I went to the restaurant feeling rich until the CHECK arrived looking like a doctoral thesis with footnotes. I CHECKed my wallet, which bravely offered two coins and a receipt from 2019 as moral support. The waiter CHECKed on me again, smiling the smile of someone who knows math better than I do. I tried to CHECK my phone for UPI balance, but even my phone pretended to be asleep. In a bold move, I CHECKed the menu again to see if regret was listed as a side dish. Finally, I CHECKed my pride, paid the bill, and walked out richer in humility and painfully poorer in calories.
Write about a few of your favorite family traditions.
The House That Bowed to a Bell
There was once a village where every evening, just before dusk, a bell rang from the oldest house on the hill. No one knew who rang it. No one questioned why. Children stopped mid-game. Dogs paused mid-bark. Adults checked the stove, the sky, and their conscience, just in case. Nothing happened when the bell rang. Yet everyone felt something had been held together for another day.
That, I’ve come to realise, is how traditions work.
In my family, we don’t have a bell, but we have a collection of rituals so strange that an anthropologist would either write a thesis or quietly back away. None of them are written down. All of them are enforced. And breaking them carries consequences, not legal ones, just emotional blackmail seasoned with “In our days…”
Take meals, for instance. Every family has food traditions. Ours has food ceremonies. The first roti cannot be eaten until the eldest has inspected it like a customs officer. The second must be offered to someone who didn’t ask for it. The third is eaten in silence, not out of reverence, but because everyone is chewing and nodding in approval, like judges on a cooking show that no one signed up for.
Then there’s the tradition of mandatory exaggeration. Any story retold by an elder must grow by at least 40% in drama. A mild cold becomes “the winter that almost took me.” A late bus becomes “we walked fifteen kilometres, uphill, both ways, carrying groceries and dignity.” No one corrects these facts. We simply listen, wide-eyed, because accuracy is optional; reverence is not.
And ah, the symbolic ones. Like touching the feet of elders, not just as a gesture of respect, but as a reminder that gravity exists and youth is temporary. Or the rule that no one leaves the house for an important event without a blessing, even if it’s shouted from the bathroom… “Go well! And call when you reach!” The blessing counts. The echo makes it holy.
We also have the tradition of selective memory. The patriarch remembers everyone’s birthdays but forgets where he kept his glasses (on his head). The matriarch remembers every family argument since 1973, indexed, cross-referenced, and occasionally resurrected to teach a moral lesson. She is the family’s emotional archive. Nothing is ever truly deleted.
Outsiders might call these habits odd, unnecessary, even outdated. And on particularly chaotic days, so do we. But here’s the thing, when everything else changes, these rituals don’t. Jobs change. Cities change. People grow up, move out, talk less. Yet the traditions stand there, arms folded, saying, “Fine. Go. We’ll be right here.”
Because traditions aren’t about logic. They’re about continuity. They give the oldest members of the family a quiet, unquestioned power, not the power to command, but the power to anchor. They become the pivot around which stories, meals, memories, and madness revolve. When they speak, the room leans in. When they bless, the house exhales.
And maybe that’s why we follow these weird, symbolic, sometimes ridiculous rituals. Not because they make sense, but because they make us.
In the end, traditions are the invisible glue holding the family together. Slightly sticky. Occasionally messy. But without them, everything comes apart a little too easily.
Once upon a time, two travelers set out to reach the same port.
One sailed by ship, learning the patience of tides, the language of storms, and the humility of waiting. The other flew by air, tasting speed, altitude, and the strange loneliness of clouds.
From the shore, onlookers argued endlessly about who had the better journey. But when both travelers finally arrived, salt in one’s hair and jet fuel in the other’s memory, the port did not ask how. It only marked that they had arrived.
That, perhaps, is where comparison begins and where it should end.
Why the Brain Compares
Comparison is not a moral failing; it is a neurological reflex.
The human brain evolved as a measuring device. In early survival settings, asking “Am I doing as well as the others?” helped determine access to food, safety, and mates. Modern neuroscience shows that this instinct still lives in us, governed largely by the default mode network – the part of the brain active during self-reflection and social evaluation.
When we compare ourselves upward (to those doing “better”), the brain activates the anterior cingulate cortex, registering discomfort and perceived threat. If the gap feels bridgeable, motivation can rise. If it feels impossible, the amygdala joins in, triggering anxiety, shame, or helplessness.
