for fact and reason. It's surprisingly difficult. I’ve been dubbed as a pattern-matching machine by friends and family, eager to close the circuit of understanding even if it means settling for a false conclusion.

But in my experience, there's something powerful about standing firmly in your uncertainty and asking questions that break through the polite surface of things into something rawer and truer underneath.

The Violence of Coherence

Last week after a very successful product strategy meeting, I was asked later in confidence where I saw myself in five years. It's one of those questions meant to demonstrate ambition and clarity of purpose. I used to have ready answers, polished like river stones I could pull from my pocket: Director by x, VP by y, maybe start a company and publication after that.

But something has shifted in how I think about identity. These days, I find myself more interested in the quality of my thoughts at 6 AM when I'm running, or in the way certain ideas refuse to leave me alone, than in titles or trajectories.

We're taught to value coherence above all. A good story should make sense. A good career should show clear progression. A good life should be explainable at dinner parties.

But I've noticed something about people who seem most themselves: their lives often appear incoherent from the outside. Like Herzog pulling a boat over a mountain, or Wittgenstein abandoning philosophy to teach elementary school. From one angle, it looks scattered. From another, it's a life of perfect internal consistency.

The Quiet Work

This isn't about dramatic gestures. You don't need to quit your job or move to a mountain. It's about something subtler: developing the capacity to hear your own voice beneath the noise of expectation.

When I run in the mornings, layer by layer, I excavate my thoughts: This one came from my parents. This one from social media. This one from a book I read. And underneath them all—what's actually mine?

It's painstaking work. Like trying to separate two pieces of paper that have been pressed together for years. Sometimes they tear. Sometimes you discover there was only one piece all along.

Standing in Your Own Silence

The hardest part isn't finding your voice - it's learning to trust it. We develop sophisticated systems of self-deception, ways of hiding from our own freedom and responsibility. Because it’s easy to stay oblivious and follow suit.

Breaking free is truly existentially terrifying. It's like stepping off a well-lit path into darkness. Your eyes need time to adjust. You need to develop new ways of seeing.

This morning, watching the sun climb over the city, I thought about how many of my most important realizations came not from answering questions but from learning to ask better ones. Maybe that's what standing in your beliefs really means. It’s having the courage to keep questioning…to stay in conversation with yourself even when the answers aren't clear.

A Practice of Attention

This kind of attention requires space. Early mornings, before the world's expectations wake up. Time to think without the immediate pressure to conclude. Books that challenge rather than confirm. Conversations with people who don't need you to be consistent with your past self.

Sometimes, in meetings, I catch myself playing the role of the competent strategic thinker, the person who knows where they'll be in five years. And then I remember: these are just costumes. The real work happens in the quiet moments, in the spaces between roles.

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The Freedom to Be Undefined

Jung was right about the world trying to tell us who we are. But he was also right about something else: that the path to genuine selfhood often leads through darkness and confusion.

The world will tell you who you are. But first, it will watch to see if you're listening for a different voice - the one that speaks in questions rather than answers, in possibilities rather than certainties.

There's something deeply unsettling about Jung's observation. It haunts me during these June days when half the year has passed by, and people seem preoccupied with their NY resolutions progress for the time passed, and defining their purpose for the remaining of it.

I've been thinking about this lately, watching friends navigate the complex terrain between societal expectations and personal truth. One friend recently left her high-paying consulting job to become a pottery teacher. Another turned down a prestigious law school acceptance to write children's books. From the outside, these might look like career crises. But sitting across from them over coffee, what I see instead is the quiet courage of people finally asking themselves: "What do I want out of life?"

The Pattern of Prescribed Paths

It starts early, this surrender to external definition. We're given standardized tests before we can properly tie our shoelaces. By middle school, we're expected to have a "career plan." The path gets increasingly narrow: take these classes, join these clubs, build this resume, attend this college, secure this internship. Each step seems logical, even necessary. Before we know it, we're so far down a predetermined path that questioning it feels impossible.

This reminds me of what Mary Oliver wrote: "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" The tragedy is that many of us never really ask this question. Instead, we outsource the answer to parents, teachers, society, or the latest on LinkedIn’s list of highest-paying jobs.

The Cost of External Definition

The price of letting the world define us is steep, and it's paid in the currency of authenticity. I've watched brilliant creatives force themselves into corporate careers because that's what "successful people" do. I've seen natural entrepreneurs grudgingly pursue graduate degrees they don't want because it's the safe choice. Each compromise chips away at something essential - not just happiness, but the very essence of who we are.

