When I was seven, a bee flew into my ear. My mother was at work. The driver had the car. My father bundled me into a rickshaw and took me to the nearest hospital. My first time riding one.

My mother being a well-known pediatrician, people knew us. My father, therefore, swept past reception, skipped triage, and took me directly to the head of ENT. The doctor, nurses, and Abbu surrounded me. Someone brought in the instruments. Out came the bee. Dead.

“What!” Abbu said, leaning over the metal basin where the bee lay, as if inspecting a great tragedy. “Ei moumachi to more gese! Ai hai! The bee died?!” The nurses began to giggle. The doctor laughed.

Still reeling from the silence that had taken over me when the bee went in, I tore my eyes away.

“Tsk tsk tsk, bechara moumachi,” my father went on, shaking his head and turning to the room as though addressing an audience. “Doctor, why didn’t you save it?”

They laughed.

He told the story on the way home. Then my mother (who stared at us with her mouth open). Then to just about everyone we knew. By the time the tale of the poor, dead bee — and “the highway to the danger zone” that was my ear canal — spread across calls, across rooms, across town, my father looked quite pleased with himself.

Abbu carried a light breeze. Visibly lightening the load of those around him. Hardly anything phased him. On road trips, if a car came up behind us trying to take over, he’d slow down and wave it past with vehement politeness as though he were hosting them. “Jaan bhai, jaan,” he’d say. “Please, go first. I am in no hurry.” We would laugh uncontrollably.

“Go. You go. Everyone go.”

As Stevie Wonder blared on the radio, he’d take his hands off the wheel — far longer than necessary — and clap in beat, flashing me a broad, clownish grin.

If words of affirmation were your only love language, it might be difficult for you to make a relationship work with a typical Bengali person. We don’t use the words. There are no declarations, no apologies stated plainly, and no habit of thanks. The good is that we learn to detect love expressed in many forms. Plates of food appearing without being asked for. Someone waiting up. Someone noticing when you are not yourself. Cuddling for no reason.

The bad is that a lot gets unsaid.

I wanted to say more to Abbu. I wanted to hear about his fears, joys, anxieties, pain. Whatever lay underneath. What he might have said, if saying it had been something we did.

I resemble my father in ways that were pointed out to me before I recognized them myself. The good looks and the charms, sure. But there were certain habits. An ache for late nights. A preference for people. A passion for music, cuisine, being behind the wheel, and — to my mother’s great annoyance — a sense of humor.

He laughed often and with his whole body. There was very little that appeared to trouble him — and if it did, it did not present itself in ways one could see. I don’t much remember him raising his voice or getting angry.

He traveled, modeled, socialized, went after everything he wanted — including my mother — by virtue of an unforgettable company, cheerful relish, and palpable goodness of heart.

Death is scary because it really is the end of something.

When I was a child, if I broke a piece of china or soaked the carpet in green watercolor, my mother never attached any ceremony of admonishment to it. “So what?” she’d say, eyes bright — seeing no reason to prolong distress. “I’ll get you another one! No need to cry!”

Her logic was — kid’s already crying. Why rub it in?

So I took it to be a rule that things could be replaced. In fact, it extended beyond things. Situations could be altered. There would be another version — another piece of china, another carpet, another school, another boy. Funny how that works. One might say I was spared a childhood of fear and anxiety because I did not get yelled at — the caveat being I believed I could always get a do-over. But death really has no do-over, does it?

My grandmother died when I was five. And while her passing left a hole in my heart the size of the Pacific — I was too young to feel the full brunt of it. She remained available to me in my heart, in memories, in diaries, in photographs. There was no clear point at which she ceased, and naturally, it did not occur to me that there might be.

My father’s death feels more final. There is no other version, no substitution, no adjustment that alters the fact of it. He was there, and then he was not. And I can’t refill this hole with anything, not even all the water in the Pacific.

The law of conservation of energy states that energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form to another or transferred between systems. A fundamental principle of physics that ensures the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant. By that logic, I suppose I must believe that my father is not gone — but altered. Merely undergoing a transformation from one form of matter to another.

The difficulty with accepting this law without doubt is that my father was more than matter. What about his unique energy? The particularity of him? The way he moved through a room, the way we responded to him, the ease with which he carried himself, and made people feel? What about his soul? These don’t feel like forms of energy that can be measured or reassigned.

Of course, there have been attempts to measure such things. At various points, it has been proposed that something leaves the body at death — that it has weight. That it can be detected, if only the instruments were sufficiently precise. (Although what becomes of it remains unsaid). I learned about this for the first time when I read The Lost Symbol, just after becoming a teenager. As Robert Langdon discovered, a man attempted to measure the human soul’s mass using an ultra-sensitive scale, proving that souls do exist. This was not entirely fictional. In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall claimed to have done something similar — weighing patients at the moment of death, and in fact, concluding that the human soul weighs twenty-one grams.

The study of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world — noetic science — studies the phenomenon of thought and consciousness having measurable, physical properties. That what we experience internally might, under the right conditions, register externally.

The question — “do souls exist?” — remains one of the deepest, most expansive, and most persistent inquiries humanity has ever pursued — in nearly every culture, religion, and philosophy.

