Why Soft, Simple Writing Stays with Us

You don’t always need big ideas or sophisticated literary techniques to make an impact. Sometimes a softer approach—a simple story told without complexity or pretension—can reach people more deeply. Tuesdays with Morrie is a perfect example of that. It’s quiet, straightforward style doesn’t try to dazzle the reader. Instead, it invites you in gently, and before you realize it, the book has settled into your heart.

You know, one  reason the book pulls people in is it’s written almost like a real conversation you’re overhearing. When you read it, you don’t feel like you’re studying themes or analysing arguments—you feel like you’ve just pulled up a chair next to Mitch and Morrie. The dialogue is so warm and natural that it’s easy to slip into the rhythm of their talks. And because most of us have had moments like this with someone older or wiser, it instantly feels familiar. It makes you think about your own conversations, your own memories, your own questions about life. The book doesn’t push you away with big ideas; it invites you in, gently, as if saying, “Sit with us for a bit.” That’s a big part of why readers feel so involved, even though the story is simple ( there’s hardly any plot to speak of ) and  the language plain. The ideas don’t feel particularly profound or original. But that’s part of  what makes it  so accessible to readers.

Telescopic Lives: A 400‑Year‑Old Man Remembers

PROLOGUE

Recently, I read How to Stop Time by Matt Haig, a novel about a man who ages far more slowly than everyone around him. The story follows him across centuries, watching people he loves grow old and disappear while he continues on. Something about that premise stayed with me—the way memory stretches, blurs, and reshapes itself when a life lasts far longer than it should. It got me thinking: what would memory feel like if only one person lived to be 400 years old while everyone else lived normal lives? Since no one has ever lived long enough to tell us how their centuries-old memories feel –  just like no one has ever come back  from death to recount what it lies beyond –  the question became the seed for the thought experiment that follows.

In this piece, I explore, more decisively than Hamlet does  in his contemplation of the state after death, this thought experiment through the imagined monologue of such a man—one who remembers, forgets, and reflects on the long-distant past in ways the rest of us can only guess at.

MONOLOGUE

[Quietly, near a window overlooking a timeless landscape]

Four hundred years… and sometimes I still wake expecting to hear the voices of people who have been gone for centuries. Longevity, when it belongs only to you, is not a gift you hold—it’s a room you inhabit alone.

Everyone I once loved lived their natural span, just as people always have. They aged, they weakened, they died… and I kept going. At first I tried to hold every memory close, terrified that forgetting them would be another kind of death. But the centuries have their own logic. Memory thins, the edges blur, and what remains are mere impressions—warm, but drifting further away in the  universe of my mind.

How do I feel now? Strange, mostly. Not sorrowing the way I once did, but not untouched either. There is a quiet ache that never quite leaves. I walk through a world  of young faces, new families, new stories, while mine stretch back so far that even I struggle to recognize the person I used to be.

The people I lost… I remember them not as portraits but as atmospheres. My parents feel like the sensation of  being hugged, rather than two specific faces. Friends from early centuries linger in me only as a jingle of laughter, or just the faint  afterglow of being together – warm, cosy –  but not as clear images. My siblings, my niece … but wait.  Were they there in the first place? Were there truly people tied to me by blood?  Oh, yes, thanks to those persistent,  involuntary flashes of memory,  I recall their names, James and Lydia. But little else. After  so many lifetimes have passed since those early days, my remembrances  of them have dissolved into  abstractions. It’s only by simple logic that I’m sure I watched them grow old, and that I must  have been with them in their dying days and that I must have grieved. But that certainty only comes from reasoning. Simple logic gives me facts. It doesn’t  retain  the lingering rawness of emotions, the sharpness of images I might  have had if I’d lived a normal span, an old man in his eighties,  reminiscing about the past.  The love of my life—her memory has become a feeling more than a person… a warmth in the chest, a softness in the voice when I speak of certain years.

Sometimes, though, something jolts my numbness: a particular melody, a scent, a phrase someone speaks with the same rhythm as a friend long gone. In those déjà vu moments, memory briefly sharpens, and for a heartbeat I see them with startling clarity. It is beautiful—and it hurts. Because the moment I notice that clarity, it slips away again.

Do I feel lonely? Yes, in a way no one around me would understand. Not for company—I have that though  I know  I will again lose it —but for shared history. No one alive remembers the world I began in. No one remembers the people who made me who I am.  Their stories exist only in me, and even I carry them imperfectly now.

