Heyaṃ duḥkham anāgatam (The suffering that has not yet come is to be avoided. Patañjali, Yoga Sūtra II.16)

In an earlier essay I argued that pain is unavoidable and that suffering, though not optional, is shaped by the meaning we give it. I ended with a question philosophy on its own cannot answer: if meaning matters so much, why does insight fail so often? Every psychiatrist has met the person who understands perfectly why they are frightened, who can name the event, place it in context, even forgive the one responsible, and who still wakes at four in the morning with a racing heart and a dry mouth. Understanding lives in one part of the brain. Suffering seems to live in another.

This essay turns from meaning to mechanism: to the circuits that detect threat, the memory systems that store and rewrite it, the predictive brain that suffers in advance, and the loops that keep trauma alive long after the event has passed.

A word of caution. Mechanism is not cause, and it is certainly not experience. Knowing that dopamine is involved in psychosis does not tell us why a particular young man fell ill in a particular year; knowing which circuits fire in grief does not tell us what grief is like.

Commenting on Patañjali, Vyāsa observes that past suffering is spent, present suffering is already being lived; and only the suffering yet to come can be prevented. Much of what we suffer now is the future, experienced in advance.

The sentinel: threat circuitry

Mātrā-sparśās tu kaunteya śītoṣṇa-sukha-duḥkha-dāḥ / Āgamāpāyino ‘nityās tāṁs titikṣasva bhārata

(The touch of the senses brings cold and heat, pleasure and pain; they come and they go, they do not last. Bear them patiently, O Bhārata. Bhagavad Gītā II.14)

Advaita Vedanta has a favourite illustration of illusion. A man walking at dusk sees a snake on the path and leaps back, heart pounding. Looking again, he sees a coil of rope. Adi Shankaracharya, the foremost teacher of Advaita (non-duality), used rajju-sarpa, the rope mistaken for a snake, to show how the mind superimposes a false reality on a true one. Without knowing it, he was describing the biology of the threat system.

Deep in each temporal lobe sits a cluster of nuclei the size and shape of an almond, which is what amygdalameans in Greek. Sensory information reaches it by two routes. The ‘low road’ from the thalamus is fast and crude, arriving in about a dozen milliseconds, long before the visual cortex has worked out what it is looking at. The ‘high road’ through the cortex is slower but more accurate. The low road sees a snake. The high road, a fraction of a second later, sees a rope. By then the body has already jumped.

For an animal in the wild, mistaking a rope for a snake costs a life. Evolution has built a sentinel that prefers false alarms to missed ones. Once alerted, the amygdala recruits the hypothalamus and brainstem: noradrenaline floods the system, the heart quickens, breathing becomes shallow, blood moves from gut to muscle, and the adrenal glands release cortisol to sustain the response. All this happens before a single conscious thought.

Beside the amygdala is the hippocampus, named for its resemblance to a seahorse, which supplies context. A snake behind glass at the zoo and a snake in the kitchen produce the same image on the retina; the hippocampus tells them apart. With the medial prefrontal cortex it acts as a brake, telling the amygdala that the danger has passed or that this place is safe. Recovery from fear is largely new learning of this kind, called extinction: a memory of safety laid over the memory of danger, which remains.

Chronic stress prunes the branching of hippocampal neurons and impairs the birth of new ones, while the same hormones make the amygdala more reactive. Sustained distress thus weakens the structure that provides context and calm, and strengthens the one that raises the alarm. The Buddha spoke of this as two arrows: the first is the pain that strikes us; the second we fire into ourselves by our reaction to it. Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing out of his own desolation, knew this:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

The rewritten past: memory reconsolidation

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ/ Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line/ Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. (Omar Khayyām, trans. Edward FitzGerald, 1859)

For most of the twentieth century, neuroscience agreed with Khayyām. A memory, once formed, was thought to pass through a brief fragile phase and then be ‘consolidated’, fixed in the synapses by the synthesis of new proteins. It could fade, but it could not be rewritten.

In 2000, Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe and Joseph LeDoux overturned this view in a short paper in Nature. They trained rats to fear a tone paired with a mild shock. Days later, long after the memory should have been fixed, they played the tone again and immediately infused into the amygdala a drug that blocks protein synthesis. The fear disappeared. Rats given the drug without hearing the tone kept their fear. Recall itself had reopened the memory and made it unstable, so that it had to be stored again. They called this reconsolidation.

A memory, then, is not taken from a shelf like a book and returned unchanged. It is taken down, reassembled and put back, and in the reassembly it can be altered by whatever mood, context or information is present. Every time we remember, we rewrite.

If memory can be softened when recalled in safety, it can be hardened when recalled in distress. I made a simple mistake at the start of my maiden speech in the House of Lords. No one seems to have noticed. Yet I cringe each time I recall it, with fresh shame each time. I suspect I am only adding another layer to an incident best forgotten. The same process may explain a finding that surprised many clinicians: psychological debriefing, in which people recounted a traumatic event in detail soon after it happened, did not prevent post-traumatic stress and in some studies made it worse. Telling the story is not in itself healing.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth, unable to bear his wife’s sleepwalking anguish, pleads with her doctor:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased/ Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow/ Raze out the written troubles of the brain?

Indian thought has a word for this. Saṃskāra is the impression left on the mind by every experience, and the next experience can deepen or erase it. Guru Nanak uses an image of washing in the twentieth stanza of the Japji: when hands and feet and body are soiled, water rinses away the dirt; when the mind is stained, it is cleansed only by love of the Name. The stain is washed out, as it was made, by what we repeatedly bring to it.

The suffering yet to come: predictive coding

There are more things, Lucilius, likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. (Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, XIII)

We tend to think of perception as a camera: the world appears as perception and the brain records what arrives. Actually it works the other way round. The brain is a prediction machine. It constantly models what it expects to see, hear and feel, and attends mainly to the gap between expectation and arrival, the prediction error. That is partly why placebos ease pain and nocebos worsen it.

A brain that predicts can also rehearse what has not happened. That is its great evolutionary advantage, and the source of a peculiarly human suffering. In the wild, fear comes in short, intense bursts as a predator gives chase; if the prey survives, the stress response switches off. Modern life rarely allows it to switch off. A world that is always on, and a mind that keeps rehearsing what might go wrong, leave us unable to rest even briefly.

If anxiety predicts danger, depression predicts futility. The depressed brain carries an expectation that nothing will improve and effort will fail, so heavy that contrary evidence is discounted before it can do its work. Kind words from a friend register as pity; a small success as luck. The signals that would correct the model are muted. Telling a depressed person to look on the bright side is unkind; it is also neurologically naïve.

Guru Tegh Bahadur, the ninth Sikh Guru, wrote in one of his saloks:

Chintā tā kī kījīai jo anhonī hoe/ Ih mārag sansār ko nānak thir nahī koe (Worry only about what is not in the order of things; this is the way of the world, O Nanak, nothing here is permanent.)

The Guru was not advising indifference. He was separating change that is certain, which we can learn to accept, from the anxious rehearsal of outcomes that may never come, which we can learn to recognise for what it is.

The worn groove: trauma looping

Ordinary memories carry a date stamp. Our first day at school belongs to another being we once were, a different ship of Theseus. Traumatic memories lack this stamp. They are not remembered but relived. A smell, a sound, a fragment of memory can place the person inside the event, with the same racing heart and the same terror. The person, understandably, begins to avoid: the street, the conversation, the sleep that brings nightmares. Avoidance brings brief relief but prevents the one thing that would break the cycle, meeting the cue and finding that nothing terrible happens.

The Buddhist account of dependent origination describes a similar wheel: contact gives rise to feeling, feeling to craving or aversion, aversion to clinging, and clinging to becoming, which brings more contact. Guru Angad, the second Sikh Guru, put it in the Āsā kī Vār: haumai dīragh rog hai, dārū bhī is māhi (ego is a chronic disease, yet its remedy lies within it). The self that keeps the loop turning is also the only one who can break it.

Mechanism is not experience

Na dṛṣṭer draṣṭāraṃ paśyeḥ (You cannot see the seer of seeing. Yājñavalkya, Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad III.4.2)

I have described the machinery of suffering: a sentinel that fires before we think, a memory rewritten each time it is read, a brain that suffers the future in advance, and loops that keep the past alive. All of it is real, measurable and increasingly treatable. Yet I cannot once described what suffering is like, just like the famous essay by Thomas Nagel: “What is it like to be a bat?”

Neurobiology tells us how suffering is produced, sustained and relieved. It does not tell us what it is from the inside. The amygdala fires; the person is afraid. The two are reliably correlated, but the second is not contained in the first. Yājñavalkya saw this nearly three thousand years ago: the seer cannot be seen, because it is the one doing the seeing.

As a psychiatrist I confront this every working day. I have never felt a patient’s pain. I have heard it described, watched it on a face, seen it in posture and in silence, and asked people to rate it from nought to ten. What I call empathy is a model, built by analogy with my own experience and checked against what the other person tells me. It is often accurate enough to help. It is never direct.

We do not, then, know that others suffer in the way we know that we do. We infer it from resemblance: they have bodies and brains like ours, faces that contort as ours do, and they tell us so in a language we share. But it is an inference, and inferences have limitations.

Everything that lives

Savve pāṇā piyāuyā suhasāyā dukkhapaḍikūlā (All beings are fond of life; they like pleasure and hate pain Ācārāṅga Sūtra I.2.3)

If my knowledge that you suffer rests on inference from resemblance, then the circle of beings I recognise as suffering is drawn by my imagination. The 2024 New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness concluded that conscious experience is a realistic possibility in all vertebrates and many invertebrates, including insects and octopuses. I go further. I believe all living beings suffer, plants and single-celled organisms included. Don’t ask me to prove it; I can’t. But I feel it in my bones. Guru Nanak wrote in Sohila that one light shines in all beings. Blake ended The Marriage of Heaven and Hell with a line that could stand above any Jain or Sikh shrine: For every thing that lives is Holy. And Tagore, in Gitanjali: The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

The only way to live, it seems to me, is to assume that all living beings suffer: the person across the desk, the dog in the street, the tree at the end of the garden, the unseen life in a drop of water. That assumption asks us to take what we need and no more, to harm only when we must, and to do even that knowingly.

I began with Patañjali’s line that the suffering yet to come is to be avoided. Neuroscience has shown how much of our own suffering is manufactured in advance, and how much of it can be eased. It cannot show us what any other being feels, whether a bat, a neem tree or the patient in front of me. On that, science is silent, and we are left with a choice. The suffering yet to come that is most within our power to avoid is the suffering we might cause.

Guru Nanak appeared in the world. The fog dissipated. All was illuminated.

All photographs by the author

Last week I was travelling in a taxi with a Sikh driver. He was devout. We started talking about his life, his longing for home, and his Sikh beliefs. He recited the line above about Guru Nanak, emphasising the word “dhundh” (fog) and said that his religious belief dissipated the fog in his mind. I was rushed as usual and paid no attention till later that evening when it struck me that he had said something profound.

The words themselves come from the writings of Bhai Gurdas, a Sikh scholar and poet who lived in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They are found in the first of his Vaars, or ballads, in the 27th Pauri(stanza). Bhai Gurdas was a contemporary of several of the Sikh Gurus and served as the principal scribe of the original compilation of the Adi Granth, the scripture that would become the Guru Granth Sahib. His writings are among the earliest interpretations of the teachings of Guru Nanak.

I have been thinking about these words, particularly the distinction between darkness and fog. I think that this distinction contains a profound insight into the human condition, into suffering, and perhaps into the purpose of spirituality itself.

But first, a little about Guru Nanak.

Guru Nanak and his world

Guru Nanak was born in 1469 in Talwandi, a village in Punjab, now known as Nankana Sahib in Pakistan. He died in 1539, having spent much of his adult life travelling, teaching, questioning religious orthodoxies and challenging the social conventions of his time.

He lived in a world divided by religion, caste and gender. Northern India was dominated politically by Muslim rulers, while much of its population followed Hindu traditions. Religion was deeply embedded in everyday life, but it was also associated with elaborate rituals, superstition, priestly authority and rigid social hierarchies. The caste system determined people’s standing in society. Women were considered inferior to men. Hindus and Muslims were separated by beliefs and practices which frequently obscured their common humanity.

Nanak challenged all of this. He rejected the idea that God belonged to any particular religion or that one human being could be intrinsically superior to another. His message was strikingly simple: there is one universal divine reality, present in all creation and accessible to every human being. One did not need priests, rituals, pilgrimages or elaborate theological knowledge to experience the divine. What mattered was how one lived. And one need not renounce the world to find the divine. One could be in the world and still be spiritual.

Nanak travelled extensively, traditionally accompanied by his Muslim companion and musician, Bhai Mardana. He communicated his teachings through poetry, music, conversation and example. Towards the end of his life, he settled in Kartarpur, where he established a community founded on worship, honest work and sharing. He restarted his life as a farmer.

His teachings were revolutionary in their simplicity. Which this brings me back to darkness and fog.

Darkness is not fog

There is a fundamental difference between darkness and fog. Darkness is the absence of light. Its remedy is straightforward. Light a lamp, switch on a torch, open the curtains, and darkness disappears. You do not need to struggle against darkness. You do not need to push it away. You simply introduce light.

Fog is different. Anyone who has driven through dense fog on a winter morning will recognise the problem. Switching on your headlights does not necessarily make things clearer. Indeed, putting on the full beam can make visibility worse. Instead of illuminating the road ahead, the light seems to come back at you, producing a dazzling white wall. The more light you shine into the fog, the less you may be able to see.

Why is this? The explanation lies in elegant physics.

Fog consists of tiny droplets of water suspended in the air. It forms when moist air cools sufficiently for water vapour to condense into liquid droplets. These droplets are individually almost invisible, but collectively they transform the way light travels through the atmosphere. In clear air, light travels relatively unimpeded. In fog, the droplets scatter the light in different directions.

The phenomenon is described by the physics of light scattering, particularly Mie scattering, which occurs when particles are comparable to or larger than the wavelength of visible light. Some light is scattered sideways, some backwards, and some continues forward. The result is that much less light from distant objects reaches our eyes in a way that preserves a clear image. At the same time, light scattered towards us creates a luminous veil that reduces contrast.

A powerful headlight may therefore illuminate the fog immediately in front of us rather than the road beyond it. This is why fog lights are positioned low and directed towards the road. The solution is not simply more light, but using light more intelligently. Strictly speaking, light does penetrate fog. It is scattered and attenuated rather than completely blocked. But the practical consequence is the same: the presence of light does not guarantee the ability to see.

This is a fascinating distinction. Darkness is a problem of absence. Fog is a problem of interference. In darkness, we cannot see because there is no light. In fog, we cannot see even though light is present.

I wonder whether this is what makes Bhai Gurdas’s metaphor so profound. Perhaps the great problem of human existence is not the absence of knowledge, wisdom or truth. Perhaps it is that our perception is obscured by everything that stands between us and that truth. Our prejudices, our beliefs, our identities, our fears, our desires and our attachments. We may be surrounded by light and yet be unable to see. And sometimes, in our attempts to understand the world, we simply turn up the headlights.

Nanak and human suffering

Nanak dukhiya sab sansar.

Nanak, the whole world suffers.

These words appear in the Guru Granth Sahib, on Ang 954, in a composition of Guru Nanak. The observation is remarkably similar to the starting point of Buddhist philosophy: suffering is an inescapable part of human existence.

As a psychiatrist, I have spent much of my professional life trying to understand human suffering. We have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of describing it. We have diagnostic classifications, psychological theories, neuroscience, genetics, neuroimaging and an expanding range of treatments. All of these have contributed to our understanding, and some have transformed lives. Yet suffering remains universal (essay in suffering here).

We suffer because of loss, illness, disappointment, loneliness and uncertainty. We suffer because reality does not conform to our expectations. We suffer because of things that happen to us, but also because of the meanings we attach to those events. We suffer because we want things we do not have, because we fear losing the things we possess, and because we struggle to accept the impermanence of everything around us.

And perhaps we suffer because we cannot see clearly.

Our minds are filled with assumptions, memories, expectations, beliefs and fears. We construct narratives about ourselves and other people and then begin to experience those narratives as reality. We mistake our interpretation of the world for the world itself. In other words, we live in fog.

And perhaps what we need is not more information, more explanations or even more intellectual illumination. Perhaps we need the fog to clear.

Spirituality without religion

I believe that Guru Nanak understood spirituality primarily as a personal pursuit.

This does not mean that he advocated withdrawal from society. Quite the contrary. His spirituality was grounded in everyday life, in work, family, community and service. But the transformation he sought began within the individual. Nanak did not set out to create the organised religion we now recognise as Sikhism, with its distinctive institutional structures, ceremonies and visible identity. He did, however, establish a community of followers (Sikh literally means to learn), and the tradition that followed him developed through the teachings of nine successive Gurus.

Over the following two centuries, this community underwent a remarkable transformation. It faced growing political hostility and persecution, including the executions of the fifth Guru, Arjan, in 1606 and the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in 1675. In 1699, Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru, established the Khalsa, giving the Sikh community a distinctive collective identity and a commitment to resist oppression. The uncut hair, the turban and the other visible symbols associated with initiated Sikhs became important expressions of this identity.

The transformation was not simply a military response to persecution. It was also the continuation of an evolving religious and ethical tradition. Nevertheless, persecution and the need for collective self-defence played a profound part in shaping the Sikh identity that we recognise today.

It is worth remembering that almost two centuries separated Nanak’s birth from the creation of the Khalsa. And I wonder whether, in concentrating on the external manifestations of religious identity, we sometimes lose sight of the extraordinary simplicity of Nanak’s original message.

The Bhakti tradition

Guru Nanak emerged within the broader intellectual and spiritual world of the Bhakti and Sant movements that flourished across medieval India.

Bhakti means devotion. At its heart was the idea that a direct and personal relationship with the divine was available to everyone, regardless of caste, status, gender or religious education. Saints and poets such as Kabir, Ravidas and Namdev questioned ritualism, caste distinctions and religious authority. They spoke in the languages of ordinary people rather than restricting spiritual knowledge to the learned and privileged.

Nanak’s teachings shared much with this tradition, particularly its emphasis on devotion to a formless God and its rejection of social and religious hierarchies. His philosophy was nevertheless distinctive and developed into a tradition of its own.

What interests me most is the underlying rejection of artificial differences between human beings. Nanak was not asking whether Hinduism was superior to Islam, or Islam superior to Hinduism. He was asking why such distinctions should matter when the same divine reality was present in every human being.

He rejected the idea that women were spiritually inferior, that birth determined human worth, or that ritual observance was evidence of goodness. The divine did not belong to the priest, the scholar, the ascetic or the wealthy. It belonged to everyone. And if we recognise the same divine presence in every human being, how can we justify treating one person as less worthy than another? This was not merely a theological proposition. It had radical social implications. It challenged the structures through which human beings establish hierarchies, exclude others and justify inequality.

Nanak’s spirituality was therefore deeply personal, but its consequences were profoundly social. A change in how we see ourselves must necessarily change how we see others. Perhaps this is what it means for the fog to dissipate.

My own journey

For much of my adult life, I considered myself a devout atheist. I use the word devout deliberately. My atheism was not simply an absence of religious belief. It was a strongly held conviction, supported by what I regarded as reason, science and a healthy scepticism towards supernatural explanations. Religion appeared to me to be a collection of beliefs, rituals and superstitions, many of which had little basis in evidence and some of which had caused considerable human suffering.

I saw no reason to believe in God. Yet, curiously, I had forgotten something important. When I was 23, I had an experience that I can only describe as revelatory. It was an experience that challenged my ordinary understanding of reality and left a profound impression on me at the time. And then, somewhere in the course of my life, I put it aside. I have described it here, as noesis – a stairway to heaven.

Perhaps it did not fit comfortably with the intellectual framework I subsequently developed. Perhaps my scientific training and professional identity gave me ways of understanding the world that seemed more coherent, more respectable and more defensible. Whatever the reason, the experience receded from consciousness.

I am not suggesting that such an experience constitutes evidence for the existence of God, at least not in the conventional scientific sense. Nor am I suggesting that religious explanations should replace scientific ones. But I have become increasingly interested in the distinction between what we know and what we experience, between the explanations we construct and the reality those explanations are intended to describe.

Science is an extraordinarily powerful method for understanding the natural world. But scientific knowledge and personal meaning do not necessarily answer the same questions. And intellectual certainty can sometimes become its own kind of fog.