But here's what I'm learning: the cost of not being true to yourself ultimately exceeds the cost of any external disapproval. The friend who left consulting? Her salary dropped by 60%, but the light in her eyes when she talks about teaching pottery is worth more than any bonus check. The aspiring children's author? She's living on savings and part-time wine bar gig wages, but she's writing stories that will make kids fall in love with reading.

The Search for Authentic Purpose

Finding your own definition asks you to clear away layers of accumulated shoulds and expectations to uncover what truly resonates. It’s never a one-time exercise…. it’s an ongoing process of questioning and discovery.

I've noticed that people who successfully define themselves often share certain practices:

• They pay attention to energy rather than just achievement. What activities make them lose track of time? What conversations leave them feeling energized rather than drained?

• They question inherited definitions of success. Is a bigger house really more important than free time? Does a prestigious title matter more than doing work that feels meaningful?

• They practice small acts of authenticity. Before making major life changes, they experiment with being more true to themselves in low-stakes ways.

• They cultivate self-awareness through reflection, whether through journaling, meditation, therapy, or deep conversations with trusted friends.

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The Role of Fear and Resistance

When we start to define ourselves, we often encounter intense resistance, both internal and external. This resistance usually manifests as fear: fear of failure, fear of judgment, fear of financial insecurity, fear of disappointing others.

What's interesting is that this fear often intensifies the closer we get to our authentic path. It's as if our psyche recognizes the transformative power of true self-definition and tries to protect us from the unknown by keeping us safely within familiar boundaries.

But here's what I've observed: the people who successfully break free from external definition aren't fearless. They're simply more afraid of living an inauthentic life than they are of facing uncertainty. They've reached what people call a ‘threshold moment’ - where the pain of staying the same exceeds the pain of change.

The Courage to Choose

Defining yourself requires incredible courage. It means being willing to disappoint people who have your best interests at heart. It means facing uncertainty when others seem to have it all figured out. It means trusting your inner voice when external voices are louder and more numerous.

But here's the thing about courage - it's contagious. When one person dares to define themselves authentically, they create permission for others to do the same. I've watched this ripple effect in action. One friend's decision to leave law for teaching inspired another to start the business she'd been dreaming about for years.

This courage isn't just about big life changes. Sometimes it's about small daily choices: speaking up in a meeting when you disagree with the consensus, pursuing a hobby that others find odd, setting boundaries around your time and energy.

The Practice of Self-Definition

Self-definition is a practice and not a destination (to my dismay). It requires regular check-ins with yourself, constant small adjustments, and the willingness to evolve as you learn and grow.

Here are some questions that have guided me in this practice:

What activities make me lose track of time? What work do I find effortlessly engaging? What causes or ideas spark genuine excitement? What kind of life do I want to look back on? What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail? What would I choose if no one else's opinion mattered?

The answers to these questions might change over time, and that's okay. The point isn't to arrive at a fixed definition of yourself but to stay engaged in the process of authentic becoming.

One thing I've noticed is that authentic self-definition isn't only about introspection. You don't think your way into knowing who you are; you act your way into it. Each choice you make either reinforces or challenges your current identity.

This is why small experiments can be so powerful. The aspiring writer who commits to writing for thirty minutes each morning. The potential entrepreneur who starts a side project while keeping their day job. These actions provide data about what truly resonates.

The Role of Community

While self-definition is inherently personal, having the right community can make all the difference. I'm not talking about yes-people who blindly support every idea, but thoughtful friends who can help you distinguish between fear-based resistance and genuine wisdom.

These people serve as mirrors, reflecting back what they see in you that you might not see yourself. They create safe spaces for exploration and experimentation. They offer support when the path gets difficult and celebration when you honor your truth.

What’s Next?

As we traverse an increasingly complex world, the ability to define ourselves is more crucial than ever. With AI and social media now firmly solidifying their place in our daily lives and amplifying external pressures, knowing who we are and what we stand for becomes a kind of anchor.

But here's the hopeful part: every time we choose authenticity over conformity, we make it a little easier for others to do the same. Every time we dare to define ourselves, we create a small crack in the systems that try to define us.

The world will indeed ask who you are. But the answer doesn't have to come from external sources. It can come from that quiet, knowing place within - the place that recognizes what truly matters to you, what kind of life you want to create, and what legacy you want to leave.

The question then isn't whether you'll be defined. You will be. The question is whether you'll actively participate in that definition or passively accept what the world assigns to you.

P.S. If you found meaning in these words, please consider sharing Mind Maps with others who might be wrestling with similar questions. This space thrives on curiosity and connection.