I’ve made peace  with all this.  And I also feel grateful. Grateful that they lived, grateful that I knew them, grateful that even centuries later, the essence of them still stirs within me. They are not gone—not entirely. They’ve faded into the foundation of the person I’ve become. And though details fail me; the influence does not.


But tonight? Tonight I miss the texture of them. The sound, the touch, the weight of a hand in mine. That… that never stops aching. Not sharply. Just… persistently. Like the tide, always there, always pulling something back out to sea. 

Four hundred years. You carry what you can. You let the rest become starlight. 

The Paradox of Creating From Dreams

While I might want to sketch a rough contour of my dreams upon waking up, and fill in the details later, there lies a paradox in that process of creation.

Dreams can be a powerful source of ideas, but they come with a strange limitation: we usually remember only pieces of them. The moment we wake up, parts start fading, no matter how hard we try to hold on. And yet, those fragments often spark something new—a thought, an image, a feeling that pushes us to create.

That’s the paradox. Any dream‑inspired creation depends as much on forgetting as it does on remembering. We can’t bring a full dream into waking life. We can only carry whatever survives the transition. By the time we write it down or turn it into a drawing or story, we’ve already lost parts of it. The act of creating from a dream is also the act of accepting that much of it is gone.

But this isn’t necessarily a problem. Forgetting can actually help us. When the exact details slip away, we’re free to interpret the fragments in our own way. We fill in the gaps with imagination, experience, or intuition. The result isn’t a perfect record of the dream; it’s something new that grew out of it.

So whenever we create something based on a dream, we’re really working with both memory and absence. What we remember gives us the starting point. What we forget opens space for creativity. In the end, the finished work becomes its own thing—shaped by the dream, but not bound to it.

No great artists or writers  work  from a pure memory of  dreams. The rest is a conscious process of creativity.

A Star that Shines with Words

The other day,  my brother asked if I’d managed to build a following for my blog.

Well, I’m not particularly trying to build a crowd; I’m trying to become a star –  one that shines with words.

Even if I exist as a solitary star in a quiet corner of the universe, that doesn’t matter. A star doesn’t ask who is watching. It burns with its own inner fire. 

My writing is that light. Like starlight, it may travel a long time before anyone sees it. By the time a reader looks up and notices, I may be gone, but  still exist in my works as an afterglow in the mind of another. And that’s enough.

What they’ll meet on the page is therefore not who I am in that moment, but who I was when those words were born: a distant glowing past; a scatter of stardust still making its way through the dark, its light still streaming.

Mining Dreams: How to Capture Your Subconscious Creativity

Salvador Dalí slept with a key in his hand, positioned over a metal plate. As he drifted off, the key would slip from his fingers and clang against the plate, jolting him awake just as dream images began to flood his mind. Mary Shelley dreamed the central scene of Frankenstein. Paul McCartney heard “Yesterday” in his sleep. These artists understood something fundamental: our dreams are portals to a vast creative reservoir that our waking mind barely touches.

The conscious mind, for all its cleverness, is just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface lies the subconscious—a sprawling warehouse of memories, associations, and creative possibilities that consciousness can only access in fragments. During our waking hours, our rational mind acts as a gatekeeper, filtering and organizing, often blocking what it thinks are the strange and wonderful connections that fuel truly original ideas. But when we sleep, that gatekeeper steps aside.
Dreams are the subconscious finding its voice. With our conscious mind offline, the deeper layers of our psyche begin assembling thoughts in ways that defy logic but often hold surprising insight. Characters merge impossibly; time loops back on itself; everyday objects transform into symbols—all the bizarre imagery that makes dreams feel so surreal is actually our creative engine running without its usual constraints.
The tragedy is how quickly these visions dissolve. Dreams are phosphorescent, glowing brilliantly for mere moments before fading into nothing. You wake with a sense of having witnessed something profound, only to watch it evaporate like morning mist. Five minutes later, you can barely recall a single image. Ten minutes later, it’s gone completely.
This creates an impossible choice: sacrifice sleep to capture the dream, or sacrifice the dream to preserve sleep. Getting up to write a detailed account means disrupting rest, potentially making it harder to fall back asleep. But letting the dream slip away means losing whatever creative sparks it contained.
Well, the solution lies in compromise. Keep a notebook or phone beside your bed. When you wake from a vivid dream—whether in the middle of the night or first thing in the morning—don’t try to capture everything. Instead, jot down quick fragments: key images, emotions, the strangest details, essential plot points. Just a few words or phrases, whatever you can scrawl in the dark without fully waking yourself up.
These fragments act as anchors. Later, when you’re properly awake, those brief notes will help reconstruct the fuller dream. A single phrase like “me levitating ” or “falling but laughing” can unlock entire sequences that would have otherwise vanished. You’re essentially creating a signpost  that your waking mind can follow back into the territory of dreams.
Not every dream will yield creative gold, of course. But by making this practice habitual, you give yourself regular access to  your swirling subconscious. Over time, you’ll notice patterns, recurring symbols, and unexpected ideas that your conscious mind would never generate on its own. The reservoir is always there, waiting. You just need a way to dip into it without drowning in the process.