Here’s the catch. The brain has a negativity bias. It overweights what we lack and underweights what we have. So while we admire another person’s success, wealth, or freedom, we unconsciously ignore the invisible costs – the constraints, sacrifices, and pressures that come bundled with those outcomes.
We want the fruit, not the roots.
When Comparison Turns Toxic
When people repeatedly compare and feel they are falling short, the nervous system often shifts into one of three responses:
Overstriving – chasing goals that aren’t aligned with one’s values, just to outrun inadequacy
Withdrawal – disengaging, telling oneself “it’s not for me anyway”
Resentment – devaluing others’ success to protect self-worth
None of these responses lead to joy and fulfilment. They only deepen the illusion that life is a ranking system.
Striving Without Comparing
You tell your children something profoundly wise… One set of conditions produces one set of results. Change the conditions, and the results will change.
That is not comparison, that is causality.
If one wants to be a multimillionaire, they must accept the constraints that accompany it: risk, pressure, time scarcity, public scrutiny. Every outcome carries a price tag. We often admire the rewards while refusing to read the fine print.
Living well, then, is not about asking “Why don’t I have their life?” It is about asking “Am I willing to live the life that produces that outcome?”
Very often, the honest answer is no, and that is not failure. That is clarity.
Beyond Grass and Fences
“The grass is always greener on the other side” because the brain edits the picture. It removes the droughts, the pests, the labor, and the cost of watering.
Between chance, fate, and destiny, what has been given to us is our terrain. That doesn’t mean stagnation. It means growth without self-erasure.
Some arrive by ship. Some arrive by air. Some take long, winding roads and learn things no shortcut can teach.
What counts is not who arrived fastest or flashiest, but who was awake enough to live their journey fully.
Comparison asks, “How do I rank?” Fulfillment asks, “Am I aligned?”
And the brain, once gently trained to see the whole picture, slowly learns to rest.
The Bowl We Hand to Our Children
In a village, every child was given a bowl at birth. Parents filled it carefully, some with rules, some with dreams, some with fear disguised as protection. As the children grew, they began peeking into one another’s bowls. Mine looks smaller. Yours shines more. Why does hers seem so full?
An elder gathered the parents and said, “The bowl is not the lesson. What you teach the child to put into it is.”
So the parents changed what they modeled. They showed effort without obsession. Ambition without envy. Failure without shame.
They taught their children this… If you want different results, adjust the conditions. Not by copying another bowl, but by understanding what each choice costs and gives.
Some children filled their bowls slowly. Some spilled and refilled many times. None were wrong.
And the children learned something lasting, that life is not about whose bowl looks fuller, but whether what it holds can sustain them.
That is how comparison loosens its grip on the brain. When striving is taught as curiosity, not competition. When success is framed as alignment, not ranking.
What we give our children is not a standard to match, but the courage to choose wisely, and the permission to live well, without measuring themselves against another life.
Plaid is the geometry of patience, lines agreeing to meet without argument, a measured crossing of intention and restraint. It speaks in grids, in reasoned symmetry, in the calm assurance that structure is possible and order can be worn.
It remembers hills and looms, hands that counted carefully, threads pulled straight as promises, each intersection a vow that nothing will drift too far.
But then…
The lines begin gossiping. Horizontals lean. Verticals wander off for tea. A red stripe flirts with blue and forgets where it was going.
Squares inflate. Rectangles rebel. Someone adds yellow by accident and calls it bold.
The grid starts sweating.
Plaid multiplies. Plaid argues with itself. Plaid becomes a family reunion where everyone brought patterns and no one brought rules.
Threads trip over threads. Symmetry loosens its collar, checks the room, decides to stay anyway.
And somewhere between crossing and collision, plaid learns what life knows early: that plans arrive horizontal, interruptions arrive vertical, and meaning lives only where they intersect.
Not perfect. Not aligned. But held together.
Which is why plaid survives, not because it controls the chaos, but because it makes room for it and still calls itself whole.
Checkered, like a life well-lived and poorly planned, half victories, half stains, proof that you showed up, crossed lines, lost your way, found another, and kept going anyway. Not clean. Not straight. But unmistakably yours.
On a wonderlandbound morning, the light arrived softly, as if afraid to wake the world too suddenly. Frost braided the air, and the river lay still beneath a thin skin of ice, holding its breath. A child stood at the edge, boots damp, knees knocking together, not from the cold alone, but from the quiet fear of beginning.