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Present company -

Currently on my desk: A dog-eared copy of Letters to a Young Poet, three different journals (one abandoned), cold chai, a note that says "what would you choose if no one else's opinion mattered?"

Songs for excavating thoughts: Sufjan Stevens, "Mystery of Love" / Bon Iver, "Re: Stacks" / Radiohead, "Daydreaming"

The idea of the muse as a divine visitor is seductive. It absolves us of responsibility. Either inspiration strikes or it doesn't - what could be simpler? But this model has always felt incomplete to me, like trying to explain a forest by describing only its tallest trees.

Werner Herzog, talking about his documentary practice, once said something that has since stuck with me: "The moments that make a film often come from years of paying attention to things that seem, at first, unrelated." 1 I don’t think he wasn't waiting for inspiration. Maybe he was actively building a reservoir of observations that could later connect in unexpected ways.

The other morning, making coffee, I caught the scent of jasmine drifting in through my kitchen window. For a moment, I was transported to my mum’s garden in Odisha— the morning blooms, the sound of her humming as she watered her plants, the dawn light falling through banana leaves onto her garden balcony. This fragment of memory, triggered by a passing scent, contained within it entire worlds of story.

I imagine this is how the muse often arrives: not in grand revelations, no, but small shards of sensory experience. A whiff of jasmine. The blue of a winter evening. The way light catches in a glass of water. We piece together our art from these fragments, creating meaning from the scattered tesserae of memory and observation.

The muse, our inspirations come to us in pieces like a conversation overheard on a bus, a shadow pattern on a wall, the exact shade of someone's grief. T.S. Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins." The artist's work is in capturing these fragments sure but also in finding the hidden connections between them, creating a whole that transcends its parts.

The word 'mosaic' comes from the Medieval Latin 'musaicum'—"work of the Muses." There's something intense in this etymology. It suggests that inspiration itself is inherently fragmentary, that the Muses deliver their gifts not in complete visions but in pieces we must assemble ourselves.

Think about how a mosaic is made. Each piece must be found or broken from something larger, its edges examined, its color noted, its place in the larger pattern intuited before it's even clear what that pattern will be. The artist doesn't start with the final image and break tiles to fit it. They start with the pieces and let them suggest their own configurations.

Time works differently in mosaic-making than in other arts. You can't rush the collection process. You can't force fragments to connect before they're ready. The muse as mosaic requires a particular kind of patience—not passive waiting, but active attention spread over time.

I think of it like tending a garden. You don't make plants grow by pulling on them. You create conditions where growth is possible, then pay attention to what emerges.

Last year, I spent six months collecting fragments about how people relate to time. I didn't know why I was doing it. I just knew it felt important. Notes about how different cultures measure days, how children understand "tomorrow," how elderly people speak about the past. Then one morning, running through pre-dawn streets, these fragments suddenly assembled themselves into a pattern I couldn't have planned.

What fascinates me is how different artists collect their fragments. A filmmaker friend keeps a notebook of gestures—the way an old man arranges his newspaper at a tea stall, how a mother adjusts her sleeping child's head on her shoulder in a crowded bus. A music producer on the internet collects sounds: the specific timbre of rain on tin roofs, the rhythm of vendors' calls in different cities, the varying qualities of silence.

This fragmentary nature of inspiration has historical precedent. The great epics were also assembled from scattered stories, songs, and memories passed down through generations. The Mahabharata contains within it countless smaller narratives, each with its own history and context, woven together into a larger tapestry of meaning.

Even the Muses themselves, in Greek mythology, were nine distinct entities rather than a single source of inspiration. Each represented a different aspect of artistic creation, suggesting that inspiration itself is inherently multiple, coming to us through various channels and in various forms.

A question then rears it’s head: How do you store these fragments of inspiration so they can find each other?

Technology like note-taking apps are just tools. The real skill is in developing a personal taxonomy of meaning. How do you tag and cross-reference fragments so they can participate in multiple conversations?

My system has evolved to include:

• Emotional resonance markers

• Contextual links

• Pattern recognition notes

• Questions the fragment raises

• Potential future uses

Some people use notebooks, others use digital tools, some rely on memory alone. I’ve found that the medium matters less than the practice. What's crucial is creating a space where fragments can accumulate and interact. My own collection is more hodgepodge and has evolved over years of trial and error. The muse, it turns out, isn't a bolt of lightning. I liken it to more like a patient archaeologist, piecing together shards of ancient pottery.