And do they all have an answer.

The soul goes to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory, depending on how you lived. The soul awaits the Day of Judgment. Before it proceeds to Jannat or Jahannam. Paradise or Hell. The soul reincarnates into a new body. Entering the cycle of Samsara. Entering Nirvana. Extinguishing the cycle of suffering and birth.

The soul was immortal and returned to the realm of ideas upon leaving the body, said Plato. The soul was inseparable from the body and simply ceased, said Aristotle. Materialists dispense with it altogether: the soul, or consciousness, is located purely in brain activity, one that goes with everything else.

We are made of star stuff, said Carl Sagan. And this, too, is true.

Myth and religion have long staked their claim on precisely what science cannot explain — and nowhere is that territory more contested, more crowded, than in the question of the soul. And to that end, there is no shortage of explanations. What is striking, rather, is the great deal of agreement, the consensus beneath all the disagreement: that most of us, however secular our daylight hours may appear, live through our lives carrying some version of all of the above.

But despite all the accounts of near-death experiences — the tunnels of light, the panoramic life reviews, and overwhelming feelings of peace — the position of mainstream science is clean and, in its way, brutal. It doesn’t recognize the soul as a measurable entity, and what cannot be measured does not, for these purposes, exist — marking its existence as pseudoscience. As far as science goes, the atoms that make you up existed for billions of years. They were present at the formation of stars and will continue to do so long after, becoming soil and atmosphere and more stars. It is not nothing. But it is not, by any conventional definition, you.

The rational part of me — one that has grown stronger over the years — silently accepts, without much fanfare, that life simply ends. I try not to sit with this part of me for long. Because, as rational things may seem, and for all its authority, we know only a sliver of the mysteries of the universe, if even that. What we deem “rational” operates on a thin slice of reality. The known is vanishingly small and measurable, and any basis of our rationalization, of what “seems likely,” rests on that narrow ground, and the ground itself, what we know, barely registers against the void surrounding it, what we don’t know. What lies beyond, the unknown, is infinite, escapes both our grasp and our ability to comprehend — and vastly exceeds the known. We simply can’t fathom its possibilities.

So I place my bet there — on the intricacy and the complexity and the scale of the unknown. Until science can rule it out, the matter of Abbu’s soul, and where it’s gone, remains inside the box Schrödinger put his cat in.

A common fallacy in how the trolley problem is understood is the belief that it asks for an answer. It doesn’t. There is no one, universal, correct answer to the trolley problem — and it has never been about that. It’s always been about the reasoning. What it does is expose the moral logic behind a decision. A way of thinking. A hierarchy of values. How do you arrive at your choice? What principles and assumptions do you prioritize? The question of whether you save one life or five is only the decoration on the surface — the reasoning that guides you from underneath as you think and arrive at your answer, your faith, is the crux of the matter.

And so it is with the larger debate. At the end of the day, when debates circulate about human life and death — and we have established that there are several answers to such debates, albeit not one that has been verified — what remains is the individual. The individual, like you and me, retains the power to choose and accept the version that makes the most sense, that you can bear to hold. When life throws a brutal curveball, and the answers suddenly become important, there is no time to settle the debates. One must decide what to believe and why.

Here’s something to believe.

The night I got word of Abbu’s sudden passing, I was sitting in my apartment’s living room in Los Angeles — after a long day of feeling unwell. It was pretty late. I’d stayed in bed most of the day, having woken up with an odd physical weakness. Part headache, part fatigue, part something else. I had no idea what it was.

The news came, and I sat there for three hours. Alone. I muted the television. I didn’t want to call or see anyone. I didn’t want anyone to come over. I didn’t cry. Momentarily suspended outside of time and myself, I wanted only to be with what felt, in that moment, like a strangely tangible thing — numb and nothing.

He had survived it once before, seven years ago. This time, it was not caught in time — the emperor of all maladies. He had relapsed. He had died in his sleep. He did not suffer. And he was surrounded by many loved ones.

He lived in Dhaka, thirteen hours ahead of me. This means that when I awoke that morning, he was just turning in for the last night of his life. What was happening to me that morning, and the rest of the day, finding no reason for how I felt, was suddenly no longer a mystery.

Grief is of this world. Common, recognizable, etched so deeply into our experience that even those who have not yet fully encountered it can understand it. What I was feeling that night wasn’t grief — but a different state of being. I went to a fourth dimension. Or a fifth, I don’t know. But a place I had never been before. I saw in my mind Abbu’s thick, pitch-black hair and a cleanly shaven face with a hint of a five o’clock shadow; in his 60s, yet still a boy. I stayed there for three hours before I came back down.

Once I was back, I did my duties. I made the phone calls, let the tears flow, held loved ones, and was held — all the while, eerily aware that like a shattered mirror that never quite reflects the same way, fifty percent of everything in my life stopped mattering.

I drove around the next day. Stopped at places of worship, asking God to bring him peace. I nibbled for sustenance without appetite. I spent time with my mother, partner, family, and friends.

I hadn’t uttered a word to Abbu, nor he to me. I couldn’t reach him. The way you cannot reach someone who is between places, who has not yet landed somewhere. He was in shock. A bit confused, scared, alone, lost, unmoored— not knowing where he was going next. I knew it the way you know something you have been told. I had been told. I cannot explain by whom.