I wonder whether, in my certainty that I understood the world, I had lost sight of something important. Perhaps the question is not whether one believes in God. Perhaps the more interesting question is what it means to live a good life. And here, I find myself returning to Guru Nanak.

A prescription for a flourishing life

The essence of Guru Nanak’s practical philosophy is often summarised in three simple injunctions:

Naam Japo. Kirat Karo. Vand Chhako. (Remember God. Earn an honest living. Share what you have with others).

These three phrases are a traditional summary of his teachings rather than a single verbatim quotation from his writings.

Naam Japo is usually translated as remembering or meditating on the divine name. But it can also be understood more broadly as cultivating awareness of something greater than oneself, recognising the interconnectedness of existence and resisting the tyranny of the ego. Kirat Karo means earning one’s living through honest work. It affirms the dignity of labour and the importance of contributing to the world through one’s actions. Spirituality is not an excuse to escape the responsibilities of ordinary life. Vand Chhako means sharing what one has with others. It recognises that human flourishing cannot be separated from the wellbeing of other human beings.

Remember God. Do good. Share with others. Very little theology is required to appreciate the wisdom of this prescription. One need not subscribe to a particular religion. One need not accept elaborate metaphysical propositions. One need not even believe in God in the conventional sense to recognise the value of living with awareness, integrity and generosity.

There is a great deal of contemporary scientific interest in the ingredients of a flourishing life. We study wellbeing, happiness, meaning, purpose, relationships, compassion and prosocial behaviour. We have d sophisticated theories and methods to investigate these questions. Yet here, in six or seven simple words, is a remarkably concise prescription for living well.

Naam Japo. Kirat Karo. Vand Chhako.

Cultivate awareness. Live honestly. Share with others.

Perhaps the deepest insights into human flourishing are not necessarily complicated. Perhaps they do not require elaborate theories, complex rituals or membership of an organised religion. Perhaps what we need is not more light, but clearer vision.

We have accumulated an extraordinary amount of knowledge about ourselves and the universe. We have illuminated aspects of existence that would have been unimaginable to people living five hundred years ago. And yet we continue to suffer, to divide ourselves into competing groups, to create hierarchies of human worth, and to pursue things that often leave us dissatisfied.

We have more light than ever before. But the fog has not lifted.

Five centuries after Guru Nanak, I find myself wondering whether his greatest contribution was not to provide answers to the mysteries of existence, but to suggest a different way of seeing. A way of seeing beyond religious labels, social divisions and the insistent demands of the ego.

A way of recognising our common humanity. And a way of living that makes life better, not just for ourselves but for the people around us.

Perhaps that is what Bhai Gurdas meant when he wrote:

Satgur Nanak pargatia, miti dhundh jag chanan hoya.

Guru Nanak appeared. The fog dissipated. The world was illuminated.

Not simply that a new light had appeared in the world.

But that the fog which prevented us from seeing the light that was already there had begun to clear.

Very well then I contradict myself,

I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Walt Whitman

Recently, a senior colleague sent me an email that asked: “Is this still you?”.

I was rushed at work and irritated at not being able to master a simple power-point process for a lecture, so reverted to my default setting- my frustration morphs into anger and irritability and when rushed but obstructed, I become flippant, self-deprecatory or sarcastic. I had missed a deadline to submit a paper to an important journal. One of my patient had escalating risk. On their own, each was a routine matter to resolve in everyday life of a clinical academic. Together they brought out my least attractive qualities. So I replied, part jokingly and partly in anger: “Yes. Who else might it be? Unless you are asking a deeper question, like the Ship of Theseus?”.

Within an hour I had submitted the paper, sorted out the slides, and the patient had been admitted. As the adrenaline rush faded, I started worrying that my response had been childish and facetious.

The senior colleague was obviously checking whether the old email address he had for me was contemporaneous. He might have had a serious message to convey, confidential and important enough not to send to a wrong email address. I felt foolish. I wrote a feeble apology about flippancy being my default mode when overwhelmed.

My colleague reassured me in his return email that there was nothing to apologise for; I had made him smile. But my suspicion that I had mis-spoken lingered far longer than the occasion merited. I worried for a few moments, then got worried that I was worrying about a trivial matter and then started worrying that the matter could not be trivial if I was worrying about it. It reminded me a Peanuts cartoon where Charlie Brown admits that even his worries have worries (figure widely available on the net)

Triggering in psychiatry

People with unstable bipolar disorders can often relapse at small disturbances; a full-blown manic episode does not require a catastrophe to occur, but just perturbation of daily rhythm, a broken night’s sleep, a badly phrased email or a perceived humiliation can appear catastrophic and derail recovery. The psyche is not always undone by the storm; it is often undone by the misplaced word.

My colleagues question stayed with me though. Within that deceptively simple request for a verification of my institutional email identity was a metaphysical trapdoor. Another way of understanding the question was that colleague asking me: Are you the same person I used to know?

The Ship of Theseus

The puzzle of the Ship of Theseus is an ancient inquiry into identity and change, traditionally traced back to Plutarch. The story follows Theseus, the mythical Athenian hero, who returned from Crete after killing the Minotaur. The Athenians preserved his ship for generations. As the wooden planks decayed, these were replaced with newer, stronger timber.

Eventually, every original piece - every beam, every plank, every nail - was gone, replaced by a newer one. A question then arose: Is this still the Ship of Theseus?

The easy answer is yes. The ship maintains continuity of name, form, function, and history.

But there is an argument for “No”. If no original material remains, it is merely a replica standing in the harbour.

Thomas Hobbes added a sharper edge to the dilemma. He imagined a person collecting every discarded, rotting plank and reconstructing a second ship from the original matter. Now there are two ships: the continuously maintained vessel and the one made of the original wood. Which now is the “real” ship?

This question is intriguing because it is not about ships. It is about selves, our sense of selfhood, our bodies, our memories, our relationships, nations, cultures, societies and civilisations. If something changes bit by bit over time, at what point does it stop being itself? If everything is changed and replaced, what remains of the original?

A Collection of Clocks

The email from my colleague was literally legitimate because I had not seen him in a long time. Atom by atom, molecule by molecule, my body was different from the one he had last met face to face.

The popular claim that the body replaces itself every seven years is an attractive half-truth. The body does not renew itself according to a single calendar; it is not one clock. It is a collection of clocks.

The human body replaces roughly 330 billion cells each day, approximately one percent of its total mass daily. This does not mean every cell is gone every hundred days; it means blood and gut cells dominate the turnover while other parts remain stubbornly present.

The lining of the intestine, for example, is replaced within days. This makes sense when you consider the environment these cells inhabit: they are continually exposed to digestive enzymes, acids, microbes, toxins, and the mechanical abrasion of whatever we eat. These are cells built with replacement in mind.

Neutrophils, the most abundant white blood cells in the circulation, have an even more fleeting existence. Their lifespan is measured in hours to days. They are the emergency responders of the immune system: rapidly produced, rapidly deployed, and rapidly replaced.

Platelets, essential to blood clotting and the repair of damaged blood vessels, circulate for roughly seven to ten days before being cleared and replenished.

Our skin turns over on the scale of weeks, although the exact rate changes with age, illness, injury, and environment. The surface we present to the world is therefore not quite as permanent as it appears.

Red blood cells survive much longer, around 120 days. After travelling hundreds of miles through the circulation and repeatedly squeezing through tiny capillaries, ageing red cells are eventually removed, principally by the spleen and liver, while the bone marrow quietly replaces them.

Even bones, which feels like the very definition of permanence, change. Bone is continuously broken down and rebuilt. Its turnover is slow, but the process never really stops. The skeleton is not simply the scaffolding we were issued in adulthood; it is a tissue in continual conversation with hormones, muscles, nutrition, mechanical stress, and age.

And then there are neurons.

Many neurons in the cerebral cortex can remain with us for a lifetime.

This creates a striking biological contrast. Some parts of us disappear and are replaced within hours. Others turn over over days, weeks, months, or years. And some of the cells through which we perceive the world, remember our past, and construct a sense of self may accompany us from early life into old age.

So the body is neither permanently the same nor completely replaced. The body is not an object. It is an unfolding event.

If my chemical constitution is different now from then, the question “is this still you?” is profound. It is about what maintains our sense of continuity, if everything that constitutes us materially has been replaced.

The Mechanism of Memory

The obvious answer to what holds us together is memory. I remember my colleague as a person I met the very first time and the last time I saw him. I remember some conversations, some settings, and some topics under discussion. I can stich these fragments from my memory into a ‘whole’ that I think of him as a person.

Neuroscience provides the mechanics of this operation. The hippocampus binds experience into memory, and the cortex stores and reorganizes those memories over time. The default mode network is active when we think about ourselves, remember the past, or imagine the future. It constructs the inner narrative by which we recognize ourselves as continuous.

However, autobiographical memory is not a passive archive; it is a living reconstruction. Every act of remembering is a rewriting. The “me” who remembers the past is not retrieving a file from a cabinet. He is recreating it, placing the past inside the needs, fears, griefs, and hopes of the present. Memory does not merely preserve identity; it composes it moment to moment.

If all I am is a story called “me” produced by my brain, the answer to who am I feels incomplete. It explains the mechanism but misses the mystery. If I am only a combination of atoms, why does continuity feel so intimate, self-evidently true, and personally charged?

Patterns of Concern

Materialists argue that continuity is not a substance but a pattern. They say the body changes, but the organization- the form of the ship- persists. Evolution probably gave us the experience of continuity because organisms that remember danger, kinship, and debt survive better than those that do not. A creature that wakes without a sense of self might be free, but it would soon be dead. While this explains why we have a sense of self, it does not explain what holds the self together from the inside.

Eastern traditions offer a different subtlety. The Upanishadic question, “Who am I?” is not asking for a resume or a personality profile. It asks what remains when those identifications are set aside. The Buddhist doctrine of anatta (no-self) suggests that what we call the self is not a fixed, permanent entity. It is a composite, a process of “dependent arising” where body, feeling, perception, and consciousness aggregate and dissolve. The “I” is a convenience, perhaps necessary, but not a final truth.

Who knows?

I am not clever enough to answer the question definitively. I know that I am not the same person who met my colleague years ago. I have lost loved ones. I have grown older. I have become bald, and my hair is grey. I write a Substack column to understand life, which may be wisdom or vanity. One could call these changes superficial. My face has changed, but my being remains. But we cannot step outside ourselves completely to examine that being. We are both the observer and the observed; the ship examining its own planks.

Perhaps “I” is not a thing at all, but a continuity of concern. It is a loyalty to certain memories, a pattern of loves and losses, and a set of recognitions that survive even as matter changes. It is a story told by the body, revised by the mind, interrupted by emotion, and still signed in the same hand.

So, when my colleague asked, “Is this still you?” I gave him a joke. But the honest answer is: I do not know. And yet, I am still the one replying.

“I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.

A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.

Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out.”

Song of Songs 6:3, 4:12, 4:16

Unashamedly Sexual

A flower is a reproductive organ, on public display, in colour, and often in scent strong enough to carry considerable distance. We forget this because we have spent so many centuries turning flowers into metaphors: purity, innocence, the fleeting nature of youth. But strip away the metaphor and what remains is an intricate mechanism for reproduction. The petals attract. The scent summons. The whole elaborate structure exists so that one plant’s pollen can find its way into another plant’s ovary. Human beings did not invent courtship, concealment, invitation, and consummation. We recognise them in living beings and routinely meet them in our gardens.

The Architecture of Desire

Look closely at a calla lily and the sexual resemblance needs no elaboration. A single white spathe curls around a yellow spadix, upright, faintly luminous, unmistakable in its suggestion; Georgia O’Keeffe built a large body of work by looking at flowers exactly this closely. Botanists will tell you, correctly, that the spadix is simply a spike of tiny flowers, and that the spathe is a modified leaf that protects them. I do not dispute the botany. I only note that nature, having produced this shape by the logic of pollination, has repeated it in many other living things. flower is a reproductive organ, on public display, in colour, and often in scent strong enough to carry considerable distance. We forget this because we have spent so many centuries turning flowers into metaphors: purity, innocence, the fleeting nature of youth. But strip away the metaphor and what remains is an intricate mechanism for reproduction. The petals attract. The scent summons. The whole elaborate structure exists so that one plant’s pollen can find its way into another plant’s ovary. Human beings did not invent courtship, concealment, invitation, and consummation. We recognise them in living beings and routinely meet them in our gardens.

The Architecture of Desire

Look closely at a calla lily and the sexual resemblance needs no elaboration. A single white spathe curls around a yellow spadix, upright, faintly luminous, unmistakable in its suggestion; Georgia O’Keeffe built a large body of work by looking at flowers exactly this closely. Botanists will tell you, correctly, that the spadix is simply a spike of tiny flowers, and that the spathe is a modified leaf that protects them. I do not dispute the botany. I only note that nature, having produced this shape by the logic of pollination, has repeated it in many other living things.

Some flowers take the game of resemblance further. Several species of orchid have evolved to mimic, in colour, texture, and above all in scent, the female of a particular species of bee or wasp. A male insect arrives, attempts to mate with the flower, and in his frustrated efforts collects and delivers pollen. Entomologists call this “pseudocopulation”, a wonderfully clinical word for what is, from the orchid’s point of view, an act of pure seduction, and from the insect’s, an elaborate and repeated humiliation. Orkhis is Greek for testicle, a name Theophrastus gave the plant for the shape of its paired root tubers. The medical term for an inflammation of the testicles is orchitis!

Pollination as Courtship

In the first essay of this series I described watching a bumblebee moving from lupin to lupin in my garden, and remarked that each petal resembled a hand folded in anjali, an Indian hand position welcoming the bee inside. The bee was pushing its way into a chamber built precisely to dust its underside with pollen, so that it might carry that pollen, unknowingly, to the next flower, and the next, across a garden that had become, from the plant’s point of view, an afternoon of orgies by proxy.

This is courtship without cupid. The flower cannot choose; it can only attract, as its resources allow. Colour, symmetry, fragrance, even the ultraviolet nectar guides invisible to us and blazing to a bee, all of it is advertisement in the oldest sense of the word: a public announcement of availability. Human courtship, for all its complications, its vows and its coyness, its centuries of poetry, is not a very different phenomenon. It is the same instinct, with a great deal of tumultuous anxiety along the way.

Roses, Jasmine, and Giving

We give flowers to the people we desire because we have always understood, at some level, what a flower is for. The rose carries the heaviest of this symbolic weight. In the Western tradition the Greeks and Romans gave it to Aphrodite and Venus and told several overlapping stories of its origin in the goddess’s blood or tears. Rome later hung a rose from the ceiling of a room in which confidential matters were discussed, so that anything said sub rosa, under the rose, was bound to secrecy; the flower of desire became, by a natural extension, the flower of things not meant to be repeated.

In Urdu and Persian poetry Gul (flower or rose) and Gulab (rose, literally rose-water) represent absolute beauty, perfection and the beloved. In India, jasmine, (mogra or chameli) performs a related function. It is threaded into the hair of women at weddings and temples alike, worn for the gods and for a lover with no sense of contradiction, because Indian devotion has never kept the sacred and the erotic apart, as anyone who has seen the copulation carvings on the walls of temples of Khajuraho and Konark will know. A bride at a Sikh wedding may wear garlands of marigold and jasmine, and no one in the wedding party would think to ask whether the fragrance around her neck is there to honour the ceremony or to announce her beauty. It is there to do both; the two purposes were never distinct.

The Lotus and the Present Moment

The lotus is at once the most devotional and the most erotic of flowers. It rises from mud, opens on water, and closes again each evening, a daily performance of concealment and revelation that Indian and Buddhist iconography has read for millennia as a symbol of the awakened mind. Lakshmi, the Indian Goddess of wealth, arose from the ocean seated on a lotus, which in this context is a symbol of both beauty and abundance.

A dragonfly rested on a waterlily in my photograph for perhaps four seconds before it left. I happened to have a camera ready. The Japanese have a word for the feeling this produces, mono no aware (the pathos of things) which is bittersweet awareness that a thing is beautiful partly because it will not stay. They apply it most famously to cherry blossom, which does not fade slowly on the branch but falls, all at once, at the height of its beauty, and is gone within days. I wrote, in the third essay of this series, about flowers at funerals and weddings, and noted that a flower’s beauty and its transience are linked. Desire is similar; it is not diminished by its own impermanence but sharpened by it.

What a Flower Says

A flower offered in love is not a metaphor in need of decoding. It says, without needing translation into any language: I saw this beauty and thought of you. It does not argue, apologise, or explain, and it does not need to undress because its meaning was never hidden. This, I think, is why we still do it, long after greetings cards and text messages made other gesture of courtship faster and cheaper. A cut flower is slow, perishable, and defiantly useless in its utilitarian sense. We give it because, for a few days, it says what we cannot say as economically, or as honestly, ourselves.

“The flowers withered, their colour faded away,

while meaninglessly I spent my days in the world,

and the long rains were falling.”

Ono no Komachi, Kokin Wakashu

As a lotus flower is born in water, grows in water and rises out of water to stand above it unsoiled, so I live, unsoiled by the world -Gautama Buddha

There are flowers at weddings. Flowers beside the newborn child. Flowers before gods. Flowers around photographs of the dead. Flowers laid on graves, carried to memorials, offered to lovers, placed around the necks of honoured guests.

We scatter petals when someone arrives and place wreaths when someone leaves.

Why?

In two earlier essays I wondered why we find flowers beautiful, and whether some part of that beauty might lie inmathematics: symmetry, proportion, repetition, pattern. But there is another question. Why are flowers ceremonial?

Why do we do take flowers?

It is one thing to stop beside a flower and admire it. It is quite another to pluck it, carry it somewhere, arrange it carefully and place it before another human being - a deity, a bride, a corpse. Somewhere in our history, flowers became part of a ritual. And it happened a very long time ago.

Flowers for the Dead

For many years, one of the most evocative stories in archaeology came from Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan.

In the 1950s and 1960s, archaeologist Ralph Solecki excavated the remains of several Neanderthals at that site. Around one skeleton (known as Shanidar 4) researchers discovered unusual concentrations of pollen. Had Neanderthals buried one of their dead on a bed of flowers? The discovery became famous, and it helped transform the popular image of Neanderthals from brutish creatures into beings capable of tenderness and mourning.

More recent archaeological work has questioned the interpretation. Solitary bees nest in the cave and can carry pollen. The pollen may have arrived without anyone deliberately bringing flowers. Researchers now consider the original flower-burial explanation unlikely, though they do not exclude the possibility.

I want the Neanderthals to have brought flowers. It makes them feel fellow human. But I know that I am projecting a need rather than recognising an objective truth.

The archaeological record became clearer much later, in a cave overlooking the Mediterranean.

A Bed of Flowers

At Raqefet Cave on Mount Carmel, in present-day Israel, archaeologists discovered something extraordinary. Between approximately 13,700 and 11,700 years ago, people of the Natufian culture, while transitioning from a hunter-gatherer to a more settled lifestyle, buried their dead in a cave. They created cemeteries. And they placed their dead on beds of flowers.

Archaeologists have found impressions of stems and flowering plants pressed into the material lining several graves, accompanied by microscopic plant remains. Sage and plants belonging to the mint and figwort families appear among them. These were not merely leaves accidentally blown into a hole. The graves were deliberately lined with thick layers of fresh vegetation, including plants chosen for their colourful and aromatic flowers.

Imagine that! Thirteen thousand years ago, somebody walked out into the landscape and gathered flowers. Someone chose them. Someone carried them back. Someone arranged them beneath the body of another human being. The flowers themselves disappeared within days. Yet their impressions survived for thirteen millennia.

Beauty Is Not Enough

Perhaps we bring flowers to ceremonies because they are beautiful. But I am not sure.

Many things are beautiful. We do not place polished stones beside the dead. We do not welcome wedding guests with paintings. We rarely bring seashells to someone lying ill in hospital. Flowers occupy a particular category. They are beautiful, but their beauty is alive. And therefore doomed.

The bouquet that looks magnificent on Monday has begun to wilt by Thursday. Petals loosen. Colours fade. The water gets cloudy. What we admired begins to decay in front of us. This should make flowers unsuitable for important occasions. Instead, perhaps it makes them perfect.

A plastic flower lasts longer. That is why it doesn’t work and may even offend one’s sensibility. A flower says: I am beautiful. Behold! I will not last. A flower’s beauty is intimately connected to its transience.

Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees offers a useful counterpoint to the ceremonial power of flowers. A real flower acquires its meaning precisely because it cannot last. It blooms, is offered, and then fades. The plastic tree promises permanence, but in escaping decay it also escapes being alive. Ceremonial flowers may move us because their beauty shares the condition of the ceremony itself. The moment cannot be preserved, only experienced. Their wilting is therefore not a failure of the symbol, but part of what the symbol means.