Note: I asked Chatbot to give me a few famous examples of who were inspired by their dreams for their works, hence the first paragraph.

On Stillness, Memory, and the Subconscious

As you may agree with me,  my blog entries so far have carried a sense of stillness, dream, and liminal awareness. While Discovering Stillness in Small Moments The Rest Between the Notes and Moonlit Threads, Human Ties are the clearest explorations of it, other posts also hover in that quiet, introspective register — even when their subjects differ.

When I write my reminiscences, it’s never just an act of remembering. It’s more like a quiet descent — a letting go — where I allow myself to drift as deeply as possible into the depths of my own subconscious. For a while, I suspend judgment. I loosen my grip on logic. I let the mind wander where it takes me, letting these remembrances run wild, unrestrained. 

Some of these thoughts surface in moments of stillness — those small, luminous pauses that I wrote about in Discovering Stillness in Small Moments. Others emerge from a more elusive source: the twilight realm between waking and dreaming. That half-lit territory has always fascinated me. In pieces like The Rest Between the Notes and Moonlit Threads, Human Ties, I began to sense how dreams and the subconscious can weave themselves into conscious reflection. The imagery, tone, and rhythm of those writings seem to come from somewhere deeper — as though they had been resting quietly inside me, waiting for the right moment to rise. 


Looking back, I realize that this process — this surrender to stillness and dream — is often where my writing begins. The subconscious seems to store fragments of experience: sensations, voices, faces, and fleeting impressions that never quite left me. When I stop trying to control them, they find their own way to the surface, sometimes as words, sometimes as images, sometimes as silence. 
Perhaps what I’m really exploring in all these pieces is how memory, stillness, and dream converge — how each moment of inner quiet allows the unseen parts of the mind to speak. In that sense, writing becomes less an act of mindful creation and more an act of listening. 


This is what I hope to explore next — the importance of dreams as a source of inspiration. For it’s often there, in the dim spaces of the subconscious, that the truest emotions and the most vivid images reside, waiting to be found.

Discovering Stillness in Small Moments — A Reflection on Life’s Impermanence

Recently, I’ve been spending  slow coffee mornings at Pret, sitting by the floor‑to‑ceiling glass window with a flat white or latte  in hand. Most of my time there slips away in writing and reading, punctuated now and then by moments of idle gazing—watching the world drift past the window.

Then there was another ordinary morning—so ordinary it almost escaped notice—the sunlight came streaming through the glass in slender, golden shafts. They fell across my table, catching the rising steam from my cup. Such a simple, fleeting thing—and yet something about it felt extraordinary, almost poetic.

That was it. No grand epiphany. No orchestral swell. Just a ribbon of light, and a sudden awareness that I had ‘seen’ it—truly seen it—not merely with my eyes but with some  part of the subconsciousness that rarely awakens. That tiny flicker of life was and vanished all in one breath. Just as all things do.

Maybe that’s the whole secret. We’re always searching for something real, something that endures. But perhaps it doesn’t take a story worthy of an ancient Greek tragedy  to remind us how fragile beauty really is. We wait for life to come in fanfare, when meaning often arrives softly: sunlight caressing a coffee cup; the conversations   of strangers at nearby tables  weaving their own stories; the stirring of our mind for some inspiration. Each moment appears, glints,  vanishes – the triptych of our being.


We don’t have to stand, like the man in the green overcoat in Casper David Friedric’s famous painting The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, gazing heroically at the horizon to have a brush with the sublime. Sometimes, it’s hidden inside the most mundane jiffies of our lives—tucked so gently into our days that we overlook them.