The child wore a crimson cape, stitched by someone who believed he would need it someday. It dragged behind him like a promise still learning its shape. The child lowered his head, unsure whether the world ahead would open its arms or turn its back.
A flock of birds broke the silence first.
They crossed the sky in a crooked cross, not neat, not perfect, yet they arrived exactly where they meant to. One bird fell behind, wings tired, and another slowed to match its rhythm.
“Why don’t you fly faster?” the child whispered.
The birds answered without words…because arrival is not a race.
The child felt something loosen in his chest.
At the riverbank, a bent old tree leaned forward, its roots clutching the earth like patient hands. Ice clung to its bark, yet tiny buds pressed stubbornly beneath.
“How do you stand here every winter?” the child asked.
The tree creaked gently, leaves whispering secrets from seasons past. I do not stand because it is easy. I stand because spring always remembers me.
The river offered its own riddle. A narrow cross of stones cut through it, slippery, uncertain, each step a question. At the center lay a broken wheel, half-buried, its spokes locked in place as though it had forgotten how to turn.
The child hesitated. Hope felt heavy now, like something fragile carried in both hands.
A mouse scurried past, dragging a crumb twice its size. It stopped, looked up, and continued anyway.
“Doesn’t it feel impossible?” the child asked.
The mouse twitched its whiskers… Impossible is just effort that hasn’t finished yet.
One step. Two. Three.
At the third stone, the ice sighed and cracked. Panic rushed in, loud and sudden. The child’s knees buckled, and for a moment the river seemed determined to teach loss instead of passage.
But then the wind wrapped the child’s cape around him, not as armor, but as reminder.
The child reached the wheel and pushed.
It resisted.
He pushed again – slowly, patiently, like the tree growing rings, like birds adjusting flight, like mice moving crumbs.
The wheel turned.
Not because it was repaired. Not because fear vanished. But because the child believed motion was still possible.
The ice loosened its grip. The river flowed again, relieved. The stones steadied. The child crossed to the far bank, another cross completed, another quiet victory unnoticed by anyone but the soul.
On the other side, the child bowed his head in gratitude, to birds, to trees, to wheels, to trembling beginnings.
And the world whispered its final lesson:
Hope is not loud. It does not promise safety. It simply asks you to take the next step, and teaches everything else how to follow.
Somewhere behind him, the wheel kept turning.
And so, as the child walked on, the cold still lingered. Winter did not vanish. The air stayed sharp, the mornings slow, the nights long. But something had changed.
The child turned once more and saw the birds fluff their feathers against the wind, the trees holding their buds close, the river moving beneath its ice without complaint. None of them fought the cold. They endured it, together, quietly, faithfully.
The world seemed to lean in and offer this comfort:
If you are cold right now outside or inside, know this: Cold is not cruelty. It is a pause. A gathering of strength. A reminder that warmth returns because it must.
Wrap yourself in small mercies. In scarves and stories. In laughter that fogs the air. In hope that glows brightest when everything else feels frozen.
Winter does not come to break you. It comes to teach you how deeply you can survive, and how sweet it will feel when the thaw arrives.
Until then, keep your cape close. Keep your heart moving. Spring is already practicing your name.
He was standing at a crowded bus stop on an unremarkable afternoon when he noticed the woman ahead of him crying in the way people try not to – quietly, efficiently, as if grief were a clerical error best corrected without witnesses. He did not know her. He did not know the story. He did not believe in grand gestures.
So, he did the smallest possible thing.
He stepped forward, paid for her ticket, and said only one word: “Go.”
Not it will be okay. Not I understand. Just go, as if permission itself could be an act of kindness.
The woman didn’t thank him. She just looked up, startled, as if someone had spoken her name from very far away. She boarded the bus. She went home. That night, she replied to a message she had been avoiding for weeks. The reply prevented a silence from hardening into an ending.
The person on the other end of that message slept better than they had in months. The next morning, they were gentler with a colleague who arrived late and shaking. That colleague didn’t quit that day. They stayed. They taught a class. In the third row sat a child who heard one sentence at exactly the right moment and carried it for years like a private compass.
Decades later, that child, now an adult, would pause at a bus stop and notice a stranger crying.
He would not know why he stopped. He would not remember where the instinct came from. He would only know that something in him had arrived fully formed and urgent. He would step forward and do a very small thing.
This is how transmission begins.
We think transmission is a technical thing. A virus, a signal, a gearbox problem, a warning light that flashes red and asks for money. But that’s not where transmission lives.