And perhaps that is also what a ceremony says. Ceremonies mark moments that cannot last. The bride and groom will grow older. The newborn child will become an adult. The person whose life we commemorate has already disappeared. The worshipper who places a flower before the divine is offering something that begins dying the moment it is plucked.

The Falling Flower

In Japan, cherry blossom has become the symbol of transience.

During sakura season, the petals fall. They do not remain on the tree to become seed or fruit. They fall, creating a brief spectacle of beauty across the ground, and then decompose. This falling is central to the beauty. The blossom that remained permanently attached to the tree would eventually cease to be blossom in any meaningful sense. Its falling completes its aesthetic purpose.

Perhaps flowers accompany our ceremonies for the same reason. We bring them precisely to those moments when life’s change becomes visible. Something begins. Something ends. Someone arrives. Someone leaves. Someone promises. Someone remembers. The flower embodies the change.

What the Natufians Knew

I return in my imagination to Raqefet Cave.

Someone kneeling beside a grave nearly thirteen thousand years ago. There were no written scriptures. No florists. No greeting cards with funny or profound sayings. Someone nevertheless had gone out and gathered aromatic plants in bloom.

There may be prosaic, less romantic explanations. Perhaps flowers masked the stench of decay and death. Perhaps they made the hard ground softer. But the graves were carefully prepared. The plants were deliberately gathered. The dead were placed upon them. The practice was repeated. More than disposal, this was meaningful disposal, a form of remembrance and goodbye.

I cannot know what that person thought while gathering sage from the hills of Mount Carmel. Thirteen thousand years later, we all recognise the instinct and the gesture.

Since that time, civilisations have appeared and disappeared. Languages and cultures have come and gone. Agriculture, writing, mathematics, empires, religions, printing press, steam engines, antibiotics, computers and artificial intelligence have appeared. Yet somewhere near the beginning of settled human life, somebody picked flowers and carried them to the dead. We still do.

Perhaps flowers do not represent any single thing. Not beauty alone. Not love alone. Not death alone. Not transience alone. Perhaps they represent attention.

For one brief moment, among all the things in the world, I noticed this flower. For one brief moment, among all the lives in the world, I noticed you. And because neither the flower nor I will remain here forever, just as neither will you, I place it before you.

That is enough.

I was looking for love in the strangest places/ There wasn’t a stone that I left unturned

Uriah Heep, July Morning

The miracle is not to walk on water, but to walk on the green earth

Thich Nhat Hanh

We often search for miracles in the extraordinary: visions, miracles, ruptures in the natural order. Yet the deeper mystery is not whether the laws of nature could occasionally be suspended, but that they exist at all, and that they operate with such elegance and precision in the everyday moments of our lives.

This blog follows the one I wrote about falling. My fall was unintended; my writing is intentional. Yet both remain mysterious. The more I think about how things work, the less certain I become about what understanding means. I have been thinking of who thinks within me, which will form the basis for a series of blogs in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile here’s to wonderment.

Thought before movement

I am typing this sentence while thousands of microscopic events unfold beneath awareness. Sodium ions cross membranes. Proteins change shape. My muscles contract with precise coordination. Somewhere in my brain, networks predict the next word before I consciously recognise it.

Subjectively, I am typing.

Objectively, something astonishing is happening.

We tend to search for miracles in disruption, deviations from the ordinary and everyday occurrences - visions, revelations, moments when nature appears to suspend its rules like walking on waters or raising the dead. Yet the deeper everyday mystery is non-disruptive, and outside our immediate awareness: that the ordinary works at all. That natural laws exist, and that we live inside them with such familiarity that we cease to notice. Familiarity is an anaesthetic. Babies delights in everything, but as they grow, the world becomes a familiar habit. The miracle of the everyday does not vanish; it retreats from visibility.

The Astonishment of a Single Cell

Consider an amoeba, a single-celled organism drifting through water. No brain. No nerves. No consciousness as we ordinarily define it. And yet it maintains itself against entropy. It distinguishes inside from outside. It moves toward nourishment and away from danger. It repairs, adapts, divides. Somehow, it knows how to be alive.

When an amoeba divides, the event appears trivial: one becomes two. If you look under a microscope and pay attention, simplicity dissolves and miracles happen.

DNA replicates with astonishing fidelity. Adenine pairs with thymine; cytosine with guanine. Billions of molecular letters copy themselves with extraordinary precision. Proteins fold into precise shapes without supervision or intention; or at least intention as we understand it. At no point does ‘life’ appear as a discrete ingredient, and yet life unmistakably occurs. We know it when we see death.

The closer we examine living systems, the less mechanical they appear. The distance between an amoeba dividing and a thought arising feels vast, and yet both emerge from processes that we don’t understand.

I am suspicious of the certainties of neuroscientists when it comes to ‘why’ questions about why there is anything, rather than ‘how’ questions which can be mapped onto physics and physiology. I am particularly sceptical of those who say claim consciousness has/can be been explained or that life is nothing but chance and contingency. Not because I know better, but because when you look at the argument of these academics, it is very easy to see its limitations. I do not claim that I have the answer. In fact my assertion is that we will never know. Whether we describe life as design, divine intelligence, creation, emergence, chance, or necessity, explanation eventually reaches a horizon beyond which language becomes tentative. I have come to believe that every living entity has intention, purpose and teleology. But I have no evidence other than an experiential sense. Which is not objective evidence. It makes sense to me. I am not interested in converting a materialist to my view. To each their own!

Yet I realise that I am retreating into belief. Materialism or mysticism? Perhaps both. Strict materialism and strict mysticism arise from the same human need for certainty. Explanations may accumulate but the mystery does not recede.

That which is the subtle essence; in it all that exists has its self.

Chandogya Upanishad

Thought Before Movement

A thought arises. An intention forms. I decide to type the next word. Where did that decision come from?

We can trace influences- from memory, emotion, language, unconscious associations, our cleverness - but the origin itself remains elusive. Thoughts arrive already shaped, already moving.

Thoughts think themselves. -

Meister Eckhart

Neuroscience can map correlates of thought. Imaging reveals distributed activity across prefrontal cortex, association areas, and limbic networks. But correlation is not explanation. Electrical signals do not obviously become meaning, intention, or experience.

Even as I write this, I notice the impulse to explain, as if explanation might finally make the mystery disappear.

But it does not. I have no explanation.

Still, once intention forms, the body responds with astonishing precision. I am still typing.

The Neuroscience of a Keystroke

The decision to press a key does not originate in a single place. Motor cortex participates, but it does not act alone. Premotor regions plan sequences. Basal ganglia help select and inhibit competing movements. The cerebellum refines timing and accuracy.

Pyramidal neurons fire. Action potentials propagate. These are waves of depolarisation as sodium rushes inward and potassium flows outward across the axons of nerve cells. Signals descend along the corticospinal tract, cross in the brainstem, and enter the spinal cord before synapsing onto motor neurons.

Electricity becomes chemistry. Neurotransmitters cross a synaptic cleft only tens of nanometres wide. At the neuromuscular junction, acetylcholine is released. Ion channels open. Muscle fibres depolarise. Inside the muscle, calcium floods the cytoplasm. Actin and myosin slide past one another in microscopic ratcheting motions powered by ATP stored sunlight transformed through countless biological exchanges. Sensory neurons fire back toward the brain. Pressure receptors detect force. Proprioceptors report position. Feedback loops adjust movement in real time.

All of this unfolds in fractions of a second, far faster than conscious awareness. The finger descends. A key is pressed.

Years ago, I learned these mechanisms in physiology lectures. I can describe them process in detail. Yet I cannot experience them consciously. The body knows how to do what the mind only narrates. Knowing physiology of movement does not reduce the wonder; if anything, it intensifies it.

Feedback, Awareness, and the Body Knowing Itself

Even now, as you read this, trillions of signals move silently through you. Heartbeats synchronise with breath. Muscles maintain posture without asking permission. Neural networks predict, correct, and adapt. The body knows itself from within.

Indians would say praana moves through you. The Chinese call it chi. French philosophers once called it elan vitale. The modern secular scientific temperament calls it a random occurrence which appeared simply as a function of a vast universe, the time scale it has existed, and laws of physics which somehow created themselves.

This intelligent, purposeful and goal directed life force is not limited to humans. Leaves convert light into chemical energy with extraordinary efficiency. Spiders spin silk stronger than steel. Ant colonies organise without central command. Trees exchange nutrients and warnings through fungal networks beneath the soil. Life coordinates itself not through a single centre, but through relationships.

As is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm.

Hermetic tradition (also written “as above so below”).

Perhaps what we call sentience is not confined inside brains but is an expression of what appears when matter comes alive.

The Wonder We Forgot

Imagine encountering this world for the first time. Every sensation would astonish. Every movement would feel improbable. Infants inhabit something like this state. Babies are mesmerised by sound, by motion, by the simple fact that a hand moves when they will it to move. Then familiarity settles in. The miraculous becomes mundane. The world becomes habit.

The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.

G. K. Chesterton

Recovering the Sacred Ordinary

What might change if we could interrupt that habit by paying attention, being present and seeing more clearly? A leaf could be a radiant vision. Feel its texture, examine its veins. Under the microscope, see the stomata. Sunlight turned into food to keep other life forms alive.

From that perspective, a keystroke as mysterious marvel deserving gratitude. A breath as sacred as a sacrament. The Eastern traditions that consider breathe as a divine gift are onto something that science can’t explain, even though we can pinpoint the exact spot at the junction of the brain and spinal cord that controls breathing. Not because these are supernatural, but because they are so thoroughly natural that they exceed our capacity to comprehend them full.

How is not why!

God is nearer to me than I am to myself.

St Augustine

We don’t need natural laws to be disrupted for miracles to reveal to happen. The everyday mundane unfolding life is miraculous enough.

Even now, as you are reading this sentence, your eyes move in small jumps. Tiny muscles adjust without permission. Your brain predicts what comes next before you consciously recognise it. You are participating in processes you cannot see, powered by mechanisms you did not design, sustained by patterns older than thought itself. If it happened if you were not reading, a neurologist would diagnose it as nystagmus and send you for investigations. Ordinary is miraculous, disruption of the ordinary is abnormal.

The miracle of the ordinary and every day is happening now and always.

Perhaps nothing needs to change, except the way we look. Explanation and wonder need not be opposites.Let’s pay attention to both

In the previous essay, I wrote about the beauty of flowers, inspired by the arrival of spring and the flowers that followed. I found no answer to why we find flowers beautiful, so I decided that rather than keep pondering, I would simply enjoy the relationship between a flower and me. I concluded that beauty is not a quality of the object alone, nor of the observer alone, but something that arises between them. I also noted that one explanation for our response to natural beauty may lie in evolution: we evolved within nature, not apart from it, and what we call beauty may carry the imprint of that old intimacy. Harmony once conferred fitness; an instinct for the ordered and the proportioned may have helped our ancestors survive.

Everything is more complex than it seems

But there is a deeper layer. One of the reasons flowers are beautiful, like spiders’ webs and nautilus shells and the arrangement of petals in a sunflower, is that they follow a particular mathematical pattern, which recurs persistently across the natural world: the Fibonacci sequence.

I am terrified of maths. I think it is the purest form of human intelligence. My closest friend at school, and the brightest person I know, excelled in maths. We became friends in our early teens over a shared love of P. G. Wodehouse. Maths was just another way of speaking for him. For me it was a formidable territory where my only skill, language, appeared wholly inadequate. He and I have recently made contact. We are both professors now: he at a top university in the USA, me at a “top enough” one in the UK. I remain in awe of his maths prowess.

The numbers in the petals

Count the petals of a lily: three. You might think I have got it wrong; you have counted six. But there are three petals (inner) and three sepals (outer), so the number three stands. A buttercup has five. A delphinium has eight. A marigold, thirteen; a common daisy most likely twenty-one, thirty-four, or fifty-five. These numbers- 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55- are not random. Each is the sum of the two that precede it. They are the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…

Look at the face of a sunflower and you will see two interlocking sets of spirals, one curving clockwise and one anticlockwise. Count them: almost invariably, the clockwise spirals number 34 and the anticlockwise 55, or 55 and 89 in a larger flower. Both pairs are consecutive Fibonacci numbers. The same principle governs phyllotaxis, the arrangement of leaves around a stem, where each new leaf is positioned at an angle of approximately 137.5 degrees from the one before it - the “golden angle” - ensuring that no leaf directly overshadows the one below it. Evolution seems to have found this optimal packing arrangement by natural selection, and the Fibonacci sequence is its signature.

The sequence is also connected to the golden ratio, approximately 1.618 and denoted by the Greek letter φ (phi). As the Fibonacci numbers grow larger, the ratio between consecutive terms approaches φ with ever-increasing precision. The golden ratio appears in the spiral of a nautilus shell, in the proportions of the human body, and has haunted the visual arts and architecture for millennia as an intuition about what makes proportion beautiful.

What mathematicians know about beauty

Mathematicians have long spoken of their subject in aesthetic, almost spiritual terms. I can see beauty easily in geometry, have to try harder with algebra, and only understood the beauty of trigonometry after reading a book about it as an adult. G.H. Hardy, the great British mathematician, wrote: “Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.” For Hardy, an elegant proof was not merely correct, it was beautiful, in a sense he held directly comparable to the beauty of a poem. Bertrand Russell put it more starkly still: “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty.”

Johannes Kepler devoted much of his life to the pursuit of mathematical beauty in the heavens. His Harmonices Mundi (1619) proposed that the orbital speeds of the planets correspond to musical intervals; literally a music of the spheres. His specific musical mappings did not survive scrutiny, but his third law of planetary motion emerged directly from this search for harmonic beauty and remains one of the most important laws in astronomy.

And then there is Srinivasa Ramanujan, perhaps the most extraordinary case of mathematical beauty approaching mystical revelation. Largely self-taught and working in conditions of material poverty, Ramanujan produced results of such depth and strangeness that his collaborator G.H. Hardy placed him among the most gifted mathematicians in history. Ramanujan claimed that many of his theorems came to him in dreams, delivered by the family goddess Namagiri of Namakkal. Whether or not one credits the divine attribution, the results were real, and many of his conjectures remained unproved for decades after his death in 1920. He wrote to Hardy: “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.” For Ramanujan, mathematics was not constructed. It was received.

Fibonacci, India, and rasaa - the essence of beauty

The sequence we call Fibonacci’s was known in India more than a millennium before Fibonacci wrote his Liber Abaci in 1202. Piṅgala, a scholar of Sanskrit prosody writing around the 3rd century BCE, developed a combinatorial method for counting the arrangements of long and short syllables in a line of verse, a method that generates exactly this recursion. Later Indian mathematicians, Virahanka, Gopala, and Hemachandra, described the sequence with increasing clarity, the last of them writing some fifty years before Fibonacci himself. A related structure, the Meru Prastara, described by Halāyudha in the 10th century, is what the West would later call Pascal’s Triangle and hidden in its diagonals are the Fibonacci numbers themselves. Mathematics and aesthetics, it seems, were pursuing the same quarry from different directions: counting the rhythms of poetry, and arriving, independently, at the architecture of flowers.

Just as the essence of the flower is in its fragrance, and the essence of fragrance is in its flower,

so the essence of beauty is in its mathematics, and the essence of mathematics is in its beauty.

Bhartrhari, Vākyapadīya (paraphrased)

Invented or discovered?

My exploration of the topic kept raising a question I find genuinely puzzling and cannot resolve: is mathematics invented or discovered? The Platonist view, currently the most widely held among working mathematicians, holds that numbers and mathematical relationships exist independently of human minds, and that mathematicians discover them much as astronomers discover planets. On this view, Ramanujan was not inventing. He was receiving. The formalist view, associated with David Hilbert, holds that mathematics is more like chess: we invent the rules, and only then discover what follows from them. A third, hybrid view holds that we invent the framework (our axioms, our definitions) but that what we find within it is real. We did not choose that the Fibonacci sequence would appear in sunflowers. We merely invented the tools that let us see it.

What strikes me most is the same thing that struck Wigner: that a discipline built entirely on internal elegance and consistency, with no reference to the physical world, turns out to describe that world with astonishing accuracy. If mathematics is invented, why does it keep appearing in nature?

Fractals: the mathematics of infinite detail

There is one more mathematical concept that belongs here, because it connects directly back to flowers.

In 1975, the mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot coined the word “fractal,” from the Latin fractus, broken, to describe geometric forms that exhibit self-similarity at every scale of magnification. A fractal is a structure in which the same pattern repeats, in more or less the same form, however closely you look - not randomness, but pattern, without ever reaching a smooth, featureless surface. Mandelbrot’s original motivating observation, published in a 1967 paper titled “How Long Is the Coast of Britain?”, was that a coastline’s measured length increases without limit as the unit of measurement decreases, because smaller and smaller bays and promontories keep appearing.

But fractals are not only abstract. River networks branch in fractal patterns. So do lightning bolts, snowflakes, blood vessel networks, and the large-scale structure of galaxies. The fern is a celebrated biological example: each frond resembles a small version of the whole plant. And in the garden, Romanesco broccoli, belonging to the same family as the cauliflower produces a head composed of logarithmic spirals, each bud a smaller version of the whole, the entire structure simultaneously Fibonacci and fractal. It is also, unmistakably, beautiful (at the time of writing, all my brassica, including Romanesco broccoli have been chewed by caterpillar; hence no image)

What fractals suggest is that complexity combined with self-similarity at multiple scales may itself be a source of beauty; that the visual richness of flowers may be, in part, a consequence of fractal geometry operating at the level of biological growth. We find the pattern beautiful. The pattern is mathematical. Neither fact fully explains the other.

What we cannot hold

I began these reflections with flowers, and I return to them, but from a very different direction.

Mathematics is abstract and invisible, and yet it is the most precise means we have for describing reality. I cannot follow a proof for more than a few steps before losing my footing. And yet I can recognise, even from the outside, that mathematics has a beauty that operates in the same strange territory as the beauty of flowers: not entirely in the object, not entirely in the perceiver, and resistant to full expression in language.

You can hold a flower without being able to say what makes it beautiful. You can sense that mathematics is beautiful without understanding it. Both kinds of beauty are, in the end, ineffable: they can be pointed to but not fully captured.

And this brings me to a question I keep pondering: what, finally, is beauty? Mathematics describes it with uncanny accuracy but cannot say what it is. Flowers embody it with breathtaking precision that remains irreducible to its parts. The Vedic tradition, in one of its oldest texts, had the honesty to frame this question without pretending to answer it.

Who truly knows, and who can here declare it,

Whence it was born, and whence comes this creation?

The gods came later than this world’s production.

Who knows, then, whence it first came into being?

He, the first origin of this creation,

Whether he formed it all or did not form it,

Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven,

He verily knows it — or perhaps he knows not.

— Nasadiya Sukta, Rigveda 10.129

Perhaps that is the one thing mathematics and flowers share: both point past what we can fully grasp, and in that reaching, become beautiful.

All photographs by the author

Buddha’s First Noble Truth (in Pali and English translation)

“Idaṃ kho pana, bhikkhave, dukkhaṃ ariyasaccaṃ:

Now this, monks, is the Noble Truth of suffering:

Jātipi dukkhā,

Birth is suffering,

Jarāpi dukkhā,

Aging is suffering,

Vyādhipi dukkhā,

Illness is suffering,

Maraṇampi dukkhaṃ;

Death is suffering;

Appiyehi sampayogo dukkho,

Association with what is unloved is suffering,

Piyehi vippayogo dukkho,

Separation from what is loved is suffering,

Yampicchaṃ na labhati tampi dukkhaṃ;

Not to get what one wants is suffering;

Saṅkhittena pañcupādānakkhandhā dukkha”.

In brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”

Pain and suffering

“Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is optional.”

This sentence has become a cliché, repeated whenever people wish to sound wise, kind, or reassuring. Its familiarity risks dulling its force. Yet repetition does not make it untrue. It only conceals a deeper truth.

Across cultures, languages, and centuries, human beings have distinguished between pain as an experience and suffering as what happens when pain is resisted, personalised, remembered, or feared. This essay is an attempt to examine that distinction; not to deny suffering, but to understand what sustains it.