In my case, it's a combination of:

1. Morning pages: unstructured writing before the day's demands set in

2. An anti-commonplace book: where I collect not just quotes but my reactions to them, the questions they raise

3. Voice notes captured during runs: observations that feel important even if I don't know why yet

4. Photographs of details others might miss: the texture of bark, the pattern of cracks in a wall

5. Conversations overheard and immediately transcribed, not for their content but for their rhythm

But here's what took me years to understand: the system is about developing an eye for what might matter later, even if you don't know why it matters now.

I think of the Instagram archives many artists maintain—private collections of images that resonate for reasons they can't always articulate. These digital mood boards become a kind of external subconscious, a place where fragments can marinate until their connections become clear.

Recently, I visited an exhibition where the artist had created installations from found objects - pieces of broken pottery, old photographs, discarded letters. What struck me was how these fragments, each with its own history, came together to tell new stories. The artist hadn't collected these pieces haphazardly, she understood how they wanted to speak to each other.

This is crucial: the muse as mosaic is about active listening, about developing what John Berger called "ways of seeing." It's learning to recognize which fragments contain potential energy, which pieces might spark against each other to create something new.

The mosaic muse demands a special kind of attention. Almost sharp focus of problem-solving, but something softer, more peripheral. You have to learn to notice what you're noticing.

This attention has to be maintained even (especially) when it seems pointless. The fragment that seems useless today might be the keystone of tomorrow's insight.

Some practices that have helped me:

• Walking without destination

• Listening to conversations for their rhythm rather than content

• Reading outside your field

• Allowing yourself to be drawn to things without immediately knowing why

Memory itself is a kind of mosaic. We don't remember experiences as continuous narratives. We remember collections of vivid moments, sensory snapshots, emotional resonances. Our brains store these fragments and reassemble them each time we remember, which is why memories change over time—the mosaic is constantly being rearranged.

This fragmentary nature of memory serves creativity well. When we write about childhood, for instance, we’re just working with bright shards of remembrance: the taste of a summer drink, a mother's gesture of comfort, the quality of light in an old classroom. These fragments, precisely because they are incomplete, leave room for imagination to fill the gaps.

The politics of fragmentary inspiration are complex. Whose fragments do we collect? Whose stories do we piece together? I think of how colonial museums displayed (and continue to display) fragments of other cultures, removed from their context and meaning. The ethical artist-as-mosaic-maker must work differently, maintaining awareness of each fragment's origin and significance, respecting the whole from which it came.

Time plays a crucial role in this process. Some fragments need to age before they reveal their connections to others. A scene observed today might not find its place in your work until years later, when it suddenly clicks into place alongside a memory from childhood and a line from a forgotten poem.

This is why artists need to cultivate patience. The muse as mosaic requires trust in the slow accumulation of material, faith that the fragments will eventually find their proper arrangement. It's a different model of creativity than the myth of sudden inspiration—less dramatic perhaps, but more true to how art actually gets made.

The Japanese art of kintsugi offers another way to think about fragmentary inspiration. The broken pieces aren't hidden or disguised; instead, their joining becomes part of the object's beauty and meaning. Similarly, in our creative work, the spaces between fragments—the joins, the gaps, the leaps between pieces—can become significant elements of the whole

I'm reminded of a podcast with a musician about how she composes. "Sometimes," she said, "I'll hear a pattern in the sound of traffic that becomes the rhythm for a piece. Or I'll remember a tune my grandmother used to hum, and it weaves itself into something I'm working on. The music comes together like this, piece by piece, finding its own logic."

This is how creativity often works: not in grand gestures but in small recognitions, gentle accumulations, patient assembly. The muse speaks to us in fragments because that's how life comes to us—in moments, in glimpses, in fleeting sensations that we must catch and hold and somehow make sense of.

Perhaps the hardest part of working with the mosaic muse is learning to trust the process. You have to believe that the collection is worthwhile even when you can't see the final pattern.

This trust isn't blind faith. It's more like the trust a scientist has in the scientific method—a tested process that reliably produces results, even if the specific results can't be predicted.

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The mosaic nature of inspiration explains why artists need to live attentively. Every moment might contain a piece of future work. That splash of color on a wall, that snatch of overheard dialogue, that particular quality of light on water—any of these might be the piece that completes a pattern we don't yet recognize.

When you're collecting pieces for your mosaic, every moment becomes potentially significant. The mosaic muse never stops collecting. Even as one pattern emerges, new fragments are being gathered for future configurations. This is why creative work, when approached this way, becomes sustainable rather than exhausting.

Social media presents an interesting challenge to this model of creativity. The constant stream of images, ideas, and influences can feel like too many fragments, arriving too quickly to be properly absorbed. The challenge for contemporary artists is learning to filter this flood, to recognize which pieces deserve space in our personal collections.

