🏋️ Health
Three weeks in one note. I stopped writing these somewhere around the end of September and didn’t notice until I went looking for the last one and found it was dated the 29th. So this is a catch-up, and I’d rather admit that at the top than pretend it’s a week.
The 22nd I woke at 9 without an alarm and was at the office by 10, which after the week before felt like something. The body got better across that stretch — the back easing, the mornings arriving. The head didn’t. Tuesday I felt off all day without being able to locate it, went to the gym anyway, shipped everything I was supposed to ship, and ended the night with medicine.
I bought a mattress that week. I’d gone to look, not to buy, which is what I do with every purchase — look, leave, think, repeat for a month. What broke it was somebody pointing out that the decision was never about the mattress. It’s about whether I actually intend to fix my schedule, and if I do, then in a few months the mattress stops being the thing I blame. I bought it. The relief was less about the mattress than about having closed something I’d been circling.
Pickleball that Sunday with four from the office. Second time out, and I was comfortable in a way I wasn’t the first time — not better, just not managing myself the whole game.
Then, for about two weeks, it worked. I was on schedule. On time. On the deadlines. Everything was happening. People came home and the days held their shape.
And then it went. Lately I’m getting home at 2 and 3 and calling it work, which it partly is and partly isn’t.
💻 Work
Specifics stay out, as always. The shape:
The last week of September I finally shipped the thing I’d been carrying for weeks, had another one’s key pieces done by noon on the Wednesday, and then Thursday was hell — two things pulled out of the pipeline the same day, the one I’d started first shunted for the one that was more urgent, so I ended the day with something half-done and half-paid for. Friday I got two out in a single day, which on Thursday night I did not believe was possible.
Then October arrived and it did not let up, and this is the part I want on the record, because I’ve spent this whole fortnight telling myself nothing is happening.
In three weeks I took one page from three pieces to twenty-two. Wrote and staged two episodes of a new series. Built a motion brand book. Made an ad. Wrote two posts. Put my own working rules down on paper for the first time. And turned one of those pages into an actual product — the brand, a draft of the book, the listing.
Work-wise it is going well. I want to write that plainly because I have not been saying it to myself.
The uncomfortable one from September still stands and has got louder: I’ve ended up where people need me to fix and build the things. Not ask — need. I think that’s evidence I’m useful. I also think it’s evidence I haven’t built anything that runs without me standing inside it.
And the series I’m in the middle of is going well and getting lazy at the same time. Both are true. “Fine” is how things die quietly.
📖 Learning
You can’t place a message you haven’t finished having.
If you want an audience to receive something, the clarity has to exist in you first. Not clear enough to brief someone — clear enough that if you were cut off mid-sentence you could still say in one line what’s going on, what’s about to happen, and what this is representing.
I’d had a gap there for months and kept treating it as taste, then craft, then structure. It was none of those. It was that I hadn’t finished deciding. The blur was in me before I started, and nothing downstream fixes something upstream.
People have time. That was never the shortage.
Standing in a queue for a film, watching everyone wait two extra minutes without complaint, and what landed was that nobody is short of time. We have enormous amounts of it. We just don’t know what to spend it on, so it goes to whatever asks least of us.
Which is, I think, why this AI wave is moving faster than anything before it. Not that it’s better than every previous technology. That it meets us exactly where we already were.
The driving is nearly finished as a skill.
Two years in this field, and the gap between what I can make these tools do and what they can do has got very small. For two years the value was in knowing how to operate them. That’s ending, and not slowly. What’s left over is the part that was always mine — knowing what’s worth making, and being clear enough about it to say so. Which loops straight back to the first lesson, and I didn’t plan for the month to rhyme like that.
Somebody told me on a flight once that AI is meant to be a companion. I repeated that for months without checking it. This month I think I believed it.
And the quiet one. I learned something new in After Effects from a person sitting next to me who had no reason to stop and show me. That keeps happening — nearly every day, nearly always from somebody who didn’t have to. I notice how rarely I say that out loud and how much of what I can do came from it.
☕ Small Wins
The thing I’d been carrying, shipped. It had been sitting on me for weeks.
The gym on the worst day. Bad session. Went anyway.
Two out of the pipeline in one day. With a friend in town.
The mattress. Circled for weeks, closed in an afternoon.
Pickleball, comfortably. Not watching myself play.
A page from three to twenty-two. In a week.
A product that didn’t exist a fortnight ago. Brand, draft, listing.
My own working rules, written down. Small. I’ve been carrying them in my head for years.
A friend’s phone, sorted, after a drive down a road that was genuinely frightening in parts. Cheapest, best day of the month.
📚 A Line That Stayed
“Every morning is a new start.”
Not from a book. It’s the sort of line you’d scroll past on a poster, and I’ve scrolled past it a hundred times.
What makes it land now is the opposite of what it sounds like. I’ve been reading it as permission — wipe it, begin again, today doesn’t have to carry yesterday. And that reading is exactly what’s been going wrong, because I’ve been starting again roughly every three weeks for a year, and a thing that starts again every three weeks never gets to be three weeks old.
The other reading is harder. Every morning is a new start means the start is the cheap part. You get one every single day. They cost nothing and they prove nothing. What you don’t get a fresh one of is the second week.