The idea itself is ancient. Variations of it appear in Hindu Advaitic (non-dual) philosophy, in Buddha’s and Guru Nanak’s teaching, in Stoic philosophy, and in contemplative traditions across many cultures. But it is often misunderstood. The Buddha did not teach that suffering could be opted out of, as one might choose a different path or attitude. His first noble truth was simple: life, as it is ordinarily lived, involves suffering; not as an accident, but as a fundamental feature of human existence.

Pain and suffering in language and culture

In Sanskrit and Hindi, pain is called pīḍā (pīṛ in Punjabi). The term dukkha, also used by Buddha, means suffering, and in most North Indian languages it carries the sense of existential dissatisfaction rather than mere physical pain. The commonest word for bodily pain or ache in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu is dard, since pida can also mean an affliction, especially when it is meant to imply a state rather than a passing experience. Dukkha (suffering) is broader still: unsatisfactoriness, instability, the inability of experience to provide lasting fulfillment. Pain is part of this experience, but suffering runs deeper and wider. It is the unease that arises from impermanence, from loss, from wanting things to be other than they are.

Pain and suffering in religious traditions

Once we start to understand how cultures name distress, we begin to see how they explain it.

In Hinduism the causal chain and attribution for dukkha is long and complex. Dukkha in Hindu thoughts arises from within the mind-body complex, from ego’s (ahamkara) entrapment into a worldly illusion (maya), from karmic process, and from a veil of ignorance (avidya) which hides one’s true nature, atman (soul). Atman itself is free of suffering. The mind and body suffer as emotional and physical pain, but atman is forever sat-chit-ananda (true, aware, blissful). Buddhism, denying the atman, considers dukkha structural to existence.

Christianity also distinguishes pain from suffering. Pain is part of earthly life; suffering acquires meaning through how it is borne. Augustine’s Confessions are not a catalogue of physical hardship but a meditation on the unease of a soul that cannot find peace in transient things. While describing the death of his close friend, he wrote “My heart was darkened by sorrow, and whatever I looked upon was death” (Confessions, IV.4). Here suffering comes not from pain but from clinging to what is inherently impermanent. In Gravity and Grace, a wonderful book, Simone Weil considers suffering as inevitable but argues, “it is not suffering which is beneficial, but the use made of it”.

In the Islamic mystical tradition, suffering is often portrayed as longing. Sufi poetry is filled with images of the lover aching for the beloved, of separation as both torment and purification. Rumi’s famous line, “the wound is the place where the light enters you” suggests that it is not suffering that is redemptive, but awareness that is awakened (“entering the wound”) from suffering. The poetry of Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), one of the greatest Urdu poets of India, is suffused with themes of suffering, which range from ordinary bodily desires to longing for union with the divine. A deeper reading of his poetry shows that all his love and desire imagery is profoundly spiritual in meaning. An example:

हज़ारों ख़्वाहिशें ऐसी कि हर ख़्वाहिश पे दम निकले

बहुत निकले मेरे अरमान लेकिन फिर भी कम निकले

On first reading, it can be translated as:

“Thousands of desires; each so intense it takes my breath away;

Many of my longings were fulfilled, yet they proved too few”

The phrase “take my breath away” has multiple meanings, as do the terms “desire” and “longing”. At one level Ghalib is saying that there is insufficiency even in abundance. But if the phrase “take my breath away” is translated as exhaustion and “longings” as union with God, then another meaning is that a lifetime of effort may yet not reveal the divine.

Guru Nanak’s famous verse “Nanak dukhiā sab sansār” (literally O Nanak, the whole world is afflicted with suffering), echoes Buddhist dukkha as a ‘diagnosis’ but aligns more closely Hinduism in its causes. Suffering arises from a sense of separation (ego) from others and the illusion of I and mine. Uniquely, Guru Nanak did not prescribe renunciation or retreat from the world or transcendence through isolation as the path to liberation from suffering. Instead, Guru Nanak taught that resolution of suffering comes from Naam Simran (remembrance of the True God), Kirat Karnaa (virtuous action) and Vand Chhakhna (sharing what one has). Underlying this is the acceptance of hukum (alignment with divine order, akin to the Christian ‘Thy will be done’).

What emerges across these traditions is a shared intuition: pain is part of life, but suffering is something more complex. It is not merely what happens to us, but how we meet what happens.

Pain and suffering in medicine and psychiatry

Modern medicine defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage”. The physical sensation of pain can be mapped precisely along touch organs, nerve pathways, spinal cord and the brain. The chemistry of pain is well understood, and analgesics remain one of medicine’s great achievements.

Psychiatry recognises that pain is not merely a physical sensation. The earliest forms of psychoanalysis were born from attempts to understand why emotional conflict could manifest as physical symptoms. Freud’s early theories were based on cases such as Anna O who presented with paralysis, blindness, or pain for which no physical (bodily) cause could be found. Freud has turned out to be wrong in many of his conclusions, but he was right about one thing: unprocessed emotional distress does not disappear. It finds bodily expression. The contemporary diagnostic term for this is somatisation, literally turning psychic pain into a somatic (bodily) experience. We also know, through the lens of neuroplasticity, that the brain can ‘learn’ to suffer; persistent distress creates reinforced neural loops where the nervous system remains stuck in a state of high alert long after a physical injury has healed.

In medicine and psychiatry, there is no formal diagnostic category for suffering. Clinically doctors encounter both daily. Crucially, they observe that pain can exist without suffering and suffering can exist without pain. However, in most lives the two are intertwined.

Chronic pain alters mood and cognition. Depression can present as fatigue, chest tightness, or back pain. Trauma reshapes the nervous system itself. The separation between body and mind, while useful for study, collapses in lived experience. If suffering, like pain, is rooted in our biology, it may not be entirely optional after all.

Suffering and meaning

What may be optional is not suffering itself, but our relationship to it – the meaning we attribute it. That distinction matters. It allows us to acknowledge suffering without romanticising it, and to seek relief without denying reality. It also prevents us from turning suffering into a moral failure, something one should be able to think or meditate away.

Few clinicians have confronted suffering at its most extreme directly and personally as Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), an Austrian psychiatrist who was imprisoned in multiple concentration camps, including Auschwitz. During the holocaust he lost his parents and his pregnant wife and endured severe maltreatment and deprivations. In his remarkable book Man’s Search For Meaning he first describes in visceral detail his experiences in the Nazi camps. In the second half of the book, Frankl pivots from the cruelty of the Nazis to the response of the victims. He asked himself a central question: why did some survive and others didn’t? His answer: what differed between survivors and those who perished was that the former were able to find some meaning in their suffering.

From this crucial insight Frankl developed Logotherapy (therapy through meaning). The core principles of logotherapy are that life has meaning under all circumstances, no matter how adverse; that meaning has to be discovered; and discovering meaning can alleviate suffering. Survivors of the concentration camps had found a way to locate their suffering is a larger framework - love, faith, responsibility, God’s will – and hence were more likely to endure. Unlike Freud who thought that humans were primarily driven by pleasure or Alfred Adler who claimed that humans were driven by power, Frankl proposed search for meaning as the primary motivational force in human life. His oft-cited quote captures this: “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances”.

Frankl is not arguing that suffering is chosen, or that it can be wished away by menu board of meaning choices, or that responsibility lies with the victim. Instead, he is asserting that even in the most painful of circumstances, in the most severe conditions of suffering, interpretation is not fully determined. There is a narrow space where dignity survives, and confers meaning to suffering, thus preventing collapse of suffering into despair and giving up.

The persistence of suffering

The key question therefore is not how to eliminate suffering, but how to meet it without being destroyed by it. How does suffering take root so deeply within us? Why does distress persist long after danger has passed? Why do certain thoughts and memories return again and again, even when we know they are unhelpful?

If suffering were only a matter of belief or philosophy, insight alone would be enough. But it is not. Even when pain is understood, named, contextualised, and given meaning, suffering often persists.

This persistence is not a moral failure, nor a failure of wisdom. It suggests that suffering is not sustained only by ideas, but by processes - by memory, threat, anticipation, and the body’s own alarm systems.

In Part II of this series of essays, I will turn from meaning to mechanism; from philosophy and lived experience to the anatomy and physiology of distress itself and ask how suffering becomes biologically embedded, why it loops, and why understanding alone so often fails to set us free.

Yesterday I walked around the garden with a pair of secateurs.

This extraordinary summer has made everything bloom at a pace I have never seen. Roses, dahlias, salvias, cosmos, lupins, gladioli all seem to open overnight. But the heat is unforgiving. Leave a flower two days too long and the stem collapses before your eyes, leaving behind scorched leaves, petals burnt at the edges, and seed pods where there used to be colour.

So, I do what every gardener must. I deadhead. It feels cruel. I am telling the plant: as long as you give me beauty, I will look after you. Then, off with your head. Merciless. Rather like human relationships. We think we give more than we take in relationships, till we are asked to truly give, when we walk away. If I could, I would have let my blooms flourish in another being’s life as long as they lasted, and then let go without bitterness when the season ended. But we are not as wise as the seasons.

A week later the plants answer the cuts with another bloom. My lupins are on their third output this summer already.

Ageing out of season

I have reached the stage of life where I catch myself saying, “Things were better in my day.” I say it about music. I say it about phones. I say it about attention spans. Then, one morning, cutting away at something in the garden, it dawned on me that the world probably hasn’t deteriorated nearly as much as I have convinced myself it has. What I am noticing is not the decline of civilisation. It is self-pity dressed up as social commentary. The decline that I see in the world around me is simply a reflection of my own decrepitude. It is the ageing of one man. As a young man I never passed a mirror without admiring myself in it. Nowadays I avoid mirrors, because I see a wrinkled stranger looking back. It would be funny were it not so poignant.

Most young people I meet are kinder than when I was at their age. Less arrogant. More emotionally literate, more accepting of people who are different from them, and a good deal less interested in pretending they have certainty about things nobody has certainty about. The world hasn’t run out of goodness. I have simply aged out of the season of life in which I first met it.

Renunciation or engagement

My youngest leaves home this September. I am not going to call it the empty nest syndrome, because it isn’t a syndrome. A syndrome is a clinical presentation with many underlying causes. The empty nest has only one cause, emptiness. For over twenty-five years I have known exactly who I was because somebody needed me. A father, a partner, often just a driver, very often a wallet, a shoulder, an opera partner, a shared poetry lover. But needed. And then, one day nobody needed me anymore.

Many people have heard about the new-Freudian Erik Erikson; very few have heard about Sudhir Kakar, the Indian psychoanalyst. Erikson and Kakar met in Ahmedabad while he was working on his book about Gandhi. Erikson is the psychoanalyst every psychology student still learns from; his stages of development are practically scriptural authority. Kakar taught Erikson about the ancient Indian idea of the four stages of life, the ashramas. Freudian development centred around infancy and adolescence. Erikson learnt that in the Indian tradition adulthood was not simply middle age stretched out for another thirty years, but a series of transformations, each one with a developmental task.

There are four stages. Brahmcharya (a student’s disciplined, celibate life); Grahsthya (the householder); vanaprastha(forest dweller) and Sanyaasa (renouncing the world) I am in vanparastha. But I still live an urban life. I am full of energy and vitality. I have no interest in disappearing into a forest, literal or otherwise. If anything, I want to become more present to the world than I have ever managed to be.

The multiplicity of now

There is a wonderful Korean film - Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring Again- that follows a monk through life inside the four walls of a floating monastery. A child joins the monk. He becomes a young man. The young man falls into desire, and then into something like ruin. Regret arrives. And then, without any announcement, spring comes around again. Not because nothing was lost. Nothing is undone. Life refuses to end with any one season.

There’s a line of e. e. cummings: i who have died am alive again today. And a poem by Louis MacNeice, Snow, that I first read decades ago: World is crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural. He’s sitting by a fire, peeling a tangerine, spitting out the pips, and he feels: the drunkenness of things being various. I read it now and think that’s it, that’s the complaint I’ve been making about the modern world, answered in four lines written in 1935. The world was never simple. I just used to have the energy to pretend it was.

The heaviness of being

My own heart, right now, as I write this, is not entirely light. There are losses I did not choose. Dreams that ended without permission. Relationships that withered when I wasn’t looking. It would be easy to mistake the end of one season for the end of everything. But I’ve spent enough hours in this garden to know better than that.

I’ve written before about Nalanda and Ephesus, two places that were once the centre of everything and are now mostly rubble and tourists and the silence that only ruins have. That essay was about impermanence in general. Everything changes, I said. But there is a more frightening possibility. Not everything changes; some people and places stayed the same in my lifetime I changed.

Perish and grow

There’s a verse in the Bhagavad Gita: just as a person casts off worn-out clothes and puts on new ones, so the embodiedself casts off worn-out bodies and takes on others that are new. It’s usually read as being about death and rebirth, the next life after this one. I don’t think you need to believe any of that to use it. I read it now as something closer to psychology than theology.

There’s also a line from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad that I’m not going to explain, because I think explaining it would ruin it:

From the unreal lead me to the real.

From darkness lead me to light.

From death lead me to immortality.

Yesterday I cut away another handful of dead flowers. They looked dead. Absolutely finished, the way only a dead flower can look. By next week there will be new buds where I made the cuts. Deadheading isn’t the end of flowering - it is how flowering continues. I suspect that this is true of a life as well as a rose bush. I suspect I have spent a good part of this year mistaking endings for extinctions, when they were only new beginnings.

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer- Albert Camus

but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Spring has arrived in Britain with an unusual spell of hot, unbroken sunshine, and my garden has been transformed almost overnight. What was until recently a verdant monochrome has burst into a dazzling array of colour. It started with daffodils, bold and unapologetic in their yellow, followed by bluebells and forget-me-nots, shyer and less ostentatious. The daffodils disappeared quickly; their beauty is inseparable from their ephemerality (more on daffodils here); the bluebells followed, but some forget-me-nots still linger.

Within two weeks, my garden contains an abundance of lupins in spirals of purples, pinks, yellows, and whites; marigolds in bold orange and yellows, with a French variety a blazing orange, yellow, and red that reminds me of Saharan sunsets; and heavily perfumed roses beginning their long summer of profusion. The agapanthus is coming up, the alliums have set up their architectural globes, and an unusual pale cream hellebore grows quietly, often inseparable from its leaves. There are foxgloves, cosmos, lavender, peonies, and others; some names I can recite, but whose individual personalities I am still learning.

I select flowers mainly for two reasons: as cut flowers to bring inside and to attract as many pollinators as possible. Each flower has a unique shape, colour, and aroma. Each shares the same fundamental architecture, yet each arrives at a combination so distinct that no two species seem to have agreed on the same solution if they were trying to solve an evolutionary problem.

The Architecture of a Flower

Every flower is amazing in its precision. For this essay, I had to re-read my school-level botany, for I had forgotten the names of many structures. The petals, collectively the corolla, are coloured banners that catch the light and the eye. Below them, the sepals form a protective casing of the bud and cradle the base of the open flower. At the heart, the stamens carry their anthers, which are small, powdery, often golden, and on slender filaments; these are the male structures, the pollen-bearers. At the very centre, the pistil, comprising the stigma, style, and ovary, receives and processes what the stamens offer. The entire structure is built around a single biological imperative: reproduction. Flowers are unashamedly sexual.

I can look at a single flower or its individual structures for a long time. Fascinated but unsure of what I am fascinated by. The more carefully I look, the more I notice. Petals change colour in a slow gradation, the stamens are arranged geometrically, and the scent deepens as the light fades. Why is there such a variety and beauty in flowers? There is far too much to notice, but who is the intended ‘noticer’?

The Pollinator and the Flower

The standard evolutionary answer to this variety begins with pollinators. Flowers are beautiful, the evolutionary expert will say, because what is considered beauty is an evolutionary mechanism to attract pollinators. Colour, shape, scent, and ultraviolet patterns invisible to us but blazing to a bee attract insects, birds, and bats that carry pollen from plant to plant.

The common pollinators that visit a British garden tell part of this story: bumblebees of several species (each with different tongue lengths, suited to different flower depths), honeybees, solitary bees such as mason bees and leafcutter bees, hoverflies that mimic bees, red admiral and peacock butterflies, and some butterflies and moths that work night shifts on flowers whose white petals catch the moonlight. Beetles contribute, and even ladybirds, perfect assassins, who should be called 007–licenced to kill. Then, there is my annual adversary, the cabbage butterfly, which ruins my brassicas year after year with a reliability I regard as personal animosity (my eternal enemy). I cannot bring myself to kill the larvae, for their sheer beauty and ruthless efficiency in chewing cauliflower within days that has taken me at least two months to grow. There must be a karmic debt that I owe to the cabbage butterfly.

The evolutionary logic is persuasive at one level. But I am not convinced. One sunny afternoon, I followed a single bumblebee visiting flowers of wildly different shapes, sizes, colours, and scents. If the sole purpose of a flower’s beauty is to attract a specific pollinator, one would expect convergence; each plant would settle on the optimal design for its target visitor. Instead, there is an extravagant proliferation of forms for pollinators. It is a buyer’s market; the sellers have put their best wares on display. It is plausible that different flowers specialise in attracting pollinators at different times of the day or season or in different microclimatic conditions. However, I have not been able to find an account that satisfactorily explains the sheer exuberance of variety on purely functional grounds.

There is a deeper problem. Evolutionary fitness may explain why flowers attract bees. It does not explain why I personally find flowers beautiful. I do not watch flower porn, and their sex life holds little interest for me. Even if I wanted to, my clumsy fingers could not manage the delicate task that a bee’s tongue accomplishes.

I can think of another evolutionary argument for this. The more beautiful a flower, the more likely humans are to cultivate and propagate it, conferring a kind of fitness advantage conferred by our preference. However, this fails immediately. Flowers blossomed in forests before any human being had ever ventured into them. Beauty existed before humans witnessed it. So, who witnesses beauty in a human-devoid wilderness?

Is Beauty Inherent in Nature?

A forest that no human has ever entered is still full of beauty. If beauty were simply a human projection, a quality we impose on the world for personally satisfying reasons, then an unwitnessed forest would be devoid of beauty. But this feels wrong. The flowers bloom in their thousands on hillsides that no one has ever seen. In my youth, I recklessly ventured into the mountains and wilderness in India, where I would not permit my son to go. I was captivated everywhere I went.

Glory be to God for dappled things

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty

Diversity can be easily explained from an evolutionary perspective. Each plant finds its niche, as the argument goes, and solves its individual (species) problem in its own way. But why should the solution to a biological problem consistently produce something that strikes me as beautiful? Beauty is either an inherent quality of the natural world or human beings have evolved in such an intimate relationship with nature that we are tuned, at a very deep level, to resonate with it. Perhaps both are true. Nature is saturated with dappled things.

Earlier ideas about beauty

The ancient Greeks considered beauty from a philosophical standpoint. For Plato, beauty is one of the three supreme forms, alongside Truth and Goodness. In the Symposium, the philosopher Diotima instructs Socrates that the lover of beauty begins with a single beautiful body, then recognises beauty in all bodies, then ascends to the beauty of souls, of knowledge, until finally perceiving Beauty itself - absolute, pure, unmixed with the mortal or the transient. If one accepts this argument, flowers are simply rungs on a ladder leading upward. Their beauty is real, but only an exemplar of something far more fundamental.

For Aristotle, beauty consisted of order (taxis), symmetry (symmetria), and definiteness (horismenon)–a correctly proportioned arrangement of parts. Flowers have order, symmetry, and a definite form that distinguishes one species from every other. The Stoics went further, finding in the beauty of nature evidence of divine reason (logos) running through all things, giving form and purpose to what would otherwise be chaos.

Greek philosophers assumed a fundamental link between beauty (kalos) and goodness (agathos). The compound ideal is expressed as kalos kagathos (καλὸς κἀγαθός), the beautiful and good, which is also used to describe the noble and virtuous. For Greek philosophers, beauty was not merely a decoration; it also had a moral dimension. To perceive beauty was to be drawn toward the Good. Among humans, physical beauty, in both men and women, is considered a sign of moral excellence. The ugly were base or ignoble. On this account, a flower was not merely pleasant; it possessed virtue. The Greek term for this is that a flower has arate (ἀρετή), which is best translated as excellence. For human beings, living a life of arête is the mandatory prerequisite for achieving eudaimonia, a state of human flourishing, deep fulfilment, and a well-lived life. If one agrees with this description, a flower is symbolic of a life well-lived.