There's something democratic about the mosaic model of creativity. It suggests that inspiration isn't just for special moments or special people. It's available to anyone who learns to collect and connect fragments, who develops the patience to let patterns emerge.

This view of creativity also helps explain why different artists can work with similar material and produce wildly different results. Give the same pile of fragments to ten mosaic-makers, and you'll get ten different patterns. Each artist brings their own way of seeing connections, their own understanding of how pieces might speak to each other.

As I write this, I'm aware of how this essay itself is a mosaic—pieces of observation, memory, and reflection arranged into a pattern that hopefully makes sense. Some fragments have been waiting years to find their place. Others arrived this morning, in the form of jasmine scent through my window.

This is the beauty of the mosaic model: it's never really complete. There's always room for new pieces, new patterns, new understandings. The muse keeps offering fragments, and our work is to keep finding fresh ways to arrange them, new stories to tell with old pieces.

The challenge—and the joy—has been in learning to trust this process. To believe that the fragments will eventually find their home. To understand that creativity isn't about waiting for complete visions but about patiently collecting pieces and learning to see the patterns they want to make.

After all, isn't this how meaning itself emerges? Not in grand revelations but in small recognitions, in the gentle accumulation of moments and memories, in the patient assembly of fragments into something that speaks of both brokenness and wholeness, of both the pieces and the pattern they make together.

P.S. If you found meaning in these words, please consider sharing Mind Maps with others who might be wrestling with similar questions. This space thrives on curiosity and connection.

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There's a certain anxiety that arises when someone asks, "What do you do?"

The question hangs in the air, demanding categorization - strategist, writer, athlete, academic, artist - as if human experience could be neatly filed away in manila folders. I've been thinking about this lately, particularly during these January days when everyone seems obsessed with defining their purpose, plotting their paths, fitting themselves into pre-existing boxes.

Last night, sitting cross-legged on my floor with Horses playing for perhaps the thousandth time, I found myself wondering when exactly we became so obsessed with categorization, with the need to label and separate and contain. The question emerged from a year of watching my own life resist neat definitions - shifting between roles and identities - and finding solace in artists who taught me how to exist in these in-between spaces.

Because there are artists who change how we think, and then there are artists who change how we breathe. Patti Smith belongs to the latter category. I've spent months trying to write about what she means - not just to art or music or literature, but to the very act of existing authentically in the world. Every attempt feels inadequate, like trying to capture twilight in a mason jar. Yet perhaps this very inadequacy is the lesson - that some things, some people, some ways of being, demand we learn to live without the comfort of clear categorization.

You see, Patti has always existed beyond these boxes, moving through the world with a freedom that feels almost mythological in its rarity. The first time I encountered her work was through her book, Just Kids. It was propped up on a shelf at Blossom Book House in Bangalore, and something about her face on the cover - those dark eyes that seemed to look through you rather than at you - made me pause. I didn't know then that picking up that book would be one of those moments that divides your life into before and after.

What struck me wasn't just the writing, though God, the writing. It was the way she moved through the world - this strange and beautiful creature who seemed to exist in a space between spaces. Here was someone who understood that art isn't about fitting into pre-existing categories but about creating new ones, about making space for the ineffable.

Last week, sitting in a theatre in my city, I watched a classical violinist perform a piece that wove together Carnatic ragas with jazz improvisation. The audience seemed initially unsettled - was this classical music? Was it jazz? Their discomfort was palpable until the moment they stopped trying to categorize what they were hearing and simply let themselves experience it. Something shifted then - in the music, in the room, in our collective understanding of what was possible.

We talk about transcending categories like it's a kind of escape, using the language of breaking free: shattering boundaries, breaking molds, thinking outside boxes. But I'm beginning to wonder if true transcendence isn't about escape at all - it's about presence. About inhabiting the spaces between with such fullness that they become spaces in their own right.

This hit home recently when I found myself explaining my work to my cousin. Children, I've noticed, have no trouble understanding transcendence. They don't see why someone can't be a doctor and a dancer, a teacher and a trapeze artist. It's only as we grow older that we learn to limit ourselves, to choose one path at the expense of others. We're taught that specialization equals success, that clarity comes from narrowing rather than expanding.

In those early days at the Chelsea Hotel, Patti would write poetry in the morning, make drawings in the afternoon, and perform at night. There was no separation between these acts of creation - they all flowed from the same source, like different tributaries of the same river. She didn't care about being called a poet or a musician or an artist. She just wanted to make things that hadn't existed before.

