I have a few loose thoughts swimming in my head.

Each of them is probably a blog post unto itself, but I’m putting them here so they don’t keep rattling around and escape my brain through the ears.

Thought One: Attention

Reality is far richer than what our feeble brains can comprehend.

Even paying momentary attention to the fullness of the world around us can induce raptures and reveries. There is extraordinary beauty in the ordinary. There is beauty all around us.

All we have to do is train our attention, like an errant dog, to actually pay attention.

Thought Two: Poetry

In this age of discord and disenchantment, poetry is part of the solution.

A good verse can turn your worldview inside out. It can free those imprisoned feelings and emotions inside you. It can cause earthquakes in your psyche. It does not merely shift your perspective; it can destroy it and build something new in its place.

Thought Three: Preservation

Creation is overrated. Preservation is underrated.

This isn’t to say that all creation is bad. But without preserving what has been created, creation itself loses meaning.

Thought Four: Being Understood

We automatically assume that people around us should understand what is going on in our heads.

We expect them to understand what we think is important, our side of the story, our perspective, where we are coming from.

But no matter how close we are to each other, there will always be parts of us that remain alien to one another. There will always be sides and aspects of each other that we cannot automatically know.

Which means stating things out loud, clearly and plainly, is almost always better than expecting people to magically understand our perspective or figure out what is happening inside our heads.

Thought Five: Cities and Contemplation

The architecture of modern urban spaces in India is hostile to contemplation.

Without contemplation, you will never become a fuller human being.

Which means part of the reason we are so miserable, or at least why I am miserable, is because the structure of our cities actively impedes the tender, contemplative soul inside all of us.

The density, the noise, the pollution, the recklessness, the carelessness — all of it works against contemplation.

Thought Six: Reading Versus Literary Pedantry

I’ve often found debates about which book is good, which book is bad, and a lot of these literary arguments to be pointless pedantry.

It is usually better to just pick up the book and read it yourself, then make up your own mind, especially if you actually care about that particular topic.

This does not mean all literary criticism is bad. But most criticism, most of the time, feels like a giant waste of time.

Thought Seven: Small Actions, Wild Outcomes

We often forget how small actions can lead to disproportionate outcomes.

A small conversation, meeting someone new, writing and sharing a perspective, a tiny act of effort — these things can lead to outcomes far bigger and wilder than anything we could have imagined.

There is also the fact that small actions compound over time. Repeated long enough, they become something else entirely.

And the best part is that putting in the effort to do these small actions is almost entirely within our control.

But because this is obvious, because it sounds basic, we tend to ignore its importance.