Beauty in the Indian Tradition

Indian thought, both philosophical and literary, has been unusually attentive to beauty in nature, particularly in flowers. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna:

patraṁ puṣpaṁ phalaṁ toyaṁ yo me bhaktyā prayacchati tad ahaṁ bhakty-upahṛtam aśnāmi prayatātmanaḥ

If one offers Me with love and devotion a leaf, a flower, a fruit, or water, I will accept it. Bhagavad Gita 9.26

In this context, a flower is not merely a decorative offering. It is a vehicle of devotion and a point of contact between the human and the divine. Its beauty is what makes it a worthy gift. Flowers have been used in sacred ceremonies worldwide. I will expand on this in another essay in this series.

In the Buddhist tradition, the Flower Sermon is even more specific and detailed. The Buddha assembled his disciples, held up a single flower, and said nothing. Only Mahakasyapa understood and smiled. The deepest truths, the story suggests, cannot be expressed in language but can be pointed to by a flower held in silence.

Sanskrit literature, particularly Kalidasa’s poetry, describes flowers with an unmatched sensuality. In his Meghaduta (The Cloud Messenger) and Abhijnanasakuntalam (The Recognition of Shakuntla), specific flowers are evoked as both natural objects and emotional registers.

Indian aesthetics also developed the concept of rasa, the “flavour” or essential emotional quality that arises in the experience of art or nature. Beauty is neither in the object alone nor in the perceiver alone, but in the relationship between them; it is the quality that arises when a perceiving being of a certain kind meets an object fitted to call forth a response. More of this ahead.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali

Can Beauty Be Measured?

At some point, I am overtaken by the academic habit of prioritising measurement as a quantity over quality. We are taught that only things that can be measured matter. Everything else is linguistic sophistry. If beauty is real is an empirical fact, it should be measurable. Is it a quantity?

There is, in fact, a unit of beauty: it is funny but illuminating. If Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships, then one helen is the unit of beauty sufficient to launch one thousand ships, and a millihelen, one thousandth of a Helen, is the beauty required to launch a single ship. The unit has been attributed to various wits, and it is both charming and witty because it captures the essence of the problem. But flowers do not launch ships. The millihelen fails at its first hurdle. I have not yet used it.

A deeper problem with quantifying beauty is that it requires a common standard of comparison, a shared aesthetic receptor, a universal measure. Beauty does seem to have some universality: flowers are considered beautiful by virtually all human cultures in all recorded history on all inhabited continents. But the degree of beauty, the particular quality of beauty, and above all the meaning of beauty, all resist reduction to a number. The field of empirical aesthetics attempts to measure pupil dilation, heart rate, and galvanic skin response to beautiful stimuli. The numbers are real. But they never capture what it is like to stand before a rose in full bloom on a June morning. The correlates of an experience tell us nothing about the experience itself. Threin lies the failure of billions of pounds invested in brain states that have failed to illuminate the mind.

A Relational Quality

I therefore assume that Beauty is a quality. You may not agree. But stay with me. If it is a quality, where does it reside?

Surely, not in the flower. And not simply in me. The flower was beautiful before I walked into the garden and will be beautiful after I go inside. My cat and dog show no particular interest in flowers either. I keep lilies out of the reach of the cat and ensure that I wash my hands after touching anything in the garden, knowing the leg-cocking habits of my cocky dog.

Beauty might reside in the relationship- in the meeting between a perceiving being of a certain kind and a world of a certain kind. This is close to the Indian rasa theory: beauty arises when the capacity for aesthetic experience meets an object that is fitted to call it forth. Advaita (non-dual) Indian tradition divides consciousness into a Triouti (threefold nature of perception). A drishta (seer) observes the drishya (the seen) using drishti, which is the organ of visual perception. A bee navigates by ultraviolet patterns that we cannot see; a dog reads the garden through scent maps beyond our imagining. What I find beautiful in a flower may be entirely invisible to them, and what they find rewarding in the same flower may be invisible to me.

Immanuel Kant called aesthetic judgements “subjective universals” in that they feel immediate and personal, arising from deep inside one’s own experience, and yet we make them with a confidence that others will agree. “This rose is beautiful” does not feel like “I happen to prefer this rose.” It feels like a report on the world. And yet it cannot be demonstrated to anyone who does not see it.

The Experience as Its Own Justification

I find that I have already spent several hours trying to formulate these thoughts. I am exhausted, but the stubborn academic refuses to be defeated by problems. I must find an answer. Meanwhile, I am missing the beauty of my garden. At a certain point, analysis becomes a labyrinth that leads away from the garden rather than deeper into it. Every explanation, however elegant, leaves a residue of mystery. There was a moment I had this morning, standing with my coffee in the sunshine, looking at the lupins, when the question simply dropped away. Not answered. Dissolved. I looked at them with awe, wonder, and gladness.

I watched a bee hover from one lupin to another. Each lupin petal resembled a human hand folded in anjali, a reverent Indian hand position (mudra). The bee entered the space between the thumb and palm. The flower appeared to invite the bee inside.

And that was enough. The experience was an end in and of itself. That flower, that light, that warmth on my face, that gladness in my heart, on that particular morning felt complete. It did not need an explanation.

Not everything needs to be questioned. Not everything requires an answer. Sometimes, being is sufficient.

Perhaps the wisest response to beauty is not to explain it, but to receive it.

The earth laughs in flowers. Ralph Waldo Emerson

— 1 Thessalonians 5:18

In a recent conversation with a Brazilian colleague, she mentioned that in Portuguese, the term for thank you is obrigado, literally “obliged”, implying indebtedness or a social obligation. She preferred the Spanish gracias, which is rooted in gratitude. I mentioned that the Hindi word is dhanyawaad, the Punjabi version dhanwaad, or the Urdu shukriya, which is related to the Arabic shukran. I did not know the etymology of the Hindi word offhand, but I said that I would find out. This small exchange led to this piece.

Why do we say thank you? Is it an acknowledgement, obligation, gratitude, politeness, humility, or something else entirely? The more I looked into it, the more I found that these two small words carry a remarkable amount of human history.

Linguistic Landscape: What Different Languages Literally Say

The exploration was illuminating. The English thank you comes from the Old English þancian, “to think, to remember with gratitude.” The French merci implies reward or favour but is rooted in the concept of mercy. The German danke is linked to denken, thinking, and gratitude expressed through mindful recognition.

The Hindi dhanyawaad, to my genuine surprise, literally means blessed speech. The Urdu word shukriya, which I grew up hearing, derives from shukr, meaning gratitude, thanks, or praise. It has the same root as the Arabic shukran.

Mandarin Chinese uses xièxiè, which emphasises reciprocal social harmony. I found Japanese arigatō to be the most striking of all. Historically, it arose from words meaning “rare or difficult to exist”, expressing it is an acknowledgement that something precious or unlikely has occurred. It is a beautiful way of saying thanks.

Many Indigenous languages encode relational reciprocity rather than individual indebtedness, with expressions that mean something closer to “I recognise your gift” or “we are connected through this act.” One could go on. Even these few examples make the point: every language’s word for thank you is a small window into what that culture values most.

A Sikh Voice: The Deepest Thank You

The Guru Granth Sahib offers what may be the most extraordinary expression of gratitude in any religious text. This shabad by Guru Arjan Dev Ji, the fifth Guru, is said to be the verse he recited while being tortured to death by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1606. Not a protest. Not a cry for mercy. A thank you.

ਤੇਰਾ ਕੀਆ ਮੀਠਾ ਲਾਗੈ

ਹਰਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਪਦਾਰਥੁ ਨਾਨਕੁ ਮਾਂਗੈ

Tera keeyaa meethaa laagai.

Har Naam padaarath Naanak maangai.

“Whatever You do, O Lord, feels sweet to me.

Nanak asks only for the treasure of Your Name.”

Guru Arjan Dev Ji, Raag Aasaa, Guru Granth Sahib, p. 394

This is gratitude under conditions that would break most of us down. It is not politeness, social lubricant, or even comfort. It is far harder to achieve a thank you that does not depend on things going well.

What Emotions Does “Thank You” Carry?

Once you start thinking about the possible reasons for saying thank you, the range of emotional registers the phrase covers is surprisingly wide. Gratitude and appreciation are the most obvious and perhaps the most common forms of prosocial behaviour. However, mutual recognition and reciprocity play an important part, as does the simple function of social lubrication, courtesy, and the oil of everyday interaction.

Thank you can acknowledge a power asymmetry, signal humility, mark the formal closure of an interaction, or be no more than a ritual compliance. In this way, “thank you” is less a specific emotion and more a relational signal, a way of marking that something has passed between people and that it was noticed.

One Phrase, Many Contexts

We say “thank you” in radically different situations. We thank the surgeon who saved a life, a stranger who gives way at a junction, a barista handing us a coffee, and God in prayers and hymns across every religion. How can the same two words span existential salvation, minor courtesy, economic transaction, and spiritual awe?

I think the answer is that the words are a vessel. Their meaning is poured in by context, relationship, and the sincerity, or absence of it, that the speaker brings to the conversation.

Historical Origins: Early Expressions of Thanks

Care involves behaving in a manner that meets the needs of others. It is widespread in the animal kingdom. Compassion involves recognising another’s distress and working to alleviate it, as seen in many social mammals. However, gratitude is the most cognitively demanding of the three. It requires memory of a specific act, attribution of intent, and an inclination to respond similarly.

In that sense - care is I will look after you. Compassion is, I feel your pain. Gratitude is, I remember what you did for me, and now I am with you. That is thank you as a past act that binds future relationships.

There is a famous anecdote, often attributed to Margaret Mead, that is possibly apocryphal. A student asked her what she considered to be the first sign of human civilisation. She reportedly said, a healed femur. In the wild, a broken thigh bone is a death sentence for animals. A healed person means that someone else kept that person alive, fed, protected, and cared for them through months of helplessness. Whether Mead ever said these words matters less than the truth they point to.

Neanderthal skeletons have been found with healed injuries that would otherwise have been fatal. Similar evidence of social protection exists in gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, elephants, wolves and dolphins. Survival has always been a social phenomenon. Thank you, in whatever wordless form it first took, must be nearly as old as we are.

I Thank You God

During my childhood, my father placed small plaques around the house with the phrase ਵਾਹੇਗੁਰੁ ਤੇਰਾ ਸ਼ੁਕਰ ਹੈ (O Lord, I am grateful to Thee). He wanted us to experience gratitude as a permanent state. I was anything but grateful at that time. Where was the toy I wanted? Why would he not buy me a bike? Then there were the hand-me-downs from my brother, eleven years my senior, which meant I was perpetually misaligned with whatever my peers were wearing. They had flares. I had drainpipes. There was a lot of anger in those years and very little gratitude.

Much older now, and no longer able to apologise to my father for my thoughtlessness, I find comfort in trying to be what he was trying to make me. One of my favourite poems by e.e. cummings, easily available on the net, captures the kind of reverent gratitude he was pointing toward that sees existence itself as a gift:

i thank You God for most this amazing

day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth

day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any—lifted from the no

of all nothing—human merely being

doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

What moves me most in this poem is the final image, the ears of the ears waking, the eyes of the eyes opening. A second layer of perception. Gratitude is not just a feeling but a way of seeing, of being more fully present to the fact that you exist at all.

Two Words, Vastly Insufficient

Now that the ears of my ears are awake, or at least more awake than they were as a boy who only saw the drainpipes, I understand how “thank you” is both indispensable and utterly insufficient. Its power lies in this compression: a vast range of human emotions squeezed into two syllables.

Obligation. Politeness. Recognition. Reciprocity. Spiritual surrender. The words do not distinguish between them. Context does, and so does the person who says them.

When thank you is truly felt, when it arises not from courtesy or social habit but from the recognition that something was given that did not have to be, it becomes something wonderfully, specifically human. A declaration, as much as courtesy. A statement that we notice, remember, and that the bond between us has been renewed.

My father was aware of this through his spiritual wisdom. He knew it before I was ready to hear it.

All photographs by the author

Every event in the floral calendar had taken place with immemorial punctuality and tragic rapidity. All the full-blooded flowers of Summer had long since come and gone, with their magic faces and their souls of perfume. ~Richard Le Gallienne, “The Green Friend,” October Vagabonds, 1910

Every spring, at roughly the same time, the daffodils arrive.

I do not notice the first one. For some reason, a crocus bloom captures my attention as soon as it appears. Snowdrops are beautiful and so aptly named. But they escape my attention too. Never a crocus.

But when the daffodils appear in splendid profusion, they suddenly overwhelm my visual orientation. A verge I have driven past all winter without interest suddenly appears populated with angled yellow heads, repeated sometimes precisely geometrical and lined, but more often, irregularly arranged. One day they were not there and suddenly they insist on being noticed. On a stretch of road to work, not far from home and before the worries and distractions of the day have stolen my attention, suddenly, there they are. They intrude into my restless mental preoccupation with an insistence that I would find irritating in a fellow human being.

This spring I had a strange yet convincing idea. The daffodils were smiling at me. That’s why I couldn’t ignore them.

Do not smile at strangers

When I was planning to move to England, an Indian friend familiar with the ways of the English told me to avoid discussing politics and not to smile at people while travelling in the tube. I realised on my very first day in London that the involuntary squeeze of intimacy that the London tube required an armour of studied indifference to the presence of others, and a wilful obduracy about not looking another in the eye. Smiling is an invitation to intimacy. In sexually segregated societies, women simply do not make eye contact with unfamiliar men, let alone smile at them. In my adolescence there was a risqué phrase that we sniggered over in school lavatories: hassi to phassi (literally, if she smiles at you, you’ve netted her).

The daffodils definitelysmile at me as I drive past them crowding the verge.

Even as I write this, I feel the need to qualify or justify it. It sounds bonkers. We, coldly rational human beings, equipped with marvels of modern science, know that plants do not smile. How can they? They do not possess musculature, or faces, or intent. They are subject to wind, to light, to soil. My best possible justification is that I am being poetic. I don’t really mean it. I am trying to describe an ineffable human emotion by attributing it to a ‘senseless’ entity.

And yet! When I drive past the rows upon rows of daffodils, I am convinced that they are smiling at me. Not that they are beautiful. Not that aesthetically their colour scheme is so well coordinated with the light of the season. Not that they are merely present. I am sure they are smiling at me. I know they are.

I could say they wave. That would be defensible. They sway in the wind, their stems bend, their heads move in synchrony. All easily explained. The breeze bends them with air pressure. Waving requires intent. Motion within the laws of physics is, well, just the immutable and universal laws of Newtonian physics. Apply pressure to a body and it will move. No other explanation needed.

But I do not experience the daffodils waving at me. They smile at me. I smile back.

Am I psychotic?

The lovely flowers embarrass me,
They make me regret I am not a bee –
~Emily Dickinson, 1864

I am aware, even as I set this down on paper, that this is a dodgy claim. It is not one I would defend in a Court of Law or under oath. If a patient were to say to me that flowers smiled at them, I would not accept it at face value. I would ask further questions. I would want to know whether this perception was part of a wider pattern.

Patients with psychosis often feel persecuted. The world is sending them ominous signals. Everything around them is charged with significance. The biomedical explanation is that increased activity of a particular chemical in the brain makes an individual attribute ‘salience’ to everyday perceptions. That chemical imbalance is a cause of psychosis. But for the individual who feels that they see red cars in the neighbourhood far too often, and this must mean that the intelligence services are spying on them, the experience is real and the explanation understandable. Their conviction in what we call persecutory delusions is absolute. The ‘external’ evidence to confirm this, however, is not. The world does not rearrange itself in response to the intensity of one’s belief. A strong feeling does not make the attribution of that feeling real.

I am not, to the best of my knowledge, in the throes of a psychotic breakdown every spring when daffodils appear. That sentence, too, is not as stable as it appears. It assumes that I would be able to recognise such a state in myself. That my capacity for self-observation would remain intact. That I would not, in the very act of being unwell, lose access to the criteria by which I judge external reality. My very first task, when I meet a patient with psychosis for the first time, is to help them feel understood. Everyone so far has denied what seems to them to be true. I tell them that I believe them honestly and believe their honesty. That’s where the therapeutic relationship begins.

We rely, perhaps too easily, on the idea that we can step outside our own experience and evaluate it. That there exists some internal vantage point from which we can declare this is real, this is not. This is mine, this is imposed. This is perception, this is projection. In practice, the boundary is less secure. We all carry strange and unusual ideas. But if we can function within the constraints of society accepting a shared external reality without suffering or causing suffering, we are autonomous beings, free to choose what to believe. Patients with psychosis have their lives, relationships and their own sense of self fragmented and sometimes destroyed, where a psychiatrist has to step in to restore the relationship with a shared reality.

I return, then, to the daffodils. They seem to smile. I experience them as smiling. I do not believe, in any straightforward sense, that they possess the capacity to smile. And yet, the experience persists. So, I ask myself a simpler question.

What is a smile?

“A smile is the shortest distance between two people” attributed to Victor Borge, Danish comedian and pianist

We recognise a smile without effort. Young children distinguish between a smiling face that seems to welcome and a face that does not. We do not need to be instructed in the mechanics of it. The recognition is immediate. But when closely examined, the smile is not a simple phenomenon. There is, for instance, a distinction between what is called a Duchenne smile and its less convincing counterpart. The Duchenne smile involves the contraction of muscles around the eyes as well as the mouth. The cheeks lift. The eyes narrow slightly. There is a sense, difficult to articulate, that the expression is not confined to a single part of the face.

The non-Duchenne smile, by contrast, involves the mouth alone. The lips turn upward. The rest of the face remains unchanged. It is the smile of politeness, of obligation, of social compliance.

Most of us can tell the difference. We are not taught to do so. We do not, in the moment, analyse which muscles are engaged. We simply know. A genuine smile is felt as genuine. A forced one is not.

There have been experiments in which participants are shown images of faces and asked to distinguish between these two types of smiles. They do so with a degree of accuracy that exceeds chance. When asked how they arrived at their judgement, they struggle to explain. The knowledge is tacit. It does not present itself as a set of rules.

There is, in other words, something about a smile that we recognise without knowing how we recognise it.

There are also experiments that proceed in the opposite direction. Rather than observing smiles, researchers attempt to induce them. One of the more well-known involves asking participants to hold a pencil between their teeth, thereby forcing the muscles of the mouth into a position that resembles a smile. Participants then rate their mood. Those whose faces are arranged in this way report a slight improvement.

The implication is that the relationship between expression and feeling is not unidirectional. We do not only smile because we are happy. We may also become happier because we are smiling or attempting to do so.

If we step back from the human face, we find that the function of the smile is not confined to our species. Other animals possess behaviours that serve similar purposes, even if they do not resemble a smile in form. Dogs wag their tails. The wag is not a simple movement. It varies in speed, in amplitude, in direction. It can signal excitement, affiliation, readiness to engage. It can also signal anxiety. The meaning is context dependent. And yet, for those who live with dogs, the wag is often read as a kind of greeting. A sign of recognition.

Among primates, expressions that resemble smiling have been observed. Chimpanzees, for instance, display what is sometimes called a “play face,” in which the mouth is open and the lips are retracted. In other contexts, a similar expression can signal submission. The same configuration of muscles carries different meanings depending on the situation.

What unites these behaviours is not their appearance but their function. They regulate interaction. They signal something about the internal state of the animal to others. They facilitate social cohesion or at least reduce conflict.

The smile therefore is not merely a pattern of muscle contraction. It is a signal. It operates within a system of communication. It has a role. But there is a vast gulf between chimpanzees and daffodils on every measure, other than that they are both life forms. Very little else in common between them. So does a smile have a role in the life of plants?

Are plants emotional?

Plants do not possess a nervous system, not one that we know of. They do not have brains. They do not, as far as we can tell, have experiences in anything like the way animals do. And yet, they are not inert. They grow toward light. They send roots toward water. They respond to damage. They allocate resources. They reproduce. My grandmother and mother told me that plants were as sentient as other beings, including humans.

Plants such as the Mimosa pudica close their leaves when touched. The movement is rapid enough to be observed without special equipment. It gives the impression, if one is inclined to such impressions, of withdrawal. In northern India the plant is called chhui mui, literally touch me and I will die, emphasising the delicate sensitivity of a dainty and shy bride. There are others, like the Venus flytrap, that close around an insect when triggered. The movement is purposeful and serves a function. It captures prey.

We are cautious, rightly, about attributing intention to these behaviours. We tell ourselves that all this is the result of biochemical processes, of evolutionary pressures, of mechanisms that do not require anything like awareness. And yet, the language we use begins to strain. We speak of plants “seeking” light, “avoiding” shade, “competing” for resources. These are metaphors. They borrow from the vocabulary of organisms that possess minds. They are, strictly speaking, inaccurate.