Transmission lives in what passes through us unnoticed. It begins when a mother hums a tune, she never learned the words to, and her child hums it back decades later without knowing why. It happens when two people lock eyes across a room and an entire paragraph moves between them without a single syllable. It happens when grief enters a house and rearranges the furniture without touching a thing.
Transmission is how being human actually works.
We are not built to keep things to ourselves. Even silence leaks. Even composure sweats. We transmit fear when we say “I’m fine” too quickly. We transmit love when we ask “Did you eat?” instead of “How are you?” We transmit ambition in the way we pace while talking about tomorrow, and resignation in the way we sit when we’ve quietly decided tomorrow can wait. Nothing stays contained inside us for long.
Ideas travel the same way blessings and infections do – uninvited, opportunistic, persistent. A sentence overheard in childhood becomes a belief in adulthood. A joke becomes a worldview. A careless remark becomes a lifelong doubt. A small encouragement, poorly timed, casually delivered becomes the reason someone didn’t quit. We like to imagine ourselves as original thinkers, but most of what we carry arrived through invisible couriers – parents, teachers, strangers, accidents, timing.
Transmission is inheritance without paperwork.
Trauma is its most efficient vehicle. It moves stealthily, disguised as normalcy. A raised voice teaches a child what love sounds like. A closed door teaches them what safety costs. Years later, the body remembers what the mind refuses to archive. We flinch at harmless things. We apologize for taking up space. We carry ghosts we never invited and call them personality.
And still, we transmit.
Joy travels faster. Less documented, more contagious. Laughter jumps bodies. Hope slips through cracks. Kindness is the most underestimated force on earth; it passes through borders, accents, belief systems. One person choosing softness in a sharp world sets off a quiet epidemic no one can trace back to its source.
This is why presence matters more than speeches. We transmit who we are long before we explain what we mean. Children don’t learn values from instructions; they catch them from observation. Lovers don’t fall for words; they fall for patterns. Communities don’t fracture from disagreement; they fracture from tone.
Everything is always broadcasting.
Sometimes I wonder if transmission predates language itself. If long before words, we were already sending – fear, hunger, longing straight from nervous system to nervous system. Perhaps ESP is just the name we give to moments when distance briefly forgets to exist.
A mother wakes seconds before her child cries. A friend thinks of you and your phone lights up like it was listening. Telepathy, then, isn’t magic so much as leakage, the soul forgetting its boundaries. Maybe thoughts aren’t private at all, just temporarily misfiled. Maybe we are all broadcasting on low power, brushing past each other’s inner weather without realizing it. And occasionally, when the static drops, we receive something so intimate and exact it frightens us, because it means we were never as alone as we rehearsed being.
Even objects transmit. A chipped mug carries ten years of mornings. A book smells like the person who loved it first. Old houses hum with unfinished conversations. Street corners remember who waited there. We move through spaces believing we are solitary, unaware we are walking through layered signals, residue of lives lived loudly and quietly before us.
Transmission is time’s way of touching us.
Technology only made the metaphor obvious. Messages now cross oceans in seconds, but the deeper transmissions still move at human speed: trust, betrayal, devotion, indifference.A read receipt cannot tell you if you were heard. A call cannot guarantee connection. A signal can be strong and still carry nothing at all.
What matters is what we choose to send.
Because transmission is not neutral. It shapes the future without asking permission. What we repeat becomes culture. What we excuse becomes tradition. What we heal stops traveling. What we refuse to examine gets passed on like a family heirloom no one remembers choosing.
We are conduits whether we like it or not.
Which brings us, quietly to you friends.
You didn’t just read this. Something in you adjusted its frequency while you weren’t looking. A word lingered. A sentence stayed warmer than it should have. A thought that felt suspiciously like your own may not have originated there at all.
If transmission works the way it seems to, then by the time you reach this line, you are no longer only a receiver.
You are broadcasting.
And somewhere, perhaps at a bus stop, perhaps in a room you will never enter, perhaps in a life you will never meet, someone has just felt something shift. And somewhere, perhaps very near, perhaps impossibly far, something has just tuned in.
They won’t know why. They won’t know your name. They’ll just know it’s time to step forward and do a very small thing.
What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
Uncorked Again (With Zero Regret)
Today’s prompt asks what I enjoy doing most in my leisure time. Cue dramatic pause… because the answer has already been documented.