When I paused long enough to notice that light, something inside me paused too—or perhaps, stepped briefly into a state unbound by time. For that instant, I glimpsed what the Buddha called śūnyatā —emptiness not as absence, but as the infinite space from which all things arise and to which they return. It’s the Truth he awakened to beneath the Bodhi tree two and a half millennia ago.

Outside the window, the world then became a moving poem: blurred reflections, people passing through the sunlight, each heading into their own horizons.  None stayed long enough to be part of mine, and that, I realized, was a quiet comfort. Everything, like the light, moves on.

Maybe life is just that—a sequence of shimmering moments, each one vanishing even as we notice it. And yet, when we do notice, the ordinary becomes luminous. The mundane glows. Existence itself turns into poetry—fragile, radiant, ephemeral.

So now, each morning, I still sit by that window. The coffee tastes the same. The world still hurries past. The only difference is that sometimes, I look up from my screen and see how the light touches the steam, how time folds itself into an ordinary hour. And in that instant, I remember: 
The purpose of life is not to chase the permanent, but to experience the efflorescence —while it happens, in ribbons of gold, before it slips quietly into memory.

And then even memory thins to air.

Counting Down to Meaning: What a Timer Taught Me About Living

What If You Knew Exactly When You Would Die?

 Imagine waking up tomorrow with a timer floating above your head—visible only to you—counting down to the exact moment of your death. Years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds. Every tick echoing through your consciousness.

Would this knowledge liberate you or destroy you?

 Sarah discovered her timer on a Tuesday morning. Thirty-seven years, four months, and sixteen days. She was 28, sitting in a cubicle, halfway through an email about quarterly projections. The fluorescent lights hummed above her as she stared at the numbers, watching the seconds vanish like water through her fingers.

At first, the timer felt like a prison sentence. Every sunset became a reminder of scarcity. Every birthday, a milestone toward the end. She quit her job within a week—what was the point of climbing a corporate ladder she’d never reach the top of? But then came the paralysis: if everything ends, why start anything at all?

 Three months into knowing, something shifted. Sarah stood at a farmer’s market, holding a perfectly ripe peach. The timer read thirty-seven years, one month, eight days. She bit into the fruit, and for the first time since seeing the numbers, she truly tasted it. Sweet, messy, temporary—and somehow more precious because of it.

 The timer changed everything and nothing. She still got angry in traffic. Still worried about money. Still fell in love—harder, actually, knowing that every kiss was numbered. She had a daughter at 35, knowing she’d live to see her child grow up, but not grow old. Every bedtime story carried weight. Every “I love you” meant more.

 Some days, Sarah envied those who lived in ignorance, treating time like an infinite resource. They complained about Mondays, wished away entire seasons, scrolled through their phones during sunsets. But she also pitied them. They didn’t know what she knew: that the ticking wasn’t a countdown to death, but a drumbeat calling her to life.

The philosopher Heidegger called it “being-toward-death” — the idea that truly living requires confronting our mortality. But there’s a difference between knowing death exists and watching it approach with mathematical precision. One is philosophy; the other is poetry written in vanishing ink.

Would you want to know?

Before you answer, consider this: you already have a timer. You just can’t see the numbers. Every morning you wake up one day closer to an ending you can’t predict. The only difference between you and Sarah is the illusion of uncertainty.

Maybe the real question isn’t whether we’d want to know when we’ll die. Maybe it’s why we live as if we’ll never die at all. We make five-year plans while ignoring five-minute sunsets. We hold grudges for decades but can’t hold our loved ones for five extra seconds. We save our best wine for special occasions that never come.

 Sarah’s timer now reads twenty-nine years, two months, five days. She’s teaching her daughter to ride a bike, running alongside, letting go, watching her wobble forward into her own uncertain future. The timer ticks. The wheels turn. Life moves forward, not despite its ending, but because of it.

Perhaps meaning isn’t something we find or create. Perhaps it’s something that emerges in the space between knowing we’re temporary and choosing to love anyway. Between seeing the timer and tasting the peach. Between the countdown and the courage to count each moment as if it matters.

Because it does.

What would change in your life if you could see your timer? What would stay the same? And perhaps most importantly—what’s stopping you from living as if you can already see it?

Life, Words and Everything in Between

Sitting by the window right now, just staring out at the night, and I can’t stop thinking about life. Like, what’s the point, you know? It’s so beautiful and messy and fleeting. One second, we’re here, and the next… we’re just gone. And what do we leave behind? A few stories? Some words? Does any of it even stick?