If a plant bends toward light, we can describe the differential growth of cells on one side of the stem. We can trace the hormonal pathways. We can measure the rate of change. All of this is correct. None of it, however, captures the immediacy of the movement as we perceive it.

So, do plants have emotions? The question is usually answered in the negative. Emotions, as we understand them, require a nervous system of a certain complexity. They involve representations, evaluations, bodily states.

And yet, if we consider what plants do, we find analogues, of a sort, to some of the drives we recognise in animals. They move toward what sustains them. They withdraw, in some cases, from what harms them. They invest energy in reproduction. We might speak of hunger, thirst, or a drive to reproduce as ‘animal instincts.’ So why can’t these be ‘life instincts’ that animals share with plants?

What we do not find, or do not think we find in plants is anything that corresponds to joy. There is no obvious plant behaviour that signals an immediate, outward expression of something like pleasure. There is no plant equivalent of a smile.

But do the daffodils smile?

At this point, I am less interested in resolving the question than in understanding why it arises. Why this perception, rather than another? Why smiling, rather than waving, or simply existing?

One possibility is that the smile is entirely mine. That I am projecting onto the daffodils a human need and then responding to it as if it were being fulfilled. A loop of my own making. This would not be unusual. We do this with animals, with objects, with weather. We see faces in clouds. We attribute moods to rooms. We speak to machines. I talk to my car, computer, and camera, especially when they don’t do what I say. I strongly recommend that everyone should talk to plants.

I like the idea that the daffodils smile at me. To see a smile is to be invited into a certain kind of relation. It lowers my defences. It increases my gratitude towards life and being alive. It allows for a moment of ease and comfort when I would otherwise be in turmoil about the past or the future. If I experience the daffodils as smiling, I may, in turn, find myself smiling back. The exchange is asymmetrical, perhaps entirely one-sided. And yet, the effect is not negligible.

Daffodils and mortality

Robert Herrick, a 17th-century poet, wrote a poem To Daffodils with these lines that have stayed with me since I first read it:

“Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon…”

The poem is about brevity. About the speed with which things appear and disappear. The daffodils do not last. Nor does anything else. Everything is temporary and transient. Arriving foretells perishing. Wordsworth describes a “host” of daffodils, “fluttering and dancing in the breeze.” The movement is noted. The repetition. The abundance. And later, the memory of them, which “flashes upon that inward eye” (I wandered lonely as a cloud). Wendell Berry writes of entering “the peace of wild things.” The movement here is inward. The external world provides something that the internal world lacks.

I do not wish to make too much of these references. They are not evidence. They do not resolve the question. They simply indicate that others have found, in encounters with the non-human world, something that resists simple description.

I return, again, to the road. To the morning. To the small, repeated encounter. The daffodils will be there each morning. They have no need of me. They do not alter their behaviour in response to my presence. They will continue to grow, to open, to fade, whether I pass by or not.

But when I do pass, something happens. I see them. They seem to smile. I feel something in response. An inner ease. A moment of joy. A momentary feeling that this moment is enough. I do not have to harden my armour to fight the day. It does not last. It is not transformative. It does not alter the course of the day in any dramatic way.

I could correct the perception. I could remind myself, each morning, that plants do not smile. That what I am experiencing is a projection. That the appropriate response is to note the beauty of the flowers and move on.

It is not that I believe, in any literal sense, that the daffodils are smiling. It is that the distinction between literal and non-literal seems, in this context, less important than it might otherwise be.

But it is there. There is an exchange. It is silent. It is brief. It is not subject to verification.

Every morning, they smile at me. And I smile back. Whether the smile originates in them or in me is, perhaps, not a question that requires an answer. The experience does not demand justification. It does not present itself as a claim about the world that must be defended. It is, rather, a small event. A moment in which something like connection is felt.

It is enough.

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower” Auguries of Innocence by William Blake

While cleaning my back garden for new planting, I found remnants of beans I had planted last year but had never fully cleared away. One pod had survived the severe winter. It was shrivelled and seemingly lifeless. Yet when I cracked it open, inside were five seeds. I have kept them for planting this year.

Beans flourish under my care in a way that other vegetables do not. With tomatoes, I sometimes succeed; with potatoes, more often; but beans and I have an understanding. Brassica flourishes as well, but the cabbage leaf butterfly and its writhing green caterpillars defeat me each year with their sheer numbers and insatiable appetites.

The five seeds sit in a jar along with bulbs I plan to plant this year. I am waiting for the ground to thaw, for warmth to return, so I can clear the soil in which I will plant them.

Every time I see the jar, I wonder what is alive inside that bean. Something is, for sure. But what? Is the living happening or is living a possibility awaiting the right conditions to emerge? If it is a mere possibility, how can it be called alive in any sense? I can boil and eat them as well. I can make a veggie burger with them. Or I could fill the jar with water, and magically, life will appear as a sprout.

Where was that life hiding? And is that hidden entity a living thing or the promise of one? What does it even mean to be a ‘promise’ of a living thing?

I could feel clever by declaring that life is an emergent property, when a mixture of certain chemicals combines under the ‘right conditions’, temperature and moisture. Or I could try another turn of phrase. Life is not a discrete event; it is a continuum.

I am indulging in sophistry. Emergence, continua, and probabilities do not explain the magic. Merely changing the labels does not reveal what is inside the tin.

A ‘not-yet’ life

As I type this, another clever-sounding phrase worms its way into my head. A seed is life, but not yet. I remain uncertain. Is life inside the seed, or is life something that happens to the seed?

Another thought. Life is a promise between something that exists and something that allows existence. But that simply moves the mystery one step back. Like who made God, and then who made the maker of God, and so on ad absurdum.

I cannot explain this mystery. I suspect that if someone asked me to clearly articulate the mystery for which I seek an explanation, I would struggle to be clear.

Watching the jar reminds me of a protest I once saw in Boston, USA. I frequently travel to the United States for psychiatric conferences. Outside the venues, there are often protesters, most commonly Scientologists critical of psychiatry, carrying signs warning against psychiatry’s perceived harm. They are usually peaceful and part of the background hum of public discourse.

On this occasion in Boston, an entirely separate demonstration unfolded nearby: pro-life and pro-abortion protesters locked in a screaming match. Their presence was not directly related to the conference; however, the energy of confrontation lingered in my mind. What struck me was not merely the intensity of belief but the curious constellations of ethical positions: those identifying as pro-life often also supported gun rights and the death penalty; those identifying as pro-choice opposed both. It seems that both sides require complex intellectual balancing to maintain internally coherent narratives.

Legality requires strict boundaries: when are you old enough to be an adult, vote, drive, etc.? There is a joke about a young couple sitting in a car late at night in a remote location. A policeman approaches the couple and asks them what they are doing so late in the wilderness. The boy says: we are waiting for midnight? The policeman asks why? “We both turn 18 then” replies the beaming boy.

The debate around abortion is also about a strict boundary: when does life begin in the foetus? We demand a border for a miracle, which is an unfolding. We argue over rights and independence, yet we forget that nothing, not a foetus, not a bean, and certainly not a human being, is ever truly independent. The seed offers an honest mirror. It doesn’t ask when it becomes “legal.” It asks when it is ready. It reminds us that life is not a switch that flips from ‘off’ to ‘on’. Yet if we wanted a time that determines ‘readiness’, it would be arbitrary.

Humans want boundaries.

Life exists in gradients.

Life as a continuity

In the East, life does not begin. It changes costume. In Hindu and Sikh traditions, the soul does not “start”; it flows from one form to another. The soul (atman) is part of the universal consciousness that is the fundamental reality, and it moves to another form of being after the death of its previous physical form. Reincarnation is the continuity of the life force rather than life starting from nothing.

Buddhism does not believe in a soul but does believe in reincarnation. Therefore, if there is no permanent soul, what is being reincarnated? The popular energy is that in Buddhism, reincarnation is not like water being poured from one bucket to another but like a lit candle lighting another. No soul is needed.

From this perspective, we can change the question from when does life begin, to how does life manifest through changing forms?

Perhaps, the seed is life holding its breath. It is an embryo with genetic instructions, a reserve of nutrition for when it needs to come alive, and triggers that turn dormancy into awakening. It is life suspended. To return to Buddhism, the term antarbhava means an in-between state of death and life; a transition from one life to another. A seed is a perfect example of antarbhava.

Eating plants

We believe that plants are passive. They do not move, so they are not ‘animated’. However, we now know that plants communicate through microbial networks in the soil. They are engineers who calculate the angle of the sun. They are survivors; they remember the drought of years ago and prepare for the next one. They faithfully follow the calendar and change form with the changing seasons. They are life manifesting in a continuous transition. I have come to believe that plants are conscious and sentient, so I talk to them.

Why do we feel a pang of guilt at the slaughter of a cow but not at the harvest of a carrot? Perhaps because the cows look back at us. However, the plant is doing something equally radical; it is turning light into matter. It is a miracle we have learned to ignore because it occurs in the dirt. Animals resemble us. Plants do not, but they are alive, and through their lives, they sustain us.

To the best of our knowledge, plants do not experience pain. However, they respond to physical damage and environmental stressors. Many plants have sophisticated systems for detecting touch, light, danger, and if one is to believe experiments on the Venus flytrap, they can count too. Plants can’t vocalise. They reproduce in abundance and sometimes thrive when cut and drop their fruit on ripening. Eating plants does not feel the same as eating animals.

The Gospel of Matthew speaks of the mustard seed, a tiny speck that dreams of becoming a forest. And Wendell Berry, that patron saint of the furrow, reminds us that “The soil is the great connector of lives.” Seeds are the bridge between life and death. You can keep it in a jar for years, but it has a plan to come alive when the conditions are right.

Pick up a seed, any seed. A sunflower, lentil, or stray bean from a winter garden.

Hold it in your palm and feel its weight. It feels like a stone, but it is actually an antarbhava. Within this small mineral-like thing lies the possibility of a green explosion, which will produce many more copies of itself and continue as life as long as it meets the right conditions. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” Seeds remind us that existence is relational; they do not live alone but rather in dialogue with soil, fungi, sunlight, and water.

Every day, we walk over millions of these “not-yets.” We live in a world that is constantly trying to change. The miracle is not just that the seed grows; the miracle is that it waits. It knows how to remain still until the world is ready for it.

Look at the seed again. It isn’t a thing. In a world full of endings, a seed is a promise of another beginning. The five beans are in my jar. They look like stones. But somewhere inside them a spring is already rehearsing.

All pics by the author

Ruins announce that here once stood something mighty.

I cannot find a single, authoritative published source for this widely cited line, probably from an Urdu sheyr (couplet), but it is a well-known quotation. I first heard it when I was about 15 years old from an old man who was forlornly remembering his robust youth.

In this essay, I reflect on three kinds of perishing: that of individual lives, those that result from human violence, and the ones that are nature’s slow but inevitable erasure of everything. I wonder what, if anything, survives: stones, books, memories, or the meanings we lay over them.

What does it mean to perish?

To perish is not just to die. It is to disappear slowly, to lose form, function, legibility, existence, and then to be lost to all memory. In the short story Metamorphosis, David Eagleman expresses this idea beautifully. There are three deaths. The first is when a person dies. The next death is when everyone who knows the person dies. The final death is when anyone who has ever heard of the person dies. That is the final erasure of the human being who once lived and loved.

Individuals die, cities perish, and mighty civilisations disappear.

There are two great philosophical questions that remain unanswered. Why is there something rather than nothing? Who created the universe? Both assume that something must exist. In Abrahamic religions, it is an external God; in Hinduism, it is Brahman (consciousness as the fundamental reality that created empirical reality). For Christians, the word was the beginning. In Hinduism and Sikhism, the beginning was Anhada Naad (unstruck sound).

Buddha said that there is no first cause, captured in the concept of anamatagga (without a first moment). He considered existence to have two basic attributes: annicca and paticca-samuppaada. Anicca means impermanence. Everything is in constant flux, arising, changing, and passing. Paticca-samuppaada is usually translated as dependent origination. It means that nothing exists independently. Everything arises from a prior condition. When a condition ceases, the object ceases to exist. The Buddhist formulation is: Imasmiṃ sati idaṃ hoti; Imasmiṃ asati idaṃ na hoti (When this is, that comes to be; When this is not, that does not come to be).

Stephen Hawking has asserted that “the laws of science seem to predict that the universe had a beginning”. Scientists now conceptualise a cosmos with a beginning and, therefore, at least in principle, a cosmos that could have an end, but the nature of its ending is uncertain. Some scenarios imagine continued expansion and a long “heat death”, while others entertain the possibility of a future re-collapse, a “big crunch”.

In Hinduism, existence is not an object but a rhythm described in three terms: leela, laya, and pralaya. Leela is the universe as divine play; consciousness (Brahman) revealing itself. Laya is when the individual form dissolves into this universal source. Pralaya is when the entire cosmic cycle dissolves back into the source, Brahman. As I have written before, the Creator in the Hindu view is the creation itself. It is a dance rather than a painting. Brahman’s leela starts the dance, laya is each step returning to stillness, and pralaya is the end of the performance. The curtain falls, and the stage goes dark.

I do not know which answer is correct. However, the Hindu view resonates with me. Some quantum physicists also consider consciousness to be the underlying reality from which existence emerges. But who knows?

Whatever the truth of the origin of the universe, perishing is not a local tragedy. It is written into the grain of reality itself.

Ephesus: a city that guided strangers by stone

When I went to Ephesus, what struck me first was not only the grandeur but also the intelligence with which the city had been designed to meet human needs. There is a famous stone carving where sailors arriving at night could find directions by putting their feet into the carving. One toe points to a brothel, another to a place to eat or drink, and another to a place to rest. A sailor arriving for the first time in pitch darkness would not have to disturb anyone; his toes could lead him to whatever the city offered.

After navigating the city with your toes as a guide, you arrive at the Library of Celsus, an extraordinary structure. Its proportions, as guessed by the columns that remain standing, are astonishing. Only the dramatic facades have withstood the ravages of time. The library once housed an estimated 12000 scrolls, an enormous collection of human wisdom. Imagination struggles to recreate what the library might have been in its full splendour.

Ephesus collapsed into ruin for reasons that are, in the end, almost banal: geology and ecology doing what they do. The Cayster River silted up the harbour, and the city that lived by maritime trade found itself increasingly landlocked. The resulting marshy conditions contributed to diseases, including malaria, driving the decline and relocation of the population. Earthquakes and shifting political fortunes did the rest. Nature, in its usual indifference, allowed geological forces to take their course.

The Celsus library remains as a photo opportunity. I have lost all my photographs of Ephesus, including the negatives during various house moves. Another loss of the legibility of experience. Another reminder of impermanence and ways memories perish.

Nalanda: learning burned, and then silence

I have never been to Nalanda. In school history lessons, when I did not care about history, we were taught about Nalanda and Taxila, along with the Indus Valley civilisation. History was for other people. I did not have a long enough past to respect history.

Founded in the early centuries of the first millennium and flourishing for hundreds of years, Nalanda was one of the world’s great residential centres of scholarship: a vast monastic-university complex drawing students from across Asia. UNESCO’s description of the archaeological site captures what the ruins reveal: this was not a single building, but an entire ecosystem of monasteries, temples, classrooms, and courtyards; an entire architecture devoted to learning. Chinese travellers came to study, and their records confirm the importance of Nalanda as the world’s first, most renowned, and largest residential university.

Then came fire and conquest. In the late 12^th Century Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khilji conducted raids across monasteries in Bihar, including Nalanda, Vikramshila, and Odantapuri. Monks were tortured and killed, libraries were burned, and monastic complexes were destroyed. If you Google Nalanda, you will find varying accounts of why Khilji destroyed Nalanda, depending on the tribal loyalties of the narrator. Regardless of Khilji’s intentions, the fact that he initiated the destruction of Nalanda is not in doubt.

Libraries as monuments to wisdom

Ephesus and Nalanda are monuments to the idea that knowledge is a form of immortality. That if we collect, teach, copy, and preserve, we can outlast our own brief lifetimes.

And yet both vanished.

One by natural forces and the other by human wickedness. In the final accounting, the mechanism is irrelevant. Everything perishes. Even the pyramids, those seemingly defiant geometries, are slowly being eroded by wind, sand, pollution, time, and tourism. When I first saw the Pyramids in early 1990, you had to travel some distance from Cairo to see them in the desert emptiness. You can now have a McDonald’s or KFC within a short distance of the Great Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops).

To understand impermanence is not to despair. It is to see clearly what permanence has always been: a story we tell ourselves because we are temporary creatures who long for immortality. Libraries, museums, sarcophagi, names of lovers carved on a tree trunk, palaces, paintings, statues, and writing this blog are all desperate defences against death and perishing.

Even the Himalayas are temporary

I am from Kashmir. I am drawn to mountains. There is a deep calling which must be evolutionary. My ancestors originated from the mountains. I feel genetically programmed to love mountains. As a medical student in Jammu, I travelled regularly across the mountains of Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, as often as my meagre resources permitted. In 1980 I hitchhiked to Ladakh to visit the Hemis Monastery, and then walked from Leh to Kargil without any trekking equipment and without knowing the local language for over three weeks (134 miles, 215 km). I stayed overnight with villagers who provided unwavering hospitality, without expecting anything in return.

Before that in 1978, I had spent two weeks in Dharmsala, where I met the Dalai Lama. He gave me a piece of slate with carvings. Everyone had brought an offering as he walked through the crowd, giving his blessings. I apologised for not bringing an offering and explained that I was a medical student visiting McLeod Ganj for the first time. He beamed and gave me a slate carved into which was carved Om Mani Padme Hum (Hail to the Jewel in the Lotus). It is the only thing I have carried from my past. He was not a celebrity at the time. Hollywood had not discovered him. I, a callow youth, was not mature enough to ask him the questions that I would now ask him. Even then though, I sensed that I was in the presence of an advanced soul.

I had no camera then. I have no picture of a youthful me standing next to a beaming Dalai Lama. But does it matter? It was a moment in time. Impermanent. It happened to me. It lives in my memory. It will perish with me. So will this slate, although it is likely to outlast both the Dalai Lama and me.

The mighty Himalayas will not last forever. These mountains rose from the collision of tectonic plates, with the Indian Plate pushing into the Eurasian Plate beginning roughly 50 million years ago, a collision that continues to shape the range today. They are being eroded relentlessly. I last returned to Kashmir in 2023. My clan’s houses in Srinagar are occupied by others; all my relatives were forcibly driven out at gunpoint. The rivers, forests, and glaciers I knew in Gulmarg, Pahalgam, Sonmarg, and Anantnag have all but disappeared. Mountains have been denuded by rapacious timber merchants. The Sufi Islam that coexisted peacefully with Kashmiri Vaishnavism has been replaced by brutal totalitarianism. The Kashmir of my memory has vanished.

The grand unmaking

Is perishing personal or cosmic? I have written elsewhere about the tragedy of Kashmir? Why should I mourn my clan’s cleansing from their land? The cosmos is full of unmaking. The Moon is drifting away from Earth at approximately 3.8 centimetres per year, roughly 3.8 meters per century. The Sun will not burn forever. NASA has noted that the Sun will become a red giant in approximately 5 billion years.

What do these numbers even mean? Not just mathematically, but to me, perceptually? I can only imagine my existence two generations on either side. My clan was driven out of Kashmir in the early 1990s. It hurts us. It will mean nothing to my great-grandchildren.

My life is finite, as is my capacity for love. I can only extend it to my imagined grandchildren, who are not yet born but already loved. Beyond that, who knows? I try to detach myself from present suffering by meditating and immersing myself in spirituality. My personal griefs and anguishes seems both intensely immediate and insignificantly small in the grand cycle of creation and destruction that operates in the universe.

The cosmos ceases on vast timescales. Galaxies merge, stars collapse, civilisations perish, cities get wiped out and all personal memories disappear when a being dies. Everything will eventually cease to exist. If you compare the enormity of the universe with the infinitesimally small scale of human life, it does something odd to your heart. Time widens until personal pain feels both intimate and small.

A ruined mansion near home

Not far from our house, there are ruins of an old mansion: just a few bricks and a fragment of a tiled mosaic that somehow survived the vandalism of weather and neglect.

I stand there and wonder about the lives lived inside. Love-making and child-rearing, fighting and forgiving, the small rituals of food and fatigue, the long arguments that end with doors being slammed or laughter, the private heroism of caring for someone sick, the soft cruelty of impatience, the ordinary miracle of waking up and trying again.

All of it is now compressed into a rectangle of broken tiles.

Should we grieve perishing?