The day went by. At night, after dropping my mother off at her house, my partner and I went for a walk near my place, along a long walkway neatly lined with manicured bushes and poplars, and bawled my eyes out. Always trying to solve my problems, here was one my partner couldn’t. So he walked beside me. And wept as well.

I complained of the unfairness of Abbu being gone so young. So before his time. At the unfairness of how I wouldn’t get to travel places with him. That all those plans — deferred, postponed — would now remain exactly that. At how I believed my whole life that I could get another shot, and here I was, no shots left. How was that fair, I asked. That I don’t get to go back, now that I know. Have him see me get married. Become a mother. Grow older. Why can’t I have another chance, I asked.

The tears dried as we made our way back toward the car, parked right by a freshly mowed public lawn. A strange tug to feel the grass on my skin came over me, and I told my partner I wanted to lie down.

And so we did. I lay on the grass. Almost midnight. No one around. Up above, no clouds. Black sky. Stars blinking bright. The poplar’s arms, staggering, canopied over us.

I prayed first. But the words soon fizzled. Everything around me ceased to exist. My consciousness might not have much in the name of weight, but it grew an arm. I felt all twenty grams of it tug me out of Earth and onto another plane again — one where it was neither dark nor bright nor loud nor silent.

And then I felt him. Hot tears rolled out of the corners of my eyes and into my hair.

He had been stuck all day in a waiting place. It was Abbu’s Day of Judgment. He was so nervous. He was recalling all the bits he wasn’t proud of, and sweating. He felt lighter — much lighter. A decision was being made about his next home, and he didn’t like that. He didn’t hear the prayers rising from Earth — from family, friends, strangers across four continents who had chosen to hold him in their thoughts.

God heard those prayers assemble into a chorus — as arguments from lawyers in the court of Abbu’s soul. And He had to lower the volume.

Abbu, in spite of the anxieties, felt pangs in his heart, partially not wanting to accept or believe that he would leave the only home he’d known. The wary reluctance, the tinge of anger, but mostly, the fear of the next.

In the end, a decision had come through. And surrounded by new friends, who ushered him inside and took his hands, he crossed the threshold. Ever so slowly. And, at last, he didn’t resist.

As I felt the cool crispness of the grass piercing splendidly into my back, I knew, the way people know their own hearts, that God had decided to send Abbu to Heaven.

Abbu smiled down at me — waving and grinning. That beautiful, boyish, face-splitting grin. Eyes wide. Awash with relief. The worries from the day now gone. “I made it!” He said to me. “I wasn’t sure for a second, but I made it!” He laughed.

“I couldn’t say goodbye to you, Abbu,” I said to him after a beat, once I felt it was appropriate. “I wanted to talk to you, travel with you, be with you. I wasn’t ready.”

“Oh, you can talk to me now, Abbu,” he said. “Any time you want!”

It was common in Bengali culture to address people by the same term you used to refer to them. He came down next to me and lay down. He liked the cold air. He liked the poplars. He liked the night sky.

He admired the garden. “Ai hai, is that a moumachi?!”

Abbu had new abilities now. My head played back a reel of my walk just a few minutes prior to me lying down. He made me relive it — only this time, he was walking alongside me.

“Beverly Hills, huh. Hills to dekhi na!” He said before breaking into a great, big wheeze at his own joke — a shout-laughter followed by a great slapping of the thighs.

I love you more than words can hold, Abbu. I don’t know how to go on living and breathing in a world you’re not in anymore. You were my heart and my soul — the love of my life.

Rest in peace. I know you’re already making everyone up there in heaven smile and laugh the way you did here on Earth.

I will miss you and carry you in my heart every single day. And I will find the courage to go on, and face everything, come what may — even this — by looking it in the eye. Because that’s what you taught me to do.

Until we meet again, my father.
Your daughter.

postscript

If you ask those who knew him, they will tell you without blinking — and mean it in the way one means things that are both believed and wanted — that this man was in Heaven. Please keep him in your prayers for a restful afterlife.

My father would want me to keep doing my work — so here I am, at my desk, doing it.

a postlude to family & friends

Thank you to all who sent prayers, words, tokens, gifts, and so much love over the past weeks, for keeping Abbu in your prayers. I’m blessed to have my family by my side — my wonderful, kind, supportive, caring, loving family. As well as friends, who are nothing short of. Without you, I would have been lost. Ammu, I love you. Thank you for giving me Abbu.

I leave you all with his favorite song.

prelude: if you’re new here, i write essays but i am also an art curator at heart: so read me, and walk through a museum of my favorite themed art pieces curated for you. let me know your favorite.

preamble

the modern twenties are not the roaring twenties. the roaring twenties were loud. the war had ended. four empires had fallen. people went out. they drank. they danced. they spent money and stayed up late. economy soared and excess was embraced. big parties, big swings, big music. cities filled with people and new anxieties. even films were full of wonder. (‘twas the era of the wizard of oz!).

writers took risk because the old rules no longer held. hemingway. stein. picasso. modernism took over art and literature in its pursuit of something new.

and none of it did last. by 1929, it was over.

in contrast, this decade began differently. at the jumpstart, public life closed and pushed everything inward. social circles grew smaller and the culture turned cautious and personal. there was far less appetite for spectacle. and far more for the likes of “minimalism.” the difference is hard to miss.

i made a list of such shifts.

the slow philosophy

a chic guide to current affairs, intellectual intimacy, philosophy, and overlooked works. for those who love secondhand books, quiet hours, and thinking alongside others. personal philosophical essays, weekly reading guides, and monthly postcards.

