Category: psychology & The Self

  • Growth Is Fluid

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    There was a time when I wanted the right label.

    The right type. The right box. The right IQ.
    The right explanation that would finally explain who I was.

    From Concrete to Glass

    So I took the tests. I read the descriptions. I nodded along when parts fit and quietly ignored the parts that didn’t. For a while, the labels felt comforting. They gave shape to the fog.

    But life kept happening.

    And with every season lived, something shifted.

    I noticed that the person I was at twenty could not be measured by the same questions at forty. The answers changed—not because I was inconsistent, but because I had grown. Travel does that. Loss does that. Love does that. And so, does sitting alone long enough to hear your own thoughts without interruption.

    What once felt like personality turned out to be position—where I was standing in life at the time.

    The mistake we make is assuming growth should look tidy. Linear. Predictable. As if becoming wiser means becoming more fixed.

    In reality, the opposite is true.

    The more experience you gather, the harder it becomes to stay contained by simple definitions. You integrate contradictions. You soften sharp edges. You develop empathy without losing clarity. You learn to hold questions instead of rushing toward answers.

    This isn’t instability.
    It’s depth.

    Growth is not about discovering who you are once and for all.
    It’s about learning how to move with who you are becoming.

    That’s why rigid labels eventually feel uncomfortable. They freeze a moment that was never meant to be permanent. They describe a snapshot, not the unfolding story.

    And maybe that’s the quiet truth beneath it all:

    You are not here to be defined.
    You are here to evolve.

    To adapt.
    To revise.
    To surprise even yourself.

    So if you no longer fit the version of yourself you once understood, that’s not a problem to solve.

    That’s life working exactly as it should.

    Growth is fluid.
    And you are allowed to flow.

    Click on the link above to read my latest exploration of life and its meaning.

  • The Simpler, Deeper Life

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    A Philosophy of Patient Pieces

    There is a particular kind of tiredness that doesn’t come from doing too much, but from trying to understand everything all at once.

    From Concrete to Glass

    The tiredness of holding opinions you haven’t had time to earn.
    Of needing clarity before you’ve been allowed confusion.
    Of believing that a meaningful life requires a finished answer.

    What if it doesn’t?

    What if a simpler, deeper life begins not with certainty—but with patience?

    I’ve come to believe there’s another way of moving through the world.
    It’s a quieter way.
    One that trades frenzy for focus and judgment for curiosity.

    It doesn’t ask you to know more.
    It asks you to notice better.

    Think of your life not as a puzzle you must solve, but as a collection of small, honest pieces.

    * A line from a conversation that lingers.
    * An article that unsettles something you thought was settled.
    * A feeling that surprises you by refusing to fit neatly into a category.

    Your job is not to explain these pieces away.
    Only to hold them.

    Instead of rushing to conclusions, you gather.

    Instead of assuming you already understand, you allow patterns to form slowly—naturally—when enough pieces are present.

    And when an understanding does emerge, you treat it as a working compass, not a permanent destination.

    You follow it.
    But you don’t cling to it.

    Because you know something essential:
    this map was drawn with incomplete information.

    That isn’t weakness.
    It’s humility.

    This way of living simplifies more than we expect.

    In conversation, the need to perform evaporates.
    You stop listening for openings to speak and start listening to understand.
    “Tell me more” becomes more powerful than “Here’s what I think.”

    In decisions, the fantasy of the perfect choice loosens its grip.
    You act with the best information you have—calmly, cleanly—knowing you can adjust without self-punishment if new truth arrives.

    And with yourself, something tender happens.

    You stop treating your inner world like a problem to fix.
    Contradiction becomes information, not failure.
    Confusion becomes a signal, not a verdict.

    You become less of a project—and more of a presence.

    Seen this way, life is no longer a test you must pass.

    It is an ongoing collaboration with reality.

    The fear of being wrong softens, because being provisionally right is enough to keep moving.
    The anxiety of not knowing eases, because knowing you don’t know is where all learning begins.

    You are not failing to reach a final answer.

    You are succeeding at engaging honestly with the mystery.

    So start small.

    Pick one question.
    One relationship.
    One quiet uncertainty you’ve been trying to force into resolution.

    Don’t solve it.

    Just collect a few more pieces.
    Notice what they suggest.
    Hold the pattern gently.

    And pay attention to how much lighter life feels when you stop demanding clarity on command.

    Walk toward what matters.

    Let the path reveal itself—
    piece by patient piece.

  • Your World or Mine

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    Between the Worlds: A Letter to a Fellow Traveller

    You are right—though perhaps not in the way certainty usually demands.

    Introduction to My Published Books

    I don’t live in your world, and you don’t live in mine.
    The landscape of my mind is shaped by memories you’ve never shared, carved by sorrows you haven’t carried, and illuminated by joys uniquely my own. My world is built from private victories and silent struggles, from the books that altered my inner weather and the moments that broke me open just enough to let light in.

    And you—you inhabit a universe just as vivid, just as real, yet entirely your own.