The Japanese have a concept called "ma" - the meaningful space between things. It's present in their architecture, their music, their art. It's the pause between notes that gives music its rhythm, the empty space in a room that makes it inhabitable. Perhaps transcendence lives in these spaces - not in the categories themselves, but in the fertile ground between them.

I see this in the most vibrant minds I know. They are businesspeople who write poetry, scientists who paint, teachers who never stop being students. They move through the world not like specialists but like renaissance souls, drawing connections between seemingly disparate fields, finding patterns in the chaos. Their power doesn't come from mastering a single category but from their ability to exist meaningfully in the spaces between.

What's fascinating is how this relates to agency and purpose. We often think of transcendence as a kind of freedom from definition, but paradoxically, it requires tremendous intention. To exist between categories means actively choosing to resist the comfort of clear labels. It means being willing to live with ambiguity, to embrace the discomfort of being hard to define.

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The digital age both helps and hinders this understanding. On one hand, it allows for unprecedented crossing of boundaries - we can be global citizens, digital nomads, remote workers. On the other hand, its algorithms constantly try to sort us, to predict us based on past behavior, to put us in ever more specific boxes. Each click, each like, each purchase becomes another data point attempting to define us.

I think about how Patti moved between mediums with such grace - poetry becoming song becoming visual art becoming prose. There's something almost alchemical about this ability to transmute one form of expression into another. This morning, studying her photographs - those black and white images that feel like visual poems - I'm struck by how the same hand that wrote Because the Night also captured Virginia Woolf's cane, Arthur Rimbaud's fork, Roberto Bolaño's chair. These aren't just photographs - they're meditations, prayers, songs without music.

But here's what I'm learning: transcendence isn't about rejecting categories entirely. It's about understanding them as tools rather than truths. They are useful for organization but should never become prisons. The most interesting work happens when we use categories as launching pads rather than boundaries - when we understand them well enough to move beyond them.

This relates deeply to how we think about purpose. We're often told to find our "one true calling," as if purpose were a single fixed point rather than a constellation of meaningful engagements. But what if purpose isn't about narrowing down but about opening up? What if it's not about finding your category but about creating your own space between existing ones?

I see this in my own work, in the way writing feeds into photography feeds into teaching feeds back into writing. These aren't separate pursuits but different manifestations of the same underlying impulse - to understand, to connect, to create meaning. When I write, I'm also painting with words. When I photograph, I'm writing with light. When I teach, I'm learning. The boundaries between these activities begin to blur, revealing themselves as artificial constructs rather than natural laws.

Last month, going through old journals, I found a note I'd written to myself years ago: "Your inability to fit neatly into categories and stereotypes isn't a flaw." At the time, I think I was trying to comfort myself. Now I see it as a kind of manifesto. Because existing between categories isn't just about personal freedom - it's about creating new possibilities for everyone. Each act of transcendence creates space for more transcendence, widening the field of what's possible.

What strikes me most about Smith's work is its profound democracy of reverence. She approaches Herman Melville's grave with the same devotion she brings to her morning coffee ritual. This isn't just artistic versatility; it's a radical philosophy of attention. In Devotion, she writes about her creative process with such transparency that the line between making art and being alive completely dissolves.

This kind of attention - this ability to see the sacred in the everyday, to find connections between seemingly disparate things - is perhaps what we're really talking about when we talk about purpose. It's not about fitting into a predefined role but about bringing your particular way of seeing to everything you do.

I think about the times I've felt most alive, most purposeful. It's never been when I was successfully fitting into a category, but rather when I was creating something new in the spaces between. Like last week, when I combined my love of photography with my practice of teaching, creating a visual literacy workshop for high school students.

The cost of transcendence is certainty. When we step beyond established categories, we lose the comfort of clear definitions, of knowing exactly who we are and what we do. But what we gain is the freedom to explore, to evolve, to surprise ourselves. There's a liberation in realizing that we don't have to choose between being a writer or a photographer, an academic or an artist, practical or creative. We can be all of these things, and in the spaces between them, we might find something entirely new.

In Buddhism, there's a concept called "beginner's mind" - the ability to approach each moment fresh, without preconceptions. This might be the key to both transcendence and purpose: maintaining the ability to see things anew, to question our categories, to remain open to possibility.

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The sun is setting now, casting long shadows across my desk where Just Kids lies open next to my notebook. Patti Smith's voice drifts from my speakers, reminding me that some of the most profound truths exist in the spaces between categories, between notes, between words.

Perhaps that's the ultimate lesson about purpose and transcendence - that they're not about rising above or moving beyond, but about moving through, about being fully present in all the spaces we inhabit, even (especially) the ones that don't have names yet. It's about understanding that our lives, like all great art, resist easy classification.