Yes, this is a repost. A proud one. Same wine, new bottle, uncorked again, swirled thoughtfully, and still very much my flavour. Different prompt, familiar obsession. Apparently my hobbies are far more consistent than my ability to move on.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, I chose to popcorn it. Again. 🍿 Because some thoughts don’t expire, they just demand an encore, especially when leisure, prophecy, and questionable observations of life bump into each other.
So if you’re curious what I do when I’m not adulting, here’s a note from my past self who knew exactly what I was about:
Once, in a quiet village stitched between hills, lived an old woman who made quilts, not from cloth, but from light.
Every evening, people brought her scraps of their days: a child’s laughter, a widow’s tear, a farmer’s tired hope. She held each fragment up to the sun, and it shimmered into color. Joy became yellow. Grief leaned toward indigo. Courage glowed a red so deep it almost breathed.
When the quilt was finished, the village gathered to admire it.
“It’s mostly blue,” said the fisherman. “No,” said the teacher gently, “it’s green.” The child laughed. “You’re both wrong. It’s orange.”
Arguments rose like dust. Voices sharpened. The old woman smiled and spread the quilt over them all.
In the shared shade, the arguing stopped.
“Tell me,” she said softly, “did the warmth change?”
They fell silent. The warmth was the same.
“Then,” she whispered, “perhaps color was never the truth, only the angle you stood in while touching it.”
That night, the quilt dissolved into dawn. What remained was the knowing.
When the Quilt Became the World
(A meditation on perspective and transcendence)
The old woman’s quilt was never really about color.
It was about how effortlessly humans confuse experience with essence.
In real life, we do exactly what the villagers did. We stand before the same event, the same sentence, the same silence and argue over its color. One person calls it optimism. Another calls it denial. A third insists it is realism. Each speaks honestly. Each is incomplete.
This is perspectivalism in its most human form: the recognition that every truth arrives already filtered through memory, culture, temperament, fear, hope.
Our upbringing dyes the fabric. Our losses darken the shade. Our privileges brighten it.
We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.
And yet, perspectivalism is only the beginning of wisdom, not its destination.
Why Perspective Alone Is Not Enough
If we stop at perspective, the village never moves beyond argument.
History shows us this clearly.
Nations remember the same war differently. Families recall the same childhood through incompatible lenses. Two people leave the same conversation convinced the other was cruel or kind.
Perspective explains disagreement. But it cannot resolve it. Left alone, perspectivalism becomes a polite relativism. You have your truth, I have mine. Useful, but insufficient.
Because humans don’t just want to be right. They want to be understood. This is where the quilt matters.
The Shade Beneath the Quilt
When the old woman spread the quilt over the villagers, she did something radical, she shifted attention from what they saw to what they felt.
The warmth did not vary. The comfort did not argue. The shared silence required no translation.
This is the doorway into aperspectivalism.
Not the denial of perspective, but the suspension of ownership over it.
Aperspectivalism asks a different question: Not “Whose view is correct?” But “What remains true regardless of the view?”
In leadership, it’s the human impact beneath data. In conflict, it’s the pain beneath positions. In dialogue, it’s the intention beneath language.
We step out of our angle, not to abandon it, but to loosen our grip.
Living Aperspectivally in a Perspectival World
We cannot escape perspective. But we can transcend its tyranny. This happens in rare, quiet moments:
When grief makes strangers equal
When music dissolves ideology
When awe silences argument
When kindness requires no explanation
These are aperspectival experiences – truths that do not belong to anyone, yet are recognized by everyone.
They are not seen. They are shared. In such moments, understanding does not come from comparison, but from communion.
What the Quilt Teaches Us Now
The quilt of light is a metaphor for modern life.
Social media amplifies color differences. Language fractures faster than empathy. Certainty shouts; nuance whispers.
But the quilt still exists.
It appears whenever we listen without preparing a rebuttal. Whenever we ask, “What does this mean to you?” instead of “Why are you wrong?” Whenever we choose to stand under the shade rather than fight over the pattern.
Perspective gives us identity. Aperspectivalism gives us unity.
One explains the world. The other allows us to live in it together. Perhaps wisdom is not the refinement of vision, but the courage to loosen it.
Not the triumph of one color over another, but the surrender of our need to name the light at all.
Beneath every perspective lies something older than opinion – a shared vulnerability, a common warmth, a silence that does not argue.