By tulipe

an emotional weather report of the modern twenties

the decade is past its midpoint and when i look back at the beginning, i’m struck by how much has changed.

i can only start with my own life. i began to observe more closely than ever before. i started noticing thing hanging off trees, the way people spoke, the ceiling. i began to slow read. in putting together my weekly reading guides, i read the papers and journals for hours and tried to pay attention.

i’ve been consuming the classics as well. a lot of postwar classics.

oh, and for the first time since middle school, i started to write everything i was doing down.

so when i looked back at my notes, i tried to connect what i was seeing on the page with what was changing in my own life, and well, society.

several patterns emerged that i think largely capture the current cultural mood. some of it might be familiar from previous decades when i may not have been old enough to track them. but researchers, journalists, and other observers have noted these shifts as well.

read them below.

emotional shifts

many people across communities have been redefining the word “boundaries” for a while. these limits now seem clearer, more personal, and more respected. people are prone to move at their own pace. if people are pressuring others to respond on their timeline, they’re seen as violating other people’s autonomy around time by treating their urgency as an obligation for others. they are imposing their pace instead of respecting yours, creating pressure instead of consent in communication, and mistaking access to you for entitlement to you. there’s a sense of inwardness and personal space in the emotional air. even anxiety has taken on a quieter tone. people are giving themselves more time to understand their emotions, and offering that same patience to others. the conversations around feelings have become less about senseless debate and more about sensible understanding. not everyone is adjusting at the same pace. in response, many find themselves turning inward and even disappearing at will to find that much sought-after steadiness. the patterns:

emotional minimalism
fewer emotional demands necessary to stay steady. e.g. responding to people only when ready and able.

selective emotional openness
people sharing more honestly, but with clearer limits.

chronic tiredness
a steady background exhaustion that carried while continuing to function.

emotional ambivalence
neither despair nor optimism but more a suspension between feelings, something close to neutrality. perhaps even emotional paralysis.

acceptance of limits
people no longer pretending they could keep up with everything and starting to organize their lives around understanding their capacity — without apology.

ambient anxiety without panic
a low, steady unease replacing acute fear.

delayed emotional processing
feelings often arriving weeks or months after the events that caused them.

lower emotional bandwidth
people managing fewer relationships, fewer projects, fewer inputs at once.

social & relational shifts

the way people relate to one another has changed in subtle but meaningful ways. people are adjusting to new pressures, new rhythms, and new understandings of what they could realistically sustain once public life slowly opened again. many found themselves redefining what connection meant out of a desire for healthier, more manageable relationships. social life became less obligatory and more intentional. if you didn’t want to hang, you didn’t. people offered what they could, asked for what felt reasonable, and stayed closer to what was within their capacity. this is similar to the previous list but more outward-facing.

practiced boundaries
unanswered messages, fewer commitments, smaller circles.

reduced emotional availability
less emotional energy to offer

low-intensity friendships
simpler and less demanding, prioritizing continuity over constant closeness.

shrinking social worlds
smaller, fewer, and more intentional.

quitting of social roles
stepped back from identities and expectations they could no longer sustain.

simple refusals
saying no indirectly, gently, or by not engaging

reduced appetite for debate
many opted out of argument, discourse, and constant opinion formation.

decreased tolerance for emotional chaos
volatile dynamics and unpredictable relationships felt harder to justify.

sincerity over spectacle
less performance, more presence — authenticity mattered more than visibility.

cognitive & attention shifts

many people, yours truly included, began experiencing a noticeable shift in how they think, focus, and process the world around them. the absence of sustained focus and attention is becoming impossible to ignore. urgency is a thing of the bygone era. it is becoming necessary to slow down and enrich the inner life again.

attention loss awareness
conscious of how difficult it is to focus

gentler content preferences
shorter, calmer, lower-stimulation

decline of optimization faith
belief in “productivity systems,” hacks, and relentless self-improvement weakening noticeably. people seeing that these were nonsense that the proletariat inherited from the elite — so work is for the working class, and leisure is reserved for the elite class.

return of the inner life
reading, journaling, thinking, and being alone. doing it all slowly.

loss of urgency tolerance
everything feeling “important” became emotionally unsustainable.

desire for predictability
routine, familiarity, and repetition.

preference for continuity over novelty
what is reliable feeling more valuable than what is novel.

non-performative self-knowledge
less interested in explaining themselves and more interested in understanding themselves privately.

self-trust
decisions being made with more personal judgment and less reliance on outside voices.

cultural shifts

mood shaped by what people consumed
people beginning to notice that whatever they took in each day had a direct effect on their mood.

cultural fragmentation
the big collective moments thinned out as people are settling into narrower, more personal worlds of interest. a few shows or stories still pulled people together, but they were exceptions.