So maybe the next time someone asks "What do you do?" the anxiety doesn't have to come. Maybe instead there can be a kind of joy in the inadequacy of any simple answer. Because the truth is, we do many things. We are many things. And it's in this multiplicity - this refusal to be easily categorized, even by our profession - that we find our most authentic expression, our truest purpose.

The challenge, then, isn't to find our box but to live meaningfully in the spaces between boxes. To create new spaces. To make peace with ambiguity. To understand that purpose isn't a destination but a way of moving through the world - with attention, with reverence, with the courage to resist easy categorization.

As night falls and the city lights begin to twinkle, I think about all the categories I've tried to fit into, all the boxes I've tried to check. And I think about how liberation came not from finding the right box but from giving myself permission to exist in the spaces between. Like Patti Smith writing poems in the morning and singing rock and roll at night, like the violinist weaving together classical and jazz, like all the beautiful misfits who've shown us that the most interesting things happen when we stop trying to fit in and start creating our own spaces to exist in.

Perhaps this is what purpose really means - not finding your place within existing categories, but having the courage to create new ones. To live in the questions rather than the answers. To make your home in the spaces between.

Hi friends, writing this piece has opened up so many questions about how we define ourselves and our purpose. I keep thinking about the spaces between - how they terrify and liberate us in equal measure. There's more to explore here, particularly about how this resistance to categorization shapes our relationships and creative work. I'd love to hear from you: where in your life have you felt the tension between fitting in and transcending categories? When have you found freedom in the spaces between?

P.S. If you found meaning in these words, please consider sharing Mind Maps with others who might be wrestling with similar questions. This space thrives on curiosity and connection.

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Dear readers,

After much contemplation over the holiday break, I've decided to make some changes to Mind Maps. While I'll continue exploring ideas at the intersection of culture, literature, and human experience, I've realized that some of the most meaningful connections we forge come through sharing our lived experiences.

This past year has taught me that the personal and the universal are not separate territories but rather concentric circles, each informing and enriching the other. The messages I've received from you about how certain essays resonated with your own experiences have shown me that there's profound value in writing from a place of lived truth.

So, starting next year, I'll be writing weekly - essays exploring ideas and also sharing personal reflections. The regular fortnightly essay will arrive next week, but today, I wanted to share something more personal about an experience that has shaped my understanding of movement, stillness, and the body's wisdom.

There's something almost sacred about the early morning ritual of running. The world holds its breath in that liminal space between night and dawn, when the streets belong only to other runners, wandering cats, and those making their way home from night shifts. The air feels different then - cleaner, more purposeful, as if it knows it's being drawn into lungs that will transform it into forward motion.

I've been thinking about running a lot lately, perhaps because I can't do it. There's a particular kind of stillness that comes with injury - not the peaceful kind that settles over you during meditation, but a restless stillness that feels like being caged. My right knee, wrapped in a sturdy black brace, has become both my constant companion and my greatest frustration.

The story begins, as many do, with love. I flew across the country to witness one of my closest friends marry the love of her life in a sunrise ceremony that made everyone believe in magic. The way she looked at him as she walked down the aisle - it was one of those moments that reminds you why we build our lives around love, why we celebrate it so fiercely. A day later, I found myself on another plane, this time orchestrating a surprise visit home for my mother's birthday. The joy on her face when I appeared at her door with a slightly jet-lagged smile was worth every minute of secret-keeping and red-eye flights.

But life has a way of balancing its ledgers. On a drive, a drunk driver swerved into my lane and rammed into me. I managed to avoid the worst of it, but there was significant impact on my knee - something that would end up derailing months of careful training for my first ultra marathon.

"It's not a fracture," the doctor said, as if this was supposed to be comforting. "But you'll need to wear this brace, and physical therapy. Several weeks, minimum." Several weeks. The words fell like stones into the quiet of the examination room. Several weeks of no running, after months of pre-dawn training sessions, after carefully building up my mileage, after all those solitary kilometers when it was just me and my breath and the rhythm of my feet against the earth.

My right knee, currently imprisoned in a black brace, serves as a constant reminder of what I've temporarily lost. The drunk driver who swerved into my lane two weeks ago didn't just derail my ultra marathon training - they interrupted a conversation I've been having with myself through movement for the better part of two decades.

Running, you see, isn't just exercise. It's a dialogue between body and mind, between self and space, between the runner you are and the runner you're becoming. Every stride is both a question and an answer: How far can I go? What am I capable of? What lives within this body of mine?