So I’d like to stop collecting starts.
🧠 Brain Refreshment
A friend from Chandigarh
Nearly every good hour of that week had no output attached to it, which is a sentence I have now written three weeks running and should probably act on rather than keep noticing.
We wandered. New spots, new alleys, corners of a city I’ve lived in for years and never turned into. Went to the film. Ran around one Saturday sourcing stock for a client of his in a complete rush, badly organised, and it was somehow one of the better days. The driving was the best part — one road genuinely scary, and we laughed most of the way down it.
The rain, that Tuesday
Home early, the rain started, one song on repeat. Thoughts everywhere — what I should be doing, the videos I keep saying I’ll record, the fact that I don’t have a trajectory written down anywhere. Not a plan, not a direction, not even a list. Nothing resolved. All of it loud. I’ve had that evening before.
A clay animation video
Somebody making tiny films out of clay, telling parables a thousand years old that still land in thirty seconds. I watched it and just bowed down. First thing in a while that made me want to build the distribution around that kind of work rather than admire it and scroll on. So I pulled the whole page apart afterwards to find out why it works. What I found wasn’t what I expected, and it’s its own post.
🎵 Music
[track + link]
✍️ A Poem by Me
खमोशी से खमोश बन के तू खमोशी मिटा दे।
आकर चल मेरे साथ, मुझे थोड़ा सा रास्ता दिखा दे।
क्या मैं लिखना शुरू करूँ या मैं रुक जाऊँ, रोक लूँ?
अपने आप को हाथ पकड़ो और मुझे चलना सिखा दे।
Translation
Quietly, by becoming quiet yourself, erase the quiet.
Come, walk with me — show me a little of the way.
Should I start writing, or should I stop, hold myself back?
Take your own hand, and teach me how to walk.
Meaning
Four lines, and every single one of them is addressed to somebody else. तू. आकर चल मेरे साथ. मुझे दिखा दे. मुझे सिखा दे. Come. Show me. Teach me. There isn’t one line in it where I do something on my own.
I did not notice that until I’d finished writing everything above it. And everything above it is about exactly this — that I get up at 6:30 when somebody is waiting and don’t when nobody is. I apparently wrote the argument of this whole post in four lines before I’d worked out what the post was about.
The third line is the one that stops me. Should I start writing, or should I stop myself. Written during three weeks in which I wrote nothing here. The poem is the only thing that came out of that gap, and what it’s about is whether to write.
Interpretation
The first line shouldn’t work. To erase the silence, become silent. You’d expect the cure for quiet to be noise — say something, post something, announce the new start. It isn’t. You have to go further into the quiet than you were willing to go, and it closes over behind you.
I’ve been trying to fix the silence by making announcements. The poem says that’s the wrong direction and I think the poem is right.
And then the last line. अपने आप को हाथ पकड़ो — take your own hand. I asked somebody else to hold their own hand and then teach me to walk. It isn’t quite correct Hindi and I’m leaving it, because the mistake is the most honest thing in the poem. Either I’m asking someone to steady themselves before they can steady me, or the person I’m asking was me the whole time and I wrote it down without meaning to.
I don’t know which. I wrote it in under a minute and it knows more than I do.
💭 Closing Thoughts
I spent most of this month believing I had no control over my own brain and my own body.
Then I went back through what actually got made in three weeks and it was: a page taken from three to twenty-two, two episodes, a brand book, an ad, two posts, a set of working rules, and a product that didn’t exist a fortnight ago.
Both of those are true at the same time and I don’t quite know what to do with that.
What I think is going on: I have the output. I don’t have a shape. And because the shape is missing, I can’t see the output, so I keep concluding I’m broken — which isn’t what the evidence says. The evidence says I’m productive and unscheduled, and I’ve been reading the second one as a verdict on the first.
I keep comparing myself to the version of me in college who woke at six and slept at ten and loved it. I’ve been asking how he managed it with less time than I have now. He didn’t have more willpower. He had a timetable, and a building full of people running on the same clock.
And that’s the thing about me I’ve been slow to admit, though I keep writing it down without noticing. I get up at 6:30 for football. I turn up for pickleball. I couldn’t buy a phone over a five-thousand-rupee difference until four separate people had told me it was fine. I run beautifully on other people’s clocks and barely at all on my own.
So I didn’t lose discipline somewhere after college. I lost the scaffolding. Those are different problems and I’ve spent years trying to fix the wrong one, which is also why it keeps feeling like a flaw in my character. I’m less sure it is.
Which means the plan this time is not to revamp myself. There’s nothing wrong with the engine. It’s to revamp the schedule, and to stop deleting the evidence every time I start again.
One thing only, to begin with. Fifteen minutes at the desk, every day, writing down what happened. Even one line. Even “nothing, tired.” It’s small enough that I can’t negotiate with it and it produces the exact thing whose absence is the reason you’re reading three weeks in one post.
The sleep, the 6:30, the gym — those come after. Not because they don’t matter, but because I have tried changing everything in a single day before and I know precisely how that ends.
I keep thinking about something that won’t quite resolve. The world is very small. And if it’s that small, then I have never really stepped outside myself — so the thing to do is give everything to the small world I’ve actually got.
Let’s see how it goes.
See you next week. Properly, this time.
— Naman
Mumbai
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