Where I think things through properly, in public. Short essays on making, attention, and learning to trust slowness. I write when there's something true to say.
On the race we never agreed to run, the impermanence of everything, and why the thing we keep chasing was here the whole time. We hold one thing in any given moment: the choice to act, or not. The outcome was never ours. So why burn down what we already have for something that was never in our hands?
The Gita gives you exactly one job: what to do, what not to do. Your choice is a small field, and its fence sits close: only what you can or cannot do in this moment. Beyond the fence nothing answers to you, and expectation does not move it. Plan the path, sure. But while walking it, the only choice that ever arrives is the one in front of you. Again, I know how simple that sounds. The simplicity is the hard part.
I watch people, and myself also, reaching for the next thing before the present thing has finished speaking. Nisargadatta says the river of life flows between the banks of pleasure and pain, and the trouble only starts when the mind grips a bank. Acceptance is not giving up. It is looking at what is actually in front of you before deciding it should be something else. That's how things are.
Act on what is in front of you, within what you can actually do. One line. I don't know much, but I've noticed the mind refuses instructions this small, so it builds frameworks and five-year plans and waits for a better moment instead. The overcomplication is not confusion. It is a hiding place.
For years the gap between what I could see and what I could make felt like proof I wasn't good enough. I've come to think it's the opposite: the gap is the talent, showing up early and refusing to let me settle. Here's how I've learned to live in it without quitting.
I spent my early twenties proud of how many tabs I could keep open, in my browser and in my head. Then I tried, badly at first, to do one thing at a time. This is what changed: not my output, but the quality of my own company.
The most useful sentence I've told myself in years. There's a difference between a fallow season and a failure, and almost everything I do well now came out of a stretch where it looked like I was doing nothing at all.
Everyone is optimizing for speed, and I understand why. But the things I've made fast, I rarely respect. The things I made slowly taught me something while I made them. A small defense of taking longer than you're supposed to.
"I don't write to be read so much as to find out what I actually think. Being read is just the lovely accident after." Nikunj