controlled visibility
slipping out of view without explanation — and returning without ceremony — turned into a common form of self‑protection in a world that watched too closely.

less faith in being seen
visibility no long an evidence of worth. stepping back feeling healthier than staying in sight.

private meaning‑making
journals, notes, and personal archives became more important than public declarations.

aesthetic & behavioral shifts

once the pace that once felt normal started to feel draining, the push to always do more started losing its appeal. instead, people are focusing on what keeps them steady — rest, comfort, familiar routines, and anything that helps a person stay grounded, protect energy, and stay stable and intact. ambition is becoming more intentional.

rest as necessity
rest lost its old association with indulgence and is becoming the basic fuel people need to keep themselves steady.

protective softness
comfort, coziness, and gentle aesthetics — what were once decorative, are evolving into actual forms of emotional protection.

slowness as relief
moving slowly feels grounding instead of shameful.

regulating nostalgia
turning to old music, films, and memories is helping people regain their footing. analog habits are returning.

energy triage
choices are increasingly made based on capacity rather than obligation or aspiration.

maintenance thinking
care, upkeep, and continuity replacing growth as the primary mode of living.

smaller ambitions
ambition scaling down. goals becoming realistic and tied to everyday life.

choosing steadiness
stability becoming a conscious, preferred value rather than a default condition.

staying intact
meaning moving toward preservation rather than endless transformation. in a culture that once worshipped reinvention, simply staying intact is becoming the main stance.

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i saw a quote recently that made me realize that i have these off days when i can’t write anything — and that’s my cue to read. and i also have these off days when i can’t read anything — and that’s my cue to write. (sadly, i didn’t screenshot the quote but it stayed with me).

this past month, in curating my weekly reading guides, i have been raking the newsstands way more than ever, addictively reading every newspaper and magazine i can find to pick out the best pieces, especially those hiding in the undertow of the internet. naturally, i had careened way out of control with it. but a lot of the built-up delirium from it passed after scribbling into my journal for an hour or two.

but i also have these off days when i can do neither. i am plain exhausted. that’s my cue to get out of the house, saunter in the leeward sides of nature, call friends, drive with them to alhambra for dinner, get my nails done, and tuck into some rosy air-fried potatoes before getting under the covers to watch a slow movie as minnie makes biscuits on my back.

it can also be my cue to go on a date.

in between our individually swamped lives, my partner and i try to date each other a lot. and we’re all tinsel and dimples when we do it. we cook. we camp. we go to the movies. we drive around the canyons listening to podcasts about our civic duties. we walk and gripe about the rudderlessness of the modern city life. we vent profusely over life’s generous conundrums.

pausing life momentarily, whether to date myself or my partner, is great medicine to cure long hours, sleeplessness, and over-exhaustion.

on some days, however, the only way cure is doing absolutely nothing.

this is a story about that.

i miss “nothing.”

remember when we were babies? in bedland? and we did nothing, but lay flat on our small backs, lolling and mewling away in perpetuity and into suspended time — as adults scuttled around us, worrying about real life?

i resent the unfavorable viewing of the leisurely couch potatoes some of us later become.

we spent the formative years of our life watching the day go by. why then, when we’re no longer holding feeding spoons, is it required to retire from all things lackadaisical like there’s something terrible about it?

while the slow philosophy is not the new yorker — yet, wink wink — i, from my dinky apartment in southern california, will say it today for the internet to scoop up — busy is not cool anymore.

if you think the growing concern of performative reading, cognitive decline, death of humanities, and having a boyfriend is bad and embarrassing— i should add to your list that busy is worse.

the culture of busy should be dead, and the busy bee should retire as the busy community’s mascot.

we’re so good as a nation at canceling shabby trends. why hasn’t anyone denigrated the frenetic images of a hustling, bustling, harried, pressed person’s flattened life overloaded with incomplete to-do lists, cortisol, and joylessness?

as this list decries, the point of life is to thrive, be well, and lead a meaningful life. how are we to achieve that if we are to believe all the clowns who tell us that we must kill ourselves to reach the forever-hypothetical “upper” echelons of society and life? (we don’t.)

actually, one has: nyt, david foster wallace’s kenyon speech, this reddit thread, hbs, seneca

i’m not saying that hard work and tenacity are bad things. we need to work hard to fulfill our dreams and feed loved ones. perseverance is what gives life meaning in a world that grants a whole lot of pain to a whole lot of us dwelling in it. camus said that “the struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.”

what i am alluding to are the fallacies of the mindless, performative “busy” that keeps us busy. the kind of busy where you work spills into the holidays — at the beck and call of someone equally clueless — even though it makes no real difference. the kind of busy that relies on bad stress to keep up the illusion of good work, good yield, and good living.

in nicomachean ethics, aristotle teaches us many wonderful greek nouns. in it, schloë, root of “school,” (leisure) means dedicated time towards study, friendship, music, politics, and philosophy. in fact, in politics book viii, he testifies that leisure is in fact the goal of civilization.

today, we borrow leisure from the toils of daily labor rather than labor to allow space for more leisure. this paradox has stretched so far that it’s etched itself into our worldview — to the point that “too much of leisure” is frowned upon, mostly by ourselves.