    Here lies the beautiful, haunting truth of our existence:
    We are all architects of invisible realms. We walk side by side, exchanging glances and pleasantries, while inhabiting different dimensions of meaning. You may look at the same mountain I see and witness, not stone and snow, but a summer with your grandfather. I may hear the same song as you and be pulled backwards into a decade, a room, a heartbreak you’ll never know.

    Our worlds are not merely physical places. They are living interiors—maps of association, memory, and emotion.

    And so, you may never fully see my world.
    I may never fully enter yours.

    We will misread each other’s symbols. We will stumble over emotional terrain whose rules were written long before we arrived. At times, we will mistake unfamiliarity for indifference, difference for distance, and silence for lack of care.

    This is where things become difficult—and honest.

    Because the danger is not that we live in different worlds.
    The danger is pretending we don’t.

    It is easier to flatten another person’s reality than to hold it with care. It’s easier to assume our map is the only map. It’s easier to dismiss what we can’t personally verify. History, relationships, and daily misunderstandings are littered with the wreckage of that refusal.

    But what if separation is not a failure of connection, but its beginning?

    What if the task is not to see identically but to honour the sanctity of another’s inner world? The bravest bridge we can build is not one that collapses difference, but one that allows a traveller from your universe to visit mine with curiosity—and for me to step into yours with humility.

    We are, each of us, lonely planets in the same human cosmos. We spin with our own gravity, orbit private suns, shaped by forces no one else fully feels. We can’t occupy the same space. But we can send signals. We can transmit stories. We can learn to become careful astronomers of each other’s lives—reading the constellations of another’s pain and passion without claiming ownership of the sky.

    So let us not fear that we live in different worlds.
    Let us be awed by it.

    Let us meet in the sacred space between realities—the quiet ground of I may not understand, but I am willing to witness. Of I may not have lived it, but I will honor its truth in you.

    In the end, our solitary worlds do not isolate us.
    They make every genuine moment of empathy—every act of careful listening across the divide—a small miracle of cosmic proportions.

    You are the sovereign of your universe.
    I am the keeper of mine.

    And in the vast, shimmering space between us, we can choose what to build. Not walls. Not erasures.

    But wonders.

  • Self-Forgiveness is the Path to Growth

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    Forgive yourself for the words you spoke and the actions you took before you had the knowledge to know better.

    This is a profoundly compassionate reminder—one that speaks directly to the heart of growth.

    We are not static beings. We are always evolving, always learning, always integrating new understanding. To judge our past selves by the wisdom of our present is to deny the very journey that shaped us.

    The person you were, spoke those words and took those actions with the tools they had at the time. With the awareness available to them. With the emotional capacity they had managed to build by then. They were navigating life using the only map they’d been given.

    The fact that you see it differently now is not evidence of past failure.
    It is proof of present growth.

    Self-forgiveness is not about excusing harm or dismissing responsibility. It is about acknowledging the complex reality of being human. And when we allow it, something important happens:

    We integrate the lesson instead of carrying the shame.
    We release the anchor of self-judgment that keeps us tethered to the past.
    We grow more patient—not just with ourselves, but with others still finding their way.

    This kind of forgiveness becomes a bridge.
    Between who you were and who you are becoming.
    Between regret and wisdom.
    Between survival and choice.

    It’s not weakness.
    It’s an act of honesty.
    And it’s one of the quiet ways we honour our own becoming.

  • The Courage to Love Every Day

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    Every morning, the world arrives as it is.

    Not polished. Not resolved.
    A mix of light and shadow. Old residue and new possibilities.

    And before the day asks anything of you, there’s already a choice to be made:
    whether you will meet it with resistance or with care.

    This isn’t about loving a perfect world.
    That kind of love collapses the moment reality intrudes.

    Perfection turns life into a constant audit — what’s missing, what’s broken, what should have been different. It trains the eye to subtract. Over time, subtraction hardens into exile.

    Nor is this a call to romanticise suffering. There are conditions no one should be asked to accept — injustice, domination, and deprivation. Love requires dignity. Without that foundation, “acceptance” becomes a quiet cruelty.

    The real work lives in the middle ground.

    To love the world you wake up in is to tend a garden in soil you didn’t choose. You don’t deny the stones. You don’t wait for ideal conditions. You kneel anyway. You move what can be moved. You plant around what cannot.

    The result will never resemble the catalogue image.
    But it will be alive. And it will be yours.

    This daily love is attention. It’s the willingness to hold complexity without numbing out — to notice the troubling headline and still hear laughter in the next room. To see cracks in the pavement and recognise the courage of whatever grows through them.

    Loving the world doesn’t mean declaring it finished.
    It means deciding it’s worth engaging with.

    So start simply.

    Be grateful for the un-owed things: breath, heartbeat, another morning. Accept imperfection as a texture rather than failure. Then, locate your sphere of influence — however small — and tend it.

    Mend one thing.
    Listen fully to one person.
    Say one sentence that’s true.

    Loving the world does not require its perfection.
    It requires your presence.

    Wake up. Let the imperfect light spill across the floor. Feel the weight of reality — and your agency within it. And choose, again, to meet this patchwork, struggling, magnificent world with courage and care.