When we finally step into that silence, truth is no longer something we possess or defend. It becomes something we participate in.
And in that participation, we discover that what truly binds us was never the color of the quilt, but the human willingness to stand beneath it together.
Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.
The first time it happened, I dismissed it as fatigue.
I was standing at a crossing, waiting for the signal to change, watching a man feed pigeons. Ordinary scene. Beige pavement. Grey birds. Crumbs of bread falling like tiny soft confessions. Nothing mystical, symbolic and poetic.
Except I could swear one of the pigeons looked at me like it recognized me. Not the way animals look at humans, not fear, not hunger, not curiosity. Recognition.
The light turned green. The moment broke and I walked on. That night, I dreamed of feathers and eyes and a voice that said nothing but this: Take another look.
I laughed when I woke up. Brain misfiring. Overactive imagination. The human need to turn coincidence into meaning. We do that. We’re story-making machines trapped in skin.
But then it started happening everywhere.
A building I’d passed a thousand times suddenly looked like a face leaning forward to speak. A crack in the wall resembled a map of a country I’ve never been to but somehow missed. A stranger’s laugh sounded exactly like someone I loved and lost and I turned around convinced grief had learned how to walk.
Each time, I told myself: It’s nothing. Each time, something in me whispered: Take another look.
That’s the absurdity of consciousness, we live inside meaning while pretending we live inside logic.
One evening, I saw a woman sitting alone on a bench, staring at the sky. She looked like sadness. Not sad, sadness itself. Like if loneliness learned how to sit properly in public. I almost walked past her. I didn’t want to be that person who projects poetry onto strangers.
But the voice returned, softer now, kinder. Almost amused.
Take another look.
So I did.
And she wasn’t sadness. She was waiting. For someone late, for a bus, for a message, for forgiveness. Perhaps, for a future version of herself that hadn’t arrived yet. Nothing mystical and nothing dramatic. Just a human being suspended in the middle of becoming.
And something inside me cracked open quietly.
Because that’s when it hit me… we are constantly “mis-seeing” the world.
We look once and call it reality. We look quickly and call it truth. We glance and call it understanding.
We label things to feel safe: Stranger. Failure. Success. Normal. Broken. Beautiful. Lost. Found. But existence is not a headline, it’s a paragraph we never finish reading.
So I started practicing it deliberately.
I took another look at anger, and found fear wearing armor. I took another look at confidence and found terror in a tailored suit. I took another look at silence and found a scream that had learned manners. I took another look at myself and didn’t see a personality anymore, just a collection of survival strategies pretending to be an identity.
Even memories changed when I looked again.
Moments I thought were abandonment were actually people doing the best they could with the tools they didn’t have. Moments I thought were love were sometimes just attachment in a costume. Moments I thought were failure were just time taking a longer route.
The world didn’t change. My perception did. Which might be the most unsettling magic of all.
Because once you start taking another look, nothing stays simple. A chair is no longer a chair, it’s a tree that agreed to become furniture. A mirror is no longer a mirror, it’s a portal that only shows one version of the truth. A goodbye is no longer an ending, it’s a sentence cut off mid-thought.
Even people stop being nouns and start becoming verbs.
We are not who we are. We are who we are becoming while pretending to be finished.
And the absurd part?
Sometimes the first look is necessary. Sometimes illusion protects us. Sometimes not knowing keeps us functional. Sometimes the lie is the life raft.
Not everything is meant to be seen clearly. Not everything is meant to be understood now. Not every mystery wants to be solved.
But some moments, those strange intuitive flickers, those almost-seeing moments, those “wait, that wasn’t what I thought it was” seconds…
Those are invitations. Not to certainty. Not to answers. But to awareness.
To pause, soften. To doubt your conclusions. To mistrust your certainty. To re-enter the world with beginner’s eyes.
Because the truth is:
Reality is not fixed. Meaning is not stable. Identity is not solid. Perception is not reliable.
And yet…
There is something holy in looking again. In refusing the first version of things. In letting the world be stranger than your explanations. In allowing mystery to breathe.
So now, when something feels off, when intuition hums, when a moment feels slightly unreal, when a person doesn’t match their surface, when a situation feels too neat to be true, I don’t panic, overthink and I don’t label.
I just whisper to myself…
Take another look.
Because sometimes the second look isn’t clearer. It’s deeper. And sometimes what you find isn’t a new answer, but a better question.
And sometimes what changes isn’t the world at all…
Pieces Of My Heart 