the point of life is to enjoy it. imagine feeling guilty about it.

in my exaggerated reading sprees as of late, i have actually learned a great deal from writers talking about their writing lives. annie dillard, in the writing life, says that real work is very monastic. meaningful work is lonely, slow, and unspectacular. helen fielding in her recent interview with the paris review cites deliberate, patient observation as one of her most reliable writing practices.

a writer, as with any calling, must live and experience, and be able to draw from them.

as seen last week, literacy is declining. even the rare birds who do read, are now resorting to performative reading. (such is the residue of our vain, image-conscious world). and so, to fight this, it is encouraged, logically, that we read more.

sure, but reading alone will not undo the damage. we also need space — to unwind and be able to think critically.

we need space to do nothing.

every time we have “space,” we can’t use it to read a pdf of one of joan didion’s essays, no matter how essential they are. all “space” can’t go towards throwing a dinner party. all “space” can’t go towards “doing something adventurous” like driving westward to big bear lake for a weekend camp-out to “achieve” being more outdoorsy, or driving eastward to ojai for a hearty visit to an olive oil farm, or flying out to tokyo to experience your own lost in translation and “seeing the world, before you die” — ignoring the reality that you are desperately bone-drained and haven’t slept in days.

to those asking us to read more books to undo the brain decay, all the “spaces” in our lives also cannot go towards finally finishing your dusty copy of infinite jest or divine comedy. undoing the brain-rot also requires a break from reading.

plus, you can’t finish that stuff in one sitting, week, or even month. it takes time to absorb a classic. i don’t know what anyone is talking about when talking about having read a 100 classics a year. it took me one and a half years to read don quixote, because that is the right way to read a fucking cervantes — it’s not emily henry or abby jimenez or taylor jenkins reid. (no hate to those brilliant girls — but i can read them in like, a day. and they agree with me.)

“space” needs to be space. it needs to be allowed to be empty

to learn how to do nothing, we need to learn why we don’t do much of it in the first place.

cillian murphy once said in an interview that his steely disposition makes it seem like he’s living a boring, dull life — which is what he tells people he has. but in reality, he lives an intoxicating, exhilarating life. but he is okay with people thinking otherwise.

why do we have such a hard time with that?

it has to do with our society’s children’s distorted sense of self-worth.

in his 1932 harper’s essay, in praise of idleness, bertrand russell casts long shadows on the “constant activity” as well, especially as a factor of moral worth.

as soon as we stop being lolling babies, we learn to tie our self-worth to external perceptions even before we learn to tie shoes. instead of focusing on what we should be focusing on: self-trust, learning to inhabit life deeply, growing of our own terms and volitions, and deciding which frostian road to take (and knowing that it makes no difference) — we are forced to perform in our own lives for the world to pat us on the back.

your self-worth is inherent. it is not tied to anything else. it is definitely not tied to some random person in society going about the ruddy business of scrutinizing your life, silently controlling you to live up to his dreary expectations. expectations that were, sadly, handed to him as well, to which he too tethers his entire life and sense of self-worth. a putrid cycle.

the only person you need to worry about is yourself. if you can’t respect yourself, your choices and behaviors, especially when nobody is watching — you cannot make meaning and inner joy, no matter how many pats on the back you successfully solicit.

as st. augustine said in confessions: “our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” we can debate what You means here, but fuck it, i say it means you.

incidentally, cillian is way ahead of us.

i began reading the tao te ching some time last year. this 2,500-year-old book is so dense that every time i read one of its short chapters, i am compelled to sit with it for months, legs folded into the padmasana.

taoism is a philosophy of the natural order. as part of nature, we must act in harmony with our earthly realities — not in frantic opposition to them, which is what we do when we act against our inner harmony. wu wei demands that we stop centering our life on the fabricated ideals of ego, fear, and societal pressure and do things that flow well with our souls.

you will know when you are in congruence with the flow of life when you experience a swelling sense of stillness like never before. i felt this tonight at dinner.

i wanted to put this down as an example of doing nothing, so i tried it out: i ordered a cup of hot water (japanese restaurant, thankfully, so it was not weird) and just watched the steam rise.

i watched it billow furiously into the air. i watched its minuscule clusters of bubbles form van-goghish swirls on the surface. i watched as it slowly simmered down, and stopped.

my verdict is: it was profoundly calming, stilling, and necessary.

hard work is not heroic bursts that hurt your body and mind and soul, but ordinary consistency over long time. we are what we repeatedly do. “excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” and we lose a lot more than we gain by following the lore of “be busy.”

as i laid out early on, i have begun to rely on solitude, stillness, and life’s many jollities to achieve what’s important to me: the discipline of living by my own standards and values, being well, and doing well — onto myself and unto others. to do this, i had to unlearn many old habits.

how does one know if one has succumbed to the fallacies of automatic living, aimlessly “doing” so as not to feel useless or (my favorite) “waste your life away?” i have the following theories.

if you can’t be alone — and constantly need to surround yourself with people and the rungs of someone else’s agenda, you have succumbed.

if you feel uncomfortable in the face of peace and quiet — and need to fill every waking minute with something, because the feeling of “nothing” scares you, you have succumbed.

