It’s a new year. A review of the past and a look into the future.

Things I want to explore in 2025

• Write more on this blog to:
  • Think through things myself
  • As a creative outlet
  • To document for future me
  • To practice programming
• Get back into Rock climbing. I had such a great time when I used to climb a few years ago, but unfortunately I let that slip away
• Write more fiction and poetry. When I look at all my favourite people, they all seem to be authors.
• Work on this programming project and launch asap.
• Regular zazen/meditation/meetup groups. There is a community of people who are into Sam Harriss, and so far I’ve met some great people
• Structured guítar sessions at an intermediate level
• Take more photos
• Training Goals
  • Injury prevention
  • Stretch more
  • Maintain muscle mass (3x a week)
  • Skill goals : Handstand pushup
• More esoteric/obscure/random
  • Get deeply comfortable talking to anyone/strangers
  • Dress better
  • Look for beauty in every encounter
  • Memorise poetry (I’ve started with ‘Everything is waiting for you’ by David Whyte and ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver)
  • Create for the sake of creating

The past

The largest change in this past year at a personal level has been going through the end of a relationship. How do ‘I deal with the transience of all relationships in my life?’ I think.

Not just romantic, but friendships that have fallen away or changed. Relationships with my family that have evolved and changed. Grief at the loss of my mother, still the waves come, but less frequently and more lightly.

How do I not grip so tightly?

Over the past decade, it’s more clear that it’s not an intellectual answer, it’s an embodied one. And it’s not a fixed answer, it’s a dance.

I think of a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye :

Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things,
Feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.

I remember I went to a day-retreat in the middle of London with Henry Shukman, and he was talking about heartbreak. The line he used stuck with me ‘The good thing about heartbreak is that when the heart breaks, it usually breaks open’.

The more I loosen the grip, the more the boundaries between the world and the self dissolve. I love things more.

I love art more, because it allows us to access places we wouldn’t normally be able to.

I love laughter more, because it’s the only sane response to the situation.

I love people more, because I know that I am in them, and they are in me. I love fiction because it allows me to live a thousand different lives, and feel the suffering and joys that go with it.

I love creation, because you sublimate yourself, momentarily absorbed into the process, marking the universe with your own unique fingerprints.

I love using the word love, because I know that I wouldn’t have 10 years ago. I love metaphors and similes because it’s like blending words together, the ellipses and ovals slowly becoming deformed, melting into each other to say things they could never have done alone.

I love walking in silence, allowing the world to reveal deeper, more gentle dimensions of itself.

I love doing hard things, because it feels good. I love moving my body, because the world moves with it.

I love saying non-sensical things, because we shouldn’t take words so seriously. But at the same time, we should. I love paradox, because it exists.

I love the passage of time. Time is not slipping through our fingers, it is we who are slipping through time.

I love meeting new people, because it’s like opening a new book and discovering that this moment is now etched into both your stories.

I love dogs, because they’re the golden ideal of how we should love.

And a million more things.

It’s hard to put into words the shifts in my internal state over the past decade, but meditation has fundamentally altered something. I wish I could say I don’t get impatient with my Father or that I never feel alone, but those things are no longer problems.

I’m reminded that self knowledge is not an end, it’s a process. Being in a relationship, you learn a lot about yourself. I hope that I can become kinder over the years to the people around me.

Random photos taken in 2025

One of my favourite parts about engaging with art is stepping into perspective of another, and “All We Imagine as Light” offers exactly this – an intimate window into the lives of women in contemporary Mumbai.

To me this is a story about female friendship.

It is about two nurses in Mumbai (Prabha) and her younger roommate (Anu) living and working in Mumbai. We find out that the older nurse (Prabha’s) husband left for Germany soon after they married, and now rarely contacts her. The younger nurse Anu meanwhile is in a secret relationship with a Muslim boy.

I won’t spoil what events unfold, but over the course of the movie, we are given a lens into the intimacy of female relationships. In fact, the men in the movie rarely make an appearance.

“Yes, those living on the periphery often vanish, leaving behind little to no trace or noise.”

What kind of support system exists in the ‘city of dreams illusions’ especially for women?

For example, we learn about one of Prabha’s friends who is being evicted from a house that she had lived in for 22 years. Her husband had died and hadn’t told her/given her any papers for proof of address. She decides eventually to move back to her village, and both Prabha and Anu help her relocate.

We see three women, each at different life stages, navigating this indifferent city whilst supporting each other.

I like how this movie is all about the subtext. It is just a story with the tragedies and joys of living. No huge grand narratives, but just the daily lives of two women in evolving India. Whilst reading through the reviews, I saw some people say it was ‘underwhelming’. Nothing happens. It’s slow. I love this. It’s a slice of life movie- there is no grand arc or narratives, it’s just an intimate lens on a group of three women navigating a modern Mumbai. I’m reminded of Haruki Murakami’s book ‘Men without Women’ a series of short stories about men who have lost women in their lives. This is a story of women without men.