Why shouldn’t we grieve? Grief is love that encounters the finitude of our existence. How can we not grieve our own perishing and that of those we love?

But I am beginning to wonder whether grief is the only possible response to impermanence. There is another way of dealing with the reality of impermanence: awe, reverence, and gratitude for here and now. If everything perishes, including us and those we love, then perhaps the right response is astonishment at not that things end, but that anything exists at all; that there is something rather than nothing, and that we, improbably, participate in it.

The immensity of the cosmos could make us feel insignificant. Or the fact that we now know so much about it can make us proud. I feel a mixture of awe at the world, pride at humanity’s achievements, and personal gratitude that I have been allowed to take part in this strange, brief, luminous experience of being alive.

My children live through me. Their existence is also impermanent. But they are likely to have children, who will have children. Perhaps knowing that is enough. To have lived and loved, to remain in a few people’s memory after my own perishing, and to hope that the gift of memory and recall will keep me alive for little longer than I breathe, two generations on either side, is enough.

खंडर बता रहे हैं की इमारत बुलंद थी

Ruins announce that here once stood something mighty.

Ruins celebrate existence. We cannot defeat perishing. We can only but try to remain legible to one another while we still can.

When Silence Creeps In

A few years ago, my family started complaining that I was ignoring them. They would call me or ask me to pay attention to something, and I would not respond. Initially, they attributed it to my usual absent-mindedness or the hyperfocus that overtakes me when I am reading, writing, or immersed in music. Eventually, they decided that it was deliberate and that I was choosing to ignore them.

When their complaints became sufficiently vociferous, I tried to explain that I was not ignoring anyone; I genuinely had not heard them. The realisation arrived slowly for the family, and for me, I was going deaf. If a penny had literally dropped, I would not have heard it.

Diagnosis and Retrospection

I underwent a hearing test and was told that I had severe deafness in my left ear and moderate to severe in my right, particularly affecting high frequencies. The cause was partly aging and partly the consequence of listening to very loud music in my youth.

Growing up, we did not have CDs or modern digital music. I owned a small tape recorder. There was a flourishing underground economy of transferring vinyl records onto cassette tapes for a small fee. Western music arrived years after becoming established hits in the West, and the selection was limited. When I stumbled upon rock and blues at around 14, it was love at first hearing.

Hard rock and heavy metal became my staple diet: Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, and Pink Floyd shaped my auditory imagination. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen brought poetry and politics, while Jethro Tull transported me to a British countryside populated by elves and goblins. Music has never been a background for me. It is essential to my identity and existence. The music of my youth was a way of inhabiting emotions I could not articulate, and inhabiting lands and cultures that seemed forever forbidden and beyond reach.

The sound quality was poor and lyrics difficult to discern. In Purple Haze, I heard Jimi Hendrix confessing to being gay: “excuse me, while I kiss this guy!” What I lacked in auditory acuity, I compensated for in volume. Once I entered medical school, escaping domestic constraints and sibling complaints about my musical tastes, the volume knob moved permanently to the max. Whenever I was not in lectures, I was listening to music loudly and continuously, even while studying. During the rare live performances available to me, I stood as close to the speakers as possible.

After arriving in the UK, I revisited many of the bands that had shaped my youth: reunions of Deep Purple, Nazareth, remnants of Uriah Heep, Bad Company, or tribute bands. With the arrival of headphones, my listening experience became even more intimate and intense. My musical tastes expanded to jazz, blues, and classical music, but loudness remained integral to the experience.

I was warned that I would damage my hearing. However, youth brings its own recklessness and absence of foresight. Even now, when I can, I listen as loudly as possible, with sound leaking through noise-cancelling headphones so that anyone nearby can hear it.

The Gift of Restoration

Once I acquired hearing aids, the first thing I noticed during my daily dog walks was the birdsong. I had not realised how completely I had lost the astonishing variety of sounds that fill the morning air. There was so much joyous sound all around me, where there had previously been silence. I attempted to count the number of bird calls I could distinguish, but I could not total them. Occasionally, just one would chirp or whistle, but when they all sang together, the soundscape was so full and luscious that I could identify neither individual components nor its contributors.

The greatest gift of my hearing aids has been the return of subtlety: the shimmer of cymbals in live performances, the delicate clarity of high notes, and the nuanced texture of spoken words in the theatre. What the audiologist had described as “high frequencies” was a galaxy of musical notes, each with its own signature imprint. This is how the early users of telescopes might have felt when a dark sky revealed its hidden luminosities in depth and breadth. Each new bird song was like another musical galaxy revealing itself to me.

A sudden loss is acutely felt, as I did when I fell, and my temporarily paralysed leg revealed the full force of gravity, as I have described here. When things are taken away very slowly, you do not miss them. Muscle mass fades. Memory shifts. Aging advances incrementally. Hearing loss belongs to this slow erosion.

Why Birds Sing

Hearing birdsong again made me curious not just about its beauty but also its purpose. I read that birdsong is not merely decorative background music; it is a biological necessity that has been shaped by evolution. Many birds sing to establish their territory. Songs allow individuals to signal ownership and deter rivals without physical confrontation. Birdsong is also a crucial element of mate attraction. In many species, females prefer more elaborate or precise songs, which may indicate neurological development and genetic quality. The complexity, endurance, and clarity of songs often function as signals of health and fitness. Juvenile birds sometimes learn songs from adult tutors, blending instinct with culture.

These explanations, as scientifically valid as they may be, do not satisfy. What Are birds saying to each other? Is it music or might it be poetry, ‘birdwords’ set to music? Might they be conversing about the banal? Have the chicks been fed? Whose turn is it to get the worm today? Is your mother visiting our tree again? Why have you not fixed that leak in the nest?

Who knows, except the birds? And does it matter? Beauty is beauty, regardless of its purpose.

The birds in my garden

My ordinary English garden hosts an orchestra. I cannot tell them apart from their sounds, except for doves, ravens, and magpies, which have unusual sounds, none of which are high frequency. I googled the birds I could see in my garden and then heard them individually on YouTube. Over time, I came to recognise some songs. I learned that the delicate and melancholic phrases belonged to Robin. Rich flute-like melodies were delivered by the great tit, while the chaffinch produced energetic trills that ended with a flourish. I loved the song thrush with its repeated musical motif. The bassline of the wood pigeon had always been audible to me, and now several other sections of the orchestra had started playing too.

Competing with the City

Once I started listening carefully, especially when comparing bird songs across the various countries I travel to, I noticed how the environment shapes sound. Birdsong adapts to habitat. Forest species often use lower frequencies that travel through vegetation, whereas urban birds sing louder or at higher pitches to overcome traffic noise, which is an evolutionary adjustment. In India, particularly in Delhi and Mumbai, cities I visit frequently, the morning soundscape is cacophonous. Birds compete with relentless noise of traffic, construction, and dense urban lifestyle.

Studies suggest that many urban birds increase both their vocal volume and pitch to remain audible above anthropogenic noise. The pigeon outside my brother’s apartment in Bombay coos so loudly that it penetrates the soundproof windows. One cannot help but feel pity for the birds. How long will they be able to increase their vocal output to compete with the ever-growing sounds of human civilisation?

Our modern marvels

Hearing restoration is a modern marvel that would have seemed miraculous a few generations ago. I had not missed birdsong in my deaf state, but what if my livelihood depended on it? I was suddenly struck by what it might have meant for Beethoven, whose entire being overflowed with music. What is it like to lose the ability that defines you?

Ludwig van Beethoven’s progressive deafness is a poignant and painful reminder of how previous generations, with no access to modern technology suffered without hope. My deafness is partial, whereas his was total. Even during periods of increasing silence, he composed some of the most revolutionary works in Western music. By the premiere of his Ninth Symphony in 1824, he was completely deaf. While conducting the performance, he continued to beat time even after the music ended, unaware that the audience was applauding wildly, until a performer turned him around to witness the ovation he could not hear.

Music as a Unique Event

Every morning, I hear similar sounds, but never the same. The Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache believed that every musical performance is an unrepeatable event. For this reason, he resisted commercial recordings, arguing that they could never capture the living, spatial, and temporal reality of sound unfolding in real time.

For Celibidache, music was not an object but an experience that exists only in the moment between performers, acoustics, and listener. Watch Celibedache conducting Ravel’s Bolero on YouTube. If God were a composer, he would be Celibidache. Listen and judge for yourself.

Celibidache would recognise the uniqueness of every dawn chorus, magical and magnificent, never to be repeated.

Every morning, birds provide us with a free musical performance, each one a unique event, each one a special performance, never to be reproduced again in the history of the universe. We often forget the music freely offered by the natural world, a living orchestra performing without tickets or announcements.

There are countless recordings of birdsong online, but these recordings cannot replicate the subtle interplay of weather, light, and presence that shapes each dawn chorus. I would rather listen to the unrepeatable harmony that unfolds outside my door each morning.

I thank my audiologist, my hearing aids, and my family for discovering my deafness and the unexpected gift of hearing restored. I cannot imagine what Beethoven must have felt as sound retreated from him.

“In each and every heart the Divine sings its song; some hear it, and blossom”. Sri Guru Granth Sahib, Sikh Holy book.

When I hear birdsong in the morning now, it is not just sound; it is attention asserting its presence. Hearing loss has taught me how to listen.

All photographs by the author (except my mother, pic taken by my brother)

Inheritance

Long before I had heard the word sustainability, I was taught about it by a woman who would not waste a grain of rice– my mother.

She woke at 4 a.m. to prepare for my father’s needs before his two-hour daily meditation session. By the time my sibling and I began stirring at 6 a.m., she had already completed hours of invisible work. She ate at the end of the day after feeding everyone else: family members, pets, and anyone who happened to arrive at our door, including stray dogs and cows.

After she died, we sat together and tried to remember her favourite food. None of us could. I am sure she had preferences, but she belonged to a generation shaped by duty more than self-expression–married at thirteen, mother at fifteen, grandmother by thirty-five. She was part of a silent era of women who met cultural obligations without complaint and often without articulating their needs.

I remember two things she truly disliked: spilled salt and leftover rice.

If salt fell, she would warn me that in another life I would have to pick it up with the inside of my eyelid, a vivid enough image to make me careful. If I left rice on my plate, she would say, You do not know how much effort went into producing this. It is a gift from God. Do not waste it.

If food remained, she ate it instead of discarding it or fed it to the birds and stray animals. She cooked only what we needed, except for a few extra chapatis each day for the passing stray cows.

These were not simply habits of thrift. They were gestures of attention, acknowledgements that every grain carries labour, weather, soil, and grace.

The Mountain Economy

My mother was born in the mountainous region of Bagh, now in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Life there was harsh and self-sufficient. I have not been to Bagh, but I have visited that part of the region within the Indian borders. The air is cold and thin, almost metallic, in its impact on the lungs. Putting one’s hand in a stream is an ice-cold shock. During holidays in these regions, as children, we would dare to see how long we could keep our hands immersed in the water. Under such elemental conditions, families grew what they consumed and consumed what they grew. Journeys down the mountains were infrequent and purposeful, to obtain what could not be produced locally: salt, sugar, oil, and, occasionally, clothes.

For her, each grain of salt or rice held a value that modern generations might associate with digital wealth, except that its worth was not abstract. It was survival, effort, and gratitude that were made visible.

Scarcity did not induce anxiety. It produced reverence.

Confrontation: Abundance Without Memory

I have everything I need.

I tell my children that we eat better than many kings and queens of the past. Today, we command nature’s bounty outside natural rhythms: strawberries in winter and seasonal vegetables year-round. We send probes to Mars and track human-made objects that leave the solar system.

Yet, each day, we discard what earlier generations would have guarded carefully.

My work in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia has shown me landscapes where plastic accumulates like geological sediment: in the slums of Nigeria and Dhaka, the gutters of Kolkata and Delhi, and the remote streams of Indonesia and Cambodia. Rivers choke, wildlife suffers, and materials designed for convenience become permanent residents of the ecosystems.

My mother counted grains of rice. Entire economies now count surplus as a problem to be managed. Agricultural systems produce paradoxes: food is destroyed to maintain prices and policies that stabilise prosperity in one region while quietly undermining farmers in another.

Inequality is not a new phenomenon. What is new is the universality of disposability. Even the poorest communities now participate in cycles of buying and discarding.

In many regions, I am warned not to drink tap water, so each day, I buy disposable plastic bottles, which creates a small personal contradiction between safety and sustainability. I am handed bottles of water wherever I go. During my recent trip to Nigeria, I used 5-6 small plastic water bottles every day. I have to perform mental gymnastics. I cannot afford to be ill. During long road trips, there is no access to clean toilet facilities. I could carry my own metal bottle, but it would still have been filled with water from plastic bottles.

During our family stay at Rancho Margot in Costa Rica, I glimpsed another possibility: an attempt to align production with consumption, producing only what was needed and consuming only what was produced. It felt less like austerity and more like a coherent approach. It remains my family’s favourite holiday experience.

Lessons That Return

As a child, I found many of my father’s habits irritating, especially his insistence on switching off lights in empty rooms. If he found a light left on, he would say, “Ah, the spice box must have an important exam tomorrow. That’s why it needs a light to study.”

We laughed but also felt mildly embarrassed by what we interpreted to be stinginess.

Now, I walk through my own house switching off the lights. I do not make sarcastic remarks, but I secretly hope my children notice. I do not want to sermonise; I hope the lessons arrive quietly, absorbed by osmosis.

Scale and Perspective

The world has become increasingly disposable. Objects, experiences, and sometimes even relationships feel temporary.

And yet, when viewed across deep time, individual human lives have always been brief. Estimates suggest that approximately 110–120 billion humans have lived and died since the emergence of modern humans, while more than 8 billion are alive today, a historically unprecedented population sustained by advances in science and medicine.

These advances have transformed survival. Here is a brief table of what we have achieved in the last two millennia in just one area of human existence, but a profoundly impactful one: the death of a child. Behind these numbers lie humanity’s extraordinary achievement- how many children now grow into adulthood.

I deeply admire human ingenuity. Our ability to alleviate suffering, extend life, and explore the cosmos reflects our extraordinary intelligence and cooperation. As we transitioned from a world where every grain was a gift to one where every object is a commodity, our physical reach expanded to the stars, yet our spiritual attention to what lies right in front of us began to shrink.

But mastery without restraint risks becoming excess.

Integration: Learning to Tread Lightly

We human beings rule supreme on this planet. All the more reason to rule wisely.

We do not need everything we buy. I do not need any more clothes for the rest of my life. Yet, I still throw away disposable pens, even as I try to return to a fountain pen.

We need to tread lightly on this earth. Not as an act of deprivation, but as an act of attention.

We need to leave memories of love and laughter rather than landfills filled with impulse purchases. To fill lives with meaning rather than fill spaces with things.

I wish I had learned this sooner. Perhaps wisdom arrives only with age or with the slow accumulation of contradictions that force us to reconsider what matters. Maturity cannot come prematurely.

I do not expect everyone to arrive at this realisation at the same time. I only hope that some may arrive sooner than I.

“The Earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it.” (Psalm 24:1)
“Air is the Guru, Water the Father, and Earth the Great Mother of all.” (Guru Granth Sahib, Sikh Holy Book)
“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” (Mary Oliver)

“Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last river poisoned, and the last fish caught, will we realize that we cannot eat money” (saying attributed to Cree Native Americans)

The river remembers

Often watching the Extinction Rebellion and other climate protests in London and elsewhere, I am reminded not of carbon targets and slogans, but of a river in Karnataka.

In April 2019, I decided to go fishing on the Kabini River in Nagarhole National Park, Karnataka. The rest of my family were elsewhere occupied- reading, scrolling the internet, or Snapchatting. Ajaya, a local fisherman, was my guide and boatman. We set off with a rod and line, a mixture of bait (offal, dough, corn, and worms), and some cold beers to try our luck.

The Kabini River, also known as Kapila, meanders between Kerala and Karnataka, a region rich in biodiversity. One of the few places in the world where you might see the rare Black Panther or the Melanistic Leopard, also known as the ‘ghost of the forest’. It is home to a number of endangered and rare species, such as the Indian leopard, Gaur (Indian Bison), mugger or marsh crocodile, sloth bear, pangolins, and the Indian Rock Python. There are large populations of sambhar, cheetal (spotted) and barking deer, monkeys, elephants, striped hyenas, wild boars, Ussuri dhole, mongooses, civets, Indian flying giant squirrels, porcupines, slender loris, and jungle and leopard cats.

There are over 250 species of birds, with threatened species including the white Ibis, darters, and red-headed vulture, and endemic species such as the blue-winged parakeet, Malabar Grey Hornbill, Malabar Lark, Malabar Tragon, and the white-bellied Treepie, perhaps the most beautiful bird of the crow family. Flocks of spoonbills frolic on the riverside. Spread over 55 acres, this part of the forest used to be a royal lodge, a venue for Maharajas and Viceroys to indulge in their hunting passions.

The riches of rivers

Kabini once teemed with life. Here, you can find the giant humpbacked Mahseer, which can grow up to 1.5 meters in length and is considered one of the 20 megafish in the world. The red-tipped halfbeak, mrigal, Waynad Mahseer, Kohri, Nilgiri, Bhavani, and Cauvery barbs,ande Nilgiri Mystu, were all once endemicton the rive, and now face extinction. The giant Mahseer population has declined by 90% in recent years. The fish Nemacheilus pulchellus lives in these waters and is so rare that it does not have a common name. In June 2016, scientists from the Kerala University of Fisheries and Ocean Studies discovered a previously unidentified species of fish with a blue iridescence along its dorsal and ventral fins in a secluded stream draining into the Kabini River. DNA analyses confirmed that it is part of the Badis family and was named Dario neela (neela is blue in many Indian languages). Smooth-coated otters feast on the river’s many fish and invertebrates, but like the fish, the otters are also under threat.

The earth is my mother, and I am her son (Atharva Veda, Bhumi Sukta)

I threw bait into the river. The sky was dotted with Brahmani kites (also known as the red-backed eagle), a magnificent raptor that also scavenges, beautiful in its chestnut-red plumage and sharply contrasting white head and chest. One was particularly adventurous and fearless. As soon as I cast the line, it would swoop majestically on the bait, often catching it in midair. I tried to throw some bait on the other side, away from my cast, but the less intrepid kites covered that area. I feared the kite swallowing the hook or tearing its talons on it, and having been defeated by its persistence and accuracy, I decided to drop the line just by the side of the boat rather than casting it far.

The hook was stuck in something hard. Much tugging revealed remnants of a plastic net. As I pulled in the net, more of it was revealed until I ended up hauling several meters of netting, tangled with deadwood, weeds, and human detritus. Ajaya informed me that every evening, fishermen lined the riverbed with these nets and removed them at dawn, along with the trapped fish. Each day, a large amount of netting was left in the river by the fishermen. He said that the net also often caught juvenile fish, and everyone realised that the fish stock was dwindling. But what option did he have? He barely made a living and had to look after a family of six, including his elderly mother and a newborn baby. When I expressed my horror, he did the Indian head wiggle; equal parts agreement, obsequiousness, and a shrug of helplessness.

The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it (Psalm 24:1)

I decided to remove as much plastic netting as possible that afternoon. It was hard and pitiless work in hot and humid conditions. After approximately three hours, the boat was full, and we decided to take the netting on shore. As we reached the riverbank, fishermen were bringing in sacksful of nets for that night’s fishing. I offered Ajaya some extra money to dispose of the netting we had collected. He wiggled his head and thanked me in response.

The geography of anger

As Extinction Rebellion blocks traffic in London and other big cities, I understand what drives them. I sense their need to do good, to feel good, to do the right thing, and to feel righteous. I felt virtuous after three hours of fishing for plastic. It may not have made any difference; Ajaya may have tipped the plastic back into the river. However, it made me feel good momentarily.

Extinction Rebellion is driven by the same need. I do not doubt their sincerity; I doubt the geography of their anger.

I am unsure what blocking traffic in London achieves. We in Britain can reduce our use of plastic. Our beaches are also littered with plastic. We can stop exporting our filth to other nations. However, our contribution, both good and bad, is meager. I cannot imagine Extinction Rebellion protesting outside the Indian High Commission in London. It does not fit into their image of the ‘baddies’. Meanwhile, Ajaya is trying to survive. He is aware of the damage done to the source of his livelihood. However, he can plan only until the next few meals and, at best, the next few months. Carbon or plastic reduction targets set at the International Summit in exotic locations are as meaningless to him as his life is to the London protestors. Ajaya knows that the river is dying, and that hunger does not wait for environmental recovery.

Blaming or solving?

I wish I had an answer. The answer for Ajaya and his fishing community, for fired-up protesters at Extinction Rebellion, for those of us who worry about the state of the planet. My children want to save the planet; I want them to clean their rooms and study hard. I think the discipline of tidying is better than anarchic protests. Studying science and engineering may offer them greater opportunities to do good than waving placards with meaningless platitudes.

Or perhaps I too am part of the problem, wanting order, discipline, and solutions while living inside the very structures that unmake the natural world. I can only remind myself of the saying attributed to another Native American, Chief Seattle: “Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it”.

To move beyond the momentary feeling of virtue, we must bridge the gap between global awareness and the Kabini’s local reality. By channelling human wisdom and ingenuity into targeted, site-specific solutions, we can empower communities like Ajaya’s to protect their environment without sacrificing their survival and well-being.

Real change requires that we move past mere protests and displays of anger, far away from the source of the damage. Instead, we must offer tangible support and scientific innovation directly to those living on the front lines of ecological collapse, ensuring that the “web of life” remains unbroken for all.

An earlier version of this essay first appeared on kitaab.org. Reproduced with permission

“Who waits for you out there, O traveller, where will your wandering lead”

“दम ले ले घड़ी भर, ये छैंयाँ पाएगा कहाँ”

“Breathe some restful moments here, where else will you find such shade”

Opening lines of the song “Wahan Kaun hai Teraa” from the 1965 film Guide, based on a novel by R.K. Narayan. Lyrics by Shailendra, music by S.D. Burman. A YouTube video link with English translation is provided at the end of the article.

All photographs by the author

Every time I feel myself pulled toward the allure of ‘there’, this song calls me back. I am not arguing against ambition or self-improvement. I am only noticing that the peace we chase in the future often sits beside us here and now, revealed not by reaching the next milestone but by pausing after a long and restless search.

The Indian write R. K. Narayan (1906-2001) is best known in the West for his stories set in the fictional South Indian town of Malgudi. His writing style, a detailed and exquisite analysis of everyday life, observed with compassion and gentle humour, and captured in compressed prose, has been compared to Faulkner, Chekhov, Gogol and Guy de Maupassant. His novel, The Guide, published in 1958, is also set in Malgudi and was made into a wonderful film, considered one of the greats of Bollywood cinema. It is a story of a flawed man’s egoic ascent, decline, shattering, and possibility of redemption. ‘Possibility’, because the ending is deliberately ambiguous.

The Guide

The protagonist, Raju, is a street-smart tourist guide who uses his charisma, energy, and exuberance to get along in a world that does not fully satisfy. He guides people but does not know where he wants to go. He falls in love with Rosie, a dancer in a stifling marriage with a dour and unsupportive husband, from whom she eventually splits. Raju encourages Rosie to follow her passion for dancing and becomes her manager, guiding her to stardom. Their relationship collapses under the weight of ego, suspicion, the corrosive impact of fame, and Raju’s forgery of Rosie’s jewels. He is sentenced to two years imprisonment and the couple split.

Emerging from jail as a diminished man, he wanders into a drought-stricken village, where he is mistaken for a holy man capable of miracles. This is where the song finds him (and us).

After initially resisting the role of a holy man, Raju finds purpose in guiding innocent and desperate villagers out of their drought-stricken misery. Under pressure of the villagers’ belief in his divine powers, Raju undertakes a ritual fast for rain. In the film’s haunting final movement, an emaciated Raju walks into the river as thunder rumbles in the distance. It is unclear whether Raju drowns or whether it rains. The story now becomes a parable of transformation, where a flawed man’s accidental sainthood reveals an ambiguous boundary between deception and redemption.

The seductive call of ‘there’

The song’s opening line poses a profound question. We spend our lives searching for ‘there’. Out there is our perfect lover, a successful career, a fulfilling life and a legacy. The song asks us, Where is that place? Who is there for you? What are you running from? Who are you running to? Is resting in the shade here now not preferable to the imagined perfection of the future?

Raju becomes a ‘saint’ not through study, intent, or awakening, but through sheer physical, mental, and egoic exhaustion. The song reminds him that existence is ephemeral, like water waves. Existence is as transient as writing on water waves. We do not have a permanent home or residence. In this life, we are tourists seeking a destination and a guide to help us get there. However, the guide lies within. We only find it when we stop searching for it.

Rain basera (literally a rain shelter)

Life, in an old Indian metaphor, is a rain basera, a shelter you slip beneath while the storm passes by. Nothing is meant to be kept; it is only meant to be witnessed. The roof leaks a little, the wind hums through the bamboo, and it still offers a moment of peace. In this view, the wandering mind that chases distant horizons forgets the quiet gift of the present moment. Resting in this temporary refuge, here and now, is an act of wisdom. The world keeps moving, but you do not have to chase every cloud. Sometimes, the truest path is simply to sit, breathe, and let the rain fall where it will.

The song concludes with a metaphor of the hans (swan). In Indian mythic symbolism, swans represent noble souls. Swans have unique properties. They subsist on pearls. Given milk mixed with water, a swan can drink only milk and leave the water; that is, it can discern the eternal from the ephemeral. Eventually, like a swan, we must all fly alone. There is no ‘there’ to reach. The destination is an internal journey in which the “I” disappears.

Raju finds peace when he is no longer a guide, lover, prisoner, or saint. He is simply a witness (Sakshi).

Lessons for contemporary life

In our hyper-connected age, with its superabundance of possibilities to fulfil all our cravings, we believe that the next destination, whether in love, career, profit, advancement, or success, is just a bit further away. There, we will finally rest. The song reminds us that we can rest in now. Our bodies will decay. Our possessions perish or pass on to others. The house we call home will be inhabited by others. There is no peace out there. Rest in the now.

It has taken me a lifetime to discover that there is no perfect destination hidden beyond the horizon of the future. There is only this brief shelter, this breath, and this stillness.

Youtube link to the song here

“Every animal lives in its own perceptual world, rich with meaning, even if that is inaccessible to us.” From An Immense World by Ed Yong.

This is a story about animals giving gifts.

About Socks

Socks is our tiny, extremely cute, and very anxious cat. Like all our cats, Socks is also a rescue. Socks will not go near anyone or let anyone touch her, pat her, or carry her except my middle daughter, Emilia.

Emilia is the animal whisperer of the house. She can bond with any animal anywhere and under any circumstances. Once we were deep in the forests of Costa Rica and she stopped by a bush and said, “Dad, there is something here.” I tried very hard, but I could not see anything. My daughter lifted a leaf, and underneath it was a glass frog.

Glass frogs are miniature marvels of nature. They have transparent muscles and skin, and their internal organs are contained within a mirror-like sac that reflects light.
My daughter has a sense of animal presence in her vicinity that I cannot fathom. In the middle of Bandhavgarh Forest in Central India some years back, we had stopped for a rest. Suddenly, scores of beautiful yellow butterflies descended upon her, as if she were a nectar-laden bloom.

She can gently hold fireflies, lizards, slugs, and snails, creatures small and large. They are drawn to her. I have dreaded lizards since childhood. The Punjabi word for lizard is kordkilli. Kord also means leprosy. Once, when I was a child, a lizard fell on my hand and shed its tail. For months, I feared that I would contract leprosy. Emilia taught me not only how to handle lizards but also to see the magic in their reptilian bodies.

My older daughter has the same animal sense and empathy. She grew up largely with her mother, and I only recognised her abilities when she was older and spending more time with us. My mother and maternal grandmother were equally attuned with animals around them. Perhaps it runs in families, not just from shared nurture but also as a shared nature.

Socks bearing gifts
Socks spends all her time on my daughter’s bed or in her lap. Mostly she is out.

Every few days, Socks brings a kill to the house. It is usually a vole. She doesn’t eat them. I do not know how she kills them, but she leaves them outside our bedroom doors. I do not think she leaves them in any particular arrangement. But of the three occupied bedrooms, she leaves one at the door of each one, Emilia being the biggest recipient of her gifts.

My wife and I feed her in the morning, but she has not allowed us to get near her. She watches from a distance while we put the food down and scuttles away if we approach. Thus, the gift cannot be in return for food, for we feed her, but Emilia gets the largest share of gifts.

Socks sometimes meows softly outside the bedroom door, announcing her arrival with a gift. Only Emilia is awake during those hours, and Emilia tells us that Socks is her friendliest and most playful when she is found with her gift. She seems delighted.

Perhaps Socks delights in giving gifts and witnessing them being received.

Why do Cats bring gifts?

The gift may be bonding behaviour rather than being merely transactional. Socks may think she is our mummy and is teaching us how to kill. Or Socks may think that we are not competent enough hunters and may not be able to provide enough food, so is replenishing the family store of food. Whatever the explanation, Socks must feel like she is part of our family. Even though she will not let me near her.

There is a significant gap between the Socks’ intent and my interpretation of it. Perhaps that gap will remain unbridgeable until Socks starts speaking English or Punjabi, or I start speaking ‘Catese’.

Animals and gifts

I read recently that squirrels will adopt orphaned relatives if they lose their mothers. Research shows that red squirrels only adopt pups that are closely related to them, such as siblings, nieces, nephews, or grandchildren. Male squirrels are well known for bringing gifts to females.

I have spent many years making my bird feeders squirrel-proof. From my window, I can watch a squirrel get up on its hind legs and examine each new impediment or obstacle I have put in place for it to not reach the bird food. It rubs its front paws. I can feel the force of the squirrel’s intense focus and thought. It is thinking. I know it in my bones that the squirrel is thinking, just as I know I think. The squirrel consistently defeats me and gets the food.

I, a professor at one of the UK’s top universities, am regularly defeated in a test of intelligence by the humble squirrel.

I have stopped placing obstacles. If you cannot beat them, invite them to the table. Currently, both birds and squirrels feed from the same source.

Ravens bring ‘treasures’ such as shiny pebbles or bottle tops to humans who feed them. Male penguins propose by offering the smoothest pebble to the female. Some male nursery web spiders wrap their prey in silk as a ‘wedding gift’ for their mates. Many other species, such as wolves, dolphins, and ants bear gifts. Hyenas will regurgitate food to a superior as a sign of submission, like paying taxes to a king.

Does each species have the same intention?

What is a gift?

A gift is love made palpable; an offering that carries the warmth of one hand into another. Perhaps it began when our ancestors shared food or fire–a spark of trust in a dangerous world requiring group protection. The gift turns me into we. The practice endures because it feeds what is finest in us: the wish to be seen, to belong, to weave gratitude and care into everyone’s story. Gifts can express hierarchy, love, reciprocity or represent what words cannot articulate. If gifts are social signals, then giving and receiving a gift requires not just instinct, but an embodiment of the relational aspects of being.

Finding Highway on a highway

We get our rescue cats from Argos sanctuary in Cyprus, where a group of dedicated, mainly English women look after stray cats. We found a cat there called Highway.

Highway was so called because he had been found near dead next to a main road. Somebody had shot him, and some pellets were still lodged near his spine, so he walked with a funny gait, but he was a truly loving cat. The moment we saw him at the sanctuary, we all fell in love with him.

My son, the youngest in the family, was against bringing Highway home to England because of the effect on Socks. In a democratic vote, he lost three to one, and we got Highway airlifted to our house.

Our son turned out to be right. Socks vanished, refusing to return for several months, while Highway stole our attention and affection.

Highway was a lovely, curious, and affectionate creature. He is the only cat who made me love cats. I am a dog person. I like my affection to be reciprocated. I want the dog to tell me that he knows I am Daddy. Cats don’t do that. They are too proud, snooty, and indifferent for my liking.

Till I met Highway. He forced me to carry him and insisted that he sit on my lap and that I stroke his head or body. I realised that cats love humans too and both give and seek affection, but differently from dogs.

Highway died while exploring the road outside and was run over. We were heartbroken. One of the reasons we’ve had animals since our kids were born is that we think it’s important for children to have pets, understand the roles and rules of caring for others, witness the cycle of life and death and learn how to grieve and let go.

Miraculously, Socks reappeared a few weeks after Highway died

Animal communication

How did Socks know that Highway was gone? We have discussed this as a family many times. We have no explanation.

There was no sign that Socks was coming furtively to the house to check for the presence of Highway. Might there be a cat gossip group or a cat WhatsApp group? If cats have a gossip group, Socks would certainly not be part of it. She is too skittish to be near another cat.

So how did she sense it? Telepathically? I don’t know. Smell? Or another sense we know nothing about.

And I don’t think we can know.

We can see the love of a dog in the dog’s eyes. It feels like human love. This is not anthropomorphisation. Anyone who thinks it is, does not understand the nature of love. Love is a quality of emotion, not a quantifiable object that can be dissected atom by atom to prove its existence or its equivalence between humans and other species.

Why we fail?
We are too blind to the natural world. Our definitions of intelligence, sentience, and consciousness are too narrow. Our intelligence is far too limited to understand animal intelligence.

Everybody I know loved the documentary My Octopus Teacher. But you don’t have to go deep into the ocean to find animal intelligence. It is in the ants crawling on your windowsill. In the Robin that is right now at my bird feeder. In the vole that is sometimes alive when Socks brings it in. Socks releases it from her jaws and the vole scurries to hides in the tiniest space it can find beyond her reach. We lock Socks in another room and gather around the terrified vole, attempting to capture it for release. The tiny vole, almost dead with dread, still ususally manages to beat the four of us. There is intelligence in the smallest creatures you can see, and even smaller ones. Under the slide, you can see the single-celled amoeba avoiding toxins. They not only move away from harmful substances but are also known to possess sophisticated biological mechanisms for detoxifying their environment. Intelligence does not require size, only the force of life. It exists from the smallest living thing to the mightiest one you might encounter in a jungle or in the ocean.

Animals as gifts

We need to look at animals with awe and reverence. Perhaps animals, too, are gifts from nature’s benevolent hand, living reminders that the sacred wears many forms. Somewhere along the way, we placed ourselves on a throne above them, citing divine dominion and mistaking stewardship for superiority. In our quest to get closer to God, we have drifted away from the breathing tapestry of life around us. Other, older ways of knowing, such as those of my grandmother, saw things differently. She spoke to beasts and thanked trees, knowing that all life hummed with the same spark. We share the same breath, and no creature has a greater right to being than another.

The Isah Upanishad of Hinduism tells us that “the wise sees the Self in all beings and all beings in the self”(verse 6).

Let us be wise. Let us cherish these gifts. Love, protect and provide for them all, not just our pets.

Nothing to lose or gain?

I was 16 when I first heard this line in Janis Joplin’s hauntingly beautiful voice. I was young enough to feel confined and old enough to feel restless. I grew up in a world saturated with religious, cultural, and moral certainty. My family were devout Sikhs. Family rules were strict, and schools were even stricter.

My father had famously produced a poster of 32 rules for living a Good Sikh life, each rule composed of 32 letters in the Punjabi script. Life should be hard work, religious devotion, service to the community, and avoidance of all fripperies. Everything had a prescribed place. To my adolescent mind, freedom lived somewhere else. In the West. In Woodstock, the film I had seen for five consecutive days during its seven-day screening at a local cinema. Bob Dylan was a prophet, Jimi Hendrix a wizard, and Crosby, Stills Nash and Young reminders that I was “billion-years old stardust”. I knew that such freedom existed, but it was elsewhere, too remote for me to reach, let alone live in.

Back then, that song line felt like a revelation. To have ‘nothing left to lose’ meant that nothing could be taken from you. You would be beyond family and societal pressures. Beyond leverage. Beyond fear. Life, as I lived it then, was a long drill in accumulating marks, exams, approvals, failures, and trying again. Success always receded slightly ahead and was of a kind I did not really want anyway. Freedom, as the song suggested, must lie at the far end of an exhausting road, when there is nothing left to lose. You would have no rules, responsibilities, or obligations. You would be free.

What did I desire then?

Now, in my seventh decade, the same line sounds different and less true.

If I were to rewrite it, I would say: freedom is just another word for nothing left to gain.

With time and a modest measure of worldly success, I see a different pattern in the unfolding of my life. My adolescence was characterised by striving for what seemed unattainable. The restless wanting was for a forbidden fruit. I wanted to be free from rules and free to fulfil my primaeval desires. Unbeknownst to myself, in my search for freedom, I bound myself to craving. I was chasing expressions of erotic desire, freedom from rules, roles, and responsibilities, and the freedom to be ‘authentic’.

I did not know myself, let alone what authenticity meant. William Blake said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. I wanted excess more than I wanted to reach the palace of wisdom. I had none of the Woodstock generation’s freedoms, let alone excess. I craved them and sought freedom from obligations. I was not seeking freedom. I was entrapped by my desires.

What is desire?

Looking back, I realise that my youthful restlessness was not just a personal rebellion, but my first encounter with a fundamental human tension that the world’s great spiritual traditions have sought to decode for millennia. This realisation eventually shifted my perspective from a search for external escape to an enquiry into the nature of wanting itself.

Most religious traditions, despite their surface differences, converge on a surprisingly similar insight: desire is not the enemy. What causes suffering is not wanting but misdirected wanting.

Buddhism is the most explicit. The Buddha taught that craving (tanhā, literally thirst) lies at the root of suffering, not because pleasure is evil but because craving grasps at what is impermanent. When desire clings to what cannot last, it destabilises the mind. Peace does not come from satisfying desire but from loosening its grip.

Other traditions arrive at similar conclusions through different routes. Hinduism recognises desire (kāma) as a legitimate aim of life, but only when it is balanced by discernment and ethical grounding. Desire becomes destructive when it overrides judgment and turns compulsive. Christianity similarly distinguishes between disordered desire (epithymia) and rightly ordered love (agape). It is not longing itself that leads us astray, but longing aimed at the wrong objects. Augustine called this ordo amoris: the proper ordering of love.

Islam frames the struggle in terms of the nafs, the desiring self that can incline either toward ego or toward God. Desire is not to be eliminated but rather disciplined through inner effort and remembrance. Judaism, too, treats desire as double-edged: without it, there would be no creativity, intimacy, or continuity of life; yet, left unchecked, it can dominate moral awareness.

Even Taoism, which avoids moral language altogether, sees desire as something that narrows one’s perception. When desire dominates, we see only fragments; when it quietens, reality reveals itself more fully.

A shared pattern emerges across these traditions. Desire is not condemned as immoral but is understood as absorptive. It captures attention, distorts perception, and shrinks the field of awareness. In this sense, desire is less a moral failure than a thief of attention.

Freedom, then, is not found in the multiplication of wants but in recovering the capacity to see clearly.

The cage of craving

I did not understand any of this during my youth. I thought freedom meant the expansion of desire: more choice, more pleasure, more possibility. What I see now is that desire itself is the trap. Even the desire for comfort can become a form of captivity.

The modern world is very good at feeding this type of hunger.

It is less effective at noticing when hunger becomes endless.

For most of my adult life, I have craved. Whether it is good food, luxuries, fame, a higher h-index, more citations, or greater applause from the audience at a conference, it is all an effort to fill the void within. The more I sought, the larger the void became. Egoic comparisons with others are endless and endlessly enhance desire.

In my seventh decade, I have finally understood that freedom and desire are inversely related, whereas gratitude and a sense of abundance are positively related to freedom.

Freedom’s silent arrival

Although there are nuanced and subtle differences in the nature of desire across religious traditions and how to deal with it, there are also striking similarities. The Upanishads tell us that: “When all the desires that dwell in the heart fall away, then the mortal becomes immortal, and attains Brahman.”

Moksha or freedom is not an escape into something but a release from the tyranny of wanting. Christianity frames freedom in the same paradoxical way. Jesus said, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” Paul went further: “I am free, yet I make myself a servant of all.”

Freedom is not about having nothing left to lose. It was always about having nothing left to gain.

Such freedom has come to me late and almost unnoticed. Not through wanting and getting more, but through giving. The more I give to my patients, students, those who ask for guidance, or those who simply need to be heard and understood, the lighter I feel. I no longer need the world to complete me. Something in me feels full and flows outwards. That old song has not changed. I have. Somewhere along the way, Kristofferson’s line has been turned inside out.

The abundance of being abundant

This is not emptiness. It is abundance. Not the absence of loss but the absence of craving.

In another blog, I will return to the question that quietly remains: do we truly overcome desire, or is the deeper task to tame it rather than eradicate it? Perhaps desire is not an enemy to be destroyed but a wild horse to be restrained, the same image as I wrote about in an earlier blog. Some fences restrain. Some also guide. Whether true freedom lies in conquering desire, restraining it, or retraining it is something I am still waiting to discover.