if you feel guilty for having a moment of leisure or dormancy, because you think you should be “doing something important,” even though you’re exhausted — you have succumbed.

and that’s okay. so have we all.

and that’s why i know it’s reversible.

to reverse it, we need to get comfortable doing absolutely nothing. to do that, we must start doing things with no output.

busy minds hate the quiet because it brings up old feelings and unanswered questions. (the current universal reflex to this is scrolling in paralysis). let your body see that you have nothing to fear from unfilled spaces by sitting with silence. fight these false thoughts: “i am valuable and worthy of love only when i’m helpful and useful. if others are unhappy with me, i am not valuable and worthy of love.”

you are valuable and worthy of love simply because you exist.

while you’re doing nothing — which, as we can now say, is actually everything — it’s okay to feel guilty. let your body see that you can survive it. don’t justify leisure. let it exist as a neutral thing. remember, this is the goal of civilization. and you are an important member of our civilized times.

let’s kill busy — both the mechanical, exhibitionist busy of the weekdays as well as the “obligatory”, if-i’m-not-partying-i’m-not-living-even-though-i’m-zonked, and my-great-american-novel-isn’t-going-write-itself busy of the weekends.

let’s normalize doing nothing — i promise you, you will notice a difference — which is what i’m going to do next, as i’m exhausted again. i can’t wait to go stare at the ceiling.

20 ways to do nothing:

- stare at the ceiling, no phone, no timer, no intention

- sip your tea, no need to reflect on life

- go for a walk, no step goals, no podcasts, no new music friday (leave your phone home)

- lie down on your back, on the floor

- look out the window and just watch

- pet an animal just because, not for emotional processing

- eat a snack, and do just that, no multitasking

- hurkle durkle: roll around in bed for no reason, stretch in all the ways you want

- pick up an object and feel it

- daydream, don’t try to turn it into a novella

- close your eyes and stay awake

- watch steam rise from water <33333 (i did this today as research for this essay and it is officially my favorite new hobby. it’s beautiful. it’s glorious. do it.)

- do a chore but stop halfway

- sit in your car after parking (if it wasn’t clear already: scrolling or being on your phone is the opposite of doing nothing)

- wait by the microwave as it finishes (not directly in front of it!)

- make custard (pour whisked yolks, sugar, and salt into steamed milk. stir for 8 long minutes. no stepping away. vanilla after)

- make béarnaise sauce (requires full attention or the sauce breaks. whisk tarragon, yolks, vinegar, salt. place atop a water bath. whisk in butter — one cube at a time)

- let yourself be bored for 5 mins

- listen to a song, do nothing else

- rest your head in your hands, like you’re waiting for nothing

- let a thought pass without following it

- sit in silence with a friend

- if you’re listening to someone talk, don’t nod or respond: listen

Share

the em-dashes are my own:

i’ve been hearing lots of stories about people criticizing the criticism of art:

“you don’t have to listen to her”
“just don’t watch it”
“why does it need to be perfect, why can’t it just be fun”
“you’re talking about her — she’s already won.”
“why can’t something just be?”
“the artist should be able to do whatever they want.”

i believe we behold above the many faces of fallacies.

a dear friend of mine who’s a professor at a college in texas and a upenn alum captured my feelings towards it perfectly:

“something is always worth writing about if you have thoughts and analysis. the ‘am I making a mountain out of a molehill’ conversation, imo, is relevant only if you’re trying to cause outrage. in this polarized environment people think you must either love something or be outraged by it, so people sometimes react negatively to good faith criticism. we gotta push back and keep nuance alive!”

inspired by this, i want to write about the concept of keeping nuance alive by deep -diving into the many pushbacks of the “art-police police” or the “critique of the critique” if you will.

“you don’t have to listen to her”

criticism is an integral part of art’s existence. interpretation and evaluation of art — even harshly — is part of the artwork’s life. anyone who might have studied art history would know how essential a part it is. the first lesson almost always asks: who decides what art is?

the typical answer is: “art is art when someone says it is.”

which is what someone said to me when i was giving an art history presentation at the getty museum to a group of adult visitors.

in answer, inspired by the movie mona lisa smile, i pointed at the piece of art we were looking at, and said, “this is art.” they laughed but had they seen the movie, the response should have been: “well, it matters who says it!”

having taken numerous classes in art history and english, i’ve learned that the relationship between art and audience is far more complex than people admit.

thinkers like stuart hall — founder of british cultural studies — and hans robert jauss, pioneer of reception aesthetics, both emphasized that audiences are not passive recipients but active interpreters, their readings shaped by their unique cultural, social, and historical contexts. therefore, critical engagement with art is not parasitic but constitutive of art itself.

this framework of literary criticism is called reception theory. it reminds us that a work of art is never complete until it is received. meaning does not live inside the artwork alone, but emerges in the space between creator and audience — through our expectations and cultural contexts.

these responses are extremely important and help keep the artwork alive, often, as you’ll read below, by reshaping its meaning through the ages.

by releasing something publicly, the artist implicitly meant to invite engagement, including any form of dissent that might give them insight into the exact impact of their work.