I keep coming back to this idea of writing and language. Like, we spend so much time trying to make sense of everything. Writing stuff down, telling stories, putting words to it all. I guess it’s our way of trying to make it make sense. But honestly? Do words even work? Can they really capture everything? The love, the fear, the joy, the chaos? Sometimes it feels like I’m trying to hold water in my hands—it just slips through no matter what I do.

When I was younger, I thought writing would be this big, meaningful thing. Like, if I wrote enough, or wrote something ‘important’, it would last forever. That my words would be my way of leaving a mark. But now? I don’t know. Words aren’t forever, and they’re definitely not monuments. They’re more like little whispers—here for a second and then gone. And honestly, I think I’m okay with that now. These days, I write more to just remember things—faces, moments, even ideas I’m afraid of losing as time goes on.

I’ve spent so many hours just sitting and writing, trying to figure life out. Like, why are we here? What does it all mean? I’ve written about love and heartbreak, big hopes and even bigger disappointments. And sometimes, when I go back and read it, it feels… small. Like the words never really capture what I wanted them to. But maybe that’s just how it is. Maybe words can’t hold everything. Maybe they’re just the best shot we’ve got, even if they’re not perfect.

And honestly? What else can we even do but try? There’s something kind of amazing about creating something, even if it feels pointless sometimes. Finding the right word, putting together a sentence—it’s like my way of saying, “Hey, I’m here. I see this. I feel this.” Even if no one else gets it, I think I write for me. Just to figure things out, to make things make sense in my own head.

And then I think about how small we all are. Like, the stars outside? They’ve been shining for millions of years, watching people like us come and go. And the wildest part? Every single atom in me came from a star. Like, how crazy is that? When I’m gone, those same atoms will go back into the earth, back into the cycle, and become part of something else. It’s kind of comforting, in a way. Like, even after I’m gone, I’ll still be part of something bigger.

So maybe that’s the point? Not to make something that lasts forever, but just to do it*. To write, to create, to try. Not to beat death or anything dramatic like that, but just to sit with it and say, “Hey, I lived. I gave it a shot. I told my story.” And maybe that’s enough.

Anyway, I’m just sitting here with my drink, staring at the night, and I don’t think I’m looking for answers anymore. I’m just trying to figure out where I fit in all of this. And if writing helps me do that, then yeah, I’m gonna keep writing. Even if it’s small, even if it’s just for me. Because maybe that’s what it’s all about.

     Why I like Virginia Woolf

A Friend of mine found the narrative of Virgnia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse  too chaotic to understand and he decided to  pass it up as holiday reading. Instead  he chose Joseph Conrad’s Victory.  Here’s what he said to me:

“I’ve temporarily abandoned To the Lighthouse. It doesn’t seem suitable as holiday reading.  I’ll borrow it from the library in Macau.  I’ve switched to Victory by Joseph Conrad, which is more a narrative, though different in that the narrator is always present but ‘unreliable’” .

I replied to him:

You either love Virginia Woolf’s novels, or you don’t—there’s rarely any middle ground. My first encounter with To the Lighthouse was as a prescribed text during my matriculation, sometime between 1976 and 1978. I’ve often wondered why it was chosen for the A-level syllabus, and I suspect it was because of its deceptively short length. But at the time, calling it “difficult” would have been an understatement—it felt utterly impenetrable, even obfuscating.

The experience wasn’t helped by our lackluster literature teacher (I still remember calling him Mr. Harrison). Even now, fifty years later, I still remember him simply reading the text aloud to us, offering little in the way of critique, commentary, or analysis. It was as though he, too, was overwhelmed by the novel’s complexity and beauty, unable to guide us through its intricate layers.

Yet, despite these challenges, my young mind was already captivated by something in Woolf’s writing. I couldn’t articulate it back then, but I fell in love with her poetic language and the unspeakable poignancy that seemed to linger between the lines. There was a haunting quality to the prose, a rhythm and texture that moved me, even if I didn’t fully understand it.

Over the years, as I grew older—my being adding rings like a tree—and revisited the book casually a few more times, something began to shift. Each re-reading awakened me further to the sheer beauty of it. What had once seemed opaque and elusive now revealed itself as luminous and profound. The novel’s exploration of time, memory, and the fleeting nature of human existence resonated more deeply with each passing year. It’s as though the book itself matured alongside me, offering new insights as I grew into the person capable of appreciating them.