I remember my first real run - not the enforced laps around the school track, but the first time I chose to run for myself. I was seven, angry about something I can't now recall, and I laced up my father's old running shoes because they were the only ones I could find. They were too big, and I probably looked ridiculous, but none of that mattered once I started moving. What I remember most clearly is the sensation of my thoughts gradually unknotting themselves with each step, as if the physical act of running was somehow untangling the mental mess I'd been carrying.

My father, watching me return home sweaty and slightly less angry, just smiled. He'd been a competitive athlete in his youth, and though he no longer raced, he maintained a religious morning routine. "Running," he told me later that evening, "is the oldest prayer humans know." I didn't understand what he meant then. Now, two decades and countless kilometers later, I think I'm beginning to.

There's a state you enter during a long run that's unlike anything else I've experienced. Runners call it ‘the zone,’ but that clinical term doesn't quite capture the almost mystical quality of it. It's a place where the distinction between you and your movement begins to blur. Your breathing finds its rhythm, your feet fall in a steady cadence, and your mind enters a space that's neither fully conscious nor unconscious. Time becomes elastic. Two hours can pass like twenty minutes, or a single kilometer can feel eternal.

I've solved writing problems during these runs, processed relationships, made life decisions. Some of my clearest insights have come not during the run itself, but hours later, as if the physical act of running had cleared a path for clarity to follow. I’ve always found running to be my form of meditation. Some people sit still to find peace, I move. There's something about the repetitive motion of running that creates space for thought, for processing, for simply being. Some of my clearest insights have come during long runs, when my body is occupied enough to let my mind wander freely.

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The training for my ultra marathon (now postponed, thanks to my injury) had taken on its own kind of meditative quality. There's something about consistently pushing your boundaries that changes not just your body, but your entire relationship with limitation. Each week, as the mileage increased, I'd find myself reconsidering what ‘impossible’ meant. Twenty kilometers no longer seemed like an insurmountable distance when I'd already run eighteen. The horizon of possibility kept expanding with each training run.

But running also teaches you about humility, about the fragility of the human body, about the fine line between pushing your limits and breaking them. My current forced rest is a lesson in this. The physical therapist tells me that recovery is its own kind of training, requiring the same patience and dedication as preparing for a race. "The body remembers," he says, showing me gentle exercises to maintain strength without stressing the injury. "When you're ready to return, it will remember how to run."

I'm trying to trust in this - in my body's ability to heal, in the temporary nature of setbacks, in the wisdom of slowing down. But I won't pretend it's easy. Every morning, I still wake up at 5 AM, my body primed for movement it can't yet make. I find myself studying my training logs from the past months, tracing the careful progression of kilometers like reading a diary. Each entry tells a story: the day I first broke a personal best pace, the morning it rained so hard I could barely see, the sunset run when a group of young runners crossed my path and joined me.

Running creates its own kind of memoir, written not in words but in muscle memory, in changed landscapes, in the gradual transformation of self. Every runner knows the strange geography of their regular routes - the slight incline at kilometer three that feels like a mountain in the last kilometers of a long run, the tree that marks the halfway point, the corner where the wind always seems to blow harder. These become waypoints not just in physical space, but in memory.

Now, watching runners pass by my french window as I ice my knee, I feel a peculiar kind of homesickness - not for a place, but for a state of being. I miss the early morning solidarity of nodding to other runners, our breath visible in the cold air. I miss the meditative rhythm of feet against earth, the gradual warming of muscles, the way the world seems to expand and contract with each breath. I miss the person I am when I'm running - someone stronger, clearer, more connected to both body and spirit.

But perhaps there's something to be learned in this enforced stillness. About patience, about the different ways we can move through the world, about how sometimes healing requires us to be still even when every fiber of our being wants to run. About how some things - love, family, the body's wisdom - persist even when our plans get derailed.

For now, I'm doing what runners do best: putting one foot in front of the other, however slowly, however painfully. Because eventually, I will run again. The trail will still be there, the early morning air will still be crisp, and my feet will remember their rhythm against the earth. Until then, I'm learning to find movement in stillness, to trust in the body's capacity for healing, and to believe that sometimes the longest races are the ones we run in place.

Running, my father always said, is the oldest prayer humans know. Maybe this time of not-running is its own kind of prayer - one of patience, of trust, of believing in return. When I do lace up my shoes again, I know that first run back will feel like both a homecoming and a beginning. Until then, I carry the runner's heart within me, beating out its steady rhythm: forward, always forward, one step at a time.

P.S. If this essay resonated with you, please consider sharing Mind Maps with your friends who might need or enjoy it. :)

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