think about it: if you wrote a book — would you want someone to own it and never touch it, never draw on it, never write on it? wouldn’t you want someone to engage with it fully, piece it apart? annotate it? underline it? highlight it? talk to you, the author, in the margins? agree with it, disagree with it, engage? that’s an artist’s dream.

that so many people are guilty of trying to protect an artist from that — might actually be a mirror to some form of unconscious insecurity or the like. maybe the like of parasocial relationships. i don’t know. and i’m not interested in that.

what i’m interested in is dissecting what happens when we stop people from criticizing altogether.

here’s the iconic scene that I had the privilege to relive, btw:

a case study in reading and misreading

stuart hall describes all media as encoded with ideology by its creators, and then decoded by its audience.

the audience’s decoding can take one of three forms:

• preferred reading: agreeing with the creator’s intended message

• negotiated reading: partially agreeing, but adapting to personal context

• oppositional reading: understanding but rejecting the intended message

so if the artist encodes certain meanings into their work — what hall called the “preferred reading” — fans who align perfectly with that message adopt that unquestioningly. meanwhile, critics may take a “negotiated” or “oppositional” stance. the friction between these readings is not a bad thing, and in fact, it can prove really important.

take the following lyrics that a brilliant friend mastering in psychology at pepperdine pointed out to me:

“did you hear my covert narcissism i disguise as altruism like some kind of congressman?”

anti-hero
taylor swift

now, her saying she’s a narcissist is likely meant as a witty confession about ego and self-loathing — and at first glance, harmless. but this flirts with a psychological term that actually describes real patterns of manipulation and emotional abuse.

many listeners, especially younger ones with limited knowledge, might repeat it, never understanding the term’s gravity, even in their own lives.

it risks trivializing a serious dynamic many people have suffered under. this is where oppositional or negotiated reading can become useful. words from pop culture travel, and it’s important to learn how they teach audiences what to normalize or mock.

when I first heard the song, I glossed over it and would not have noticed until someone critiqued it.

jauss explains this with the “horizon of expectations” in his 1982 essay toward an aesthetic reception.

audiences bring their own cultural context to every work. what was once interpreted one way can evolve — or devolve — over time.

this explains why when i was a kid, i loved sixteen candles and now realizing as an adult its casual depiction of sexual assault culture and racial stereotype.

i’m not boycotting but pointing out that we can be nuanced enough to be honest about things and still indulge in whatever we feel like indulging in.

art is important. it influences how people form ideals of social class, gender, justice, and morality.

caustic or not, criticism helps reveal the contradictions and social truths embedded in art. it does not need to be mean-spirited (although i concede that plenty of people are). but a true purveyor of art compares, contrasts, connects — traces effect.

let’s say someone outright “hates” a taylor swift album. that too can teach us something, if they can articulate why — let’s say, through feminist music theory, class analysis, and narrative analysis. this allows us to learn and think deeply about the sociology of contemporary music, and how it affects our lives.

criticism is what keeps those horizons shifting, helping society recalibrate meaning as our values evolve.

“just don’t watch it”

bell hooks, in reel to real: race, sex, and class at the movies (1996), warned that refusing critique reinforces dominant ideologies.

likewise, laura mulvey’s landmark essay visual pleasure and narrative cinema (1975) shows how analysis reveals the hidden power structures within film.

to tell someone, “just don’t watch it” assumes disengagement is the simple antidote if something’s bothersome. why not explore why it is so?

silence can allow all sorts of problematic ideas to circulate unchallenged.

if we love an artist’s work, why be afraid to open it up to scrutiny? do we worry someone disliking what we love means they dislike us?

we must not fold an artist or their work into our identity — when we don’t know the artist. we may not like them if we did. (think ellen degeneres — a friend of mine developed a stomach ulcer working for her team after being a long-time fan.)

thoughtful criticism is one of the highest forms of engagement. it shows the art resonated deeply enough to provoke discourse.

so we must do our artist a favor, and let the criticism flow, and understand the lived experiences that shape it.

we all see the world differently, and intelligence lies in recognizing those perspectives. cultural ecosystems depend on this diversity.

without critics, everything collapses into fan culture — or worse, marketing.

“why does it need to be perfect, why can’t it just be fun”

fun and perfect are not opposites. albums and movies have managed to be both — fun yet formally tight, thematically rich, and morally aware.

do people truly love imperfection in the spirit of wabi-sabi? or are they uneasy when someone else notices what they chose to ignore, or didn’t notice?

aristotle’s poetics reminds us that pleasure in art arises from structure, catharsis, and coherence — not in spite of them.

to dismiss the need for perfection in favor of “fun,” and to frame it as “you’re the serious one, i’m the fun one,” absolves artists — and ourselves — from artistic discipline.

we often confuse carelessness with authenticity. scrutinizing the quality of art can help us recognize if we’re being fooled.

lastly, is fun a shield for everything? bell hooks and angela mcrobbie have both written about how “fun feminism” or “pop feminism” often masks regressive messages under irony.

take emerald fennell’s films:

i’ve never liked them and i can tell you in details why. for one, she is great at hiding ethical incoherence with style and exposition. i’m not bothered by any latent conservatism or classism that might be in her work so much as by her formula of “here’s a list of Crazy Things Happening” