Life in a slow lane

January 29th, 2026

As I look back on 2025, I feel a deep desire to share the reflections that linger in my mind. While I may never fully capture the entirety of my subjective experience, I am committed to sharing the emotions and insights from those times.

What you will find in the next two blogs are these absorbed thoughts—memories and interpretations of my experiences. I hope this exercise brings me greater clarity and offers the same to you. The following is part one of two.

It is hard to capture a year in two blogs, especially a year full of aftershocks. When we decide on change, we underestimate the aftershocks. The mind blocks them temporarily so we can move forward in life. Change happens, bringing with it feelings of control, elation, and happiness. Days pass, and then the tremors come. We don’t understand what is happening. All we see is an emotional roller coaster.

And so it happened to me. The journal entry for January 1st, 2025: Ponder on the idea of identity. How has it evolved in the last year? What aspects of yourself have you discovered or rediscovered?

I felt a pain while writing these words—a pain I am unable to explain. The first three months of retirement were full of fun, activity, and people. The newness was ecstatic. I loved the freedom from meetings and deadlines. But within that freedom, something was missing. There was a void—a true void. I had restarted my meditation practice. The peace I found there kept getting interrupted by this emerging void, and I did not know what to do. Yet I was not unsettled or anxious. I was more curious—curious to examine this void, this pain emerging from nowhere.

I knew I had to build new skills to examine myself. I had to create a window of awareness. Life had changed its course. My energy had to slowly move from doing to being, from reaction to awareness, from control to letting go, from power to freedom, from fast to slow, and much more. The nature and structure of my energy had to change. I couldn’t find a path, anchor, or mentor. Although I felt lost, I was happy. I was finding joy in exploring this new realm.

Let us look at pain. The name itself makes us anxious, even though it is one of the core realities. We try to avoid pain at any cost, but why? The probable reason is its association with death. Nature created pain to keep us safe from objects and actions of the world which can cause our demise. This follows the foundational laws of evolution:

1. Survival
2. Replication (making a copy of ourselves)

Pain sits in the middle of these foundational laws. It can be a powerful, continuous tool to examine our nature. When in pain, we are already in a state of introspection. This is something you must experience yourself; words alone cannot capture it. If you sit for a long meditation without changing your posture, you will be able to understand this introspective state and the clarity it brings.

I was experiencing the pain. Slowly, my sittings became windows of awareness into the void and the pain. The pain was transforming into a bittersweet joy, much like the ache of lovers parting yet longing to reunite. With joy came flickers of clarity: clarity about the window of awareness, the seer within, the pain and sensation and joy coexisting within stillness. I remembered what Rumi said—Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place.

Pain, when examined with awareness, can turn our sufferings (anxiety, anger, frustration) into a vision. We become a seer who can see life from a window of awareness and is able to rationalize the illusions and reality (if any) of life.

Two writings made a significant impact during this journey: Why I Sit by Paul Fleischman and Freedom from the Known by J. Krishnamurti. More on these in the future.

The key takeaways from these two writings are:

• The act of just sitting slowly creates windows of awareness.
• Pain, when examined with awareness, can transform our sufferings – anxiety, anger, frustration – into vision.
• Our minds are cluttered with the known: power, people, past experiences, memories, traditions, beliefs, knowledge. These are the real burden to freedom.
• Real change emerges from refusal: refusal of the past, of our accumulated knowns. Letting go of the known reveals intelligence, beauty, and non-possessive love.

Today I am at peace. As darkness settles outside my window and the light slowly fades, I find myself holding multiple contradicting truths at once: freedom and bondage, joy and pain, doing and being, parting and contentment. In this slowing down, the ordinary beauty of life reveals itself. Beyond my window, the world still fights for its past, clinging to what it knows. I wonder what freedom could mean for all of us. Yet when I return to this window of awareness, hope stirs. Perhaps one day, more of humanity will awaken to this same stillness. Perhaps our world will finally be free from the tyranny of “Me” and “Mine.” And in that freedom, a window of awareness might open—not just for the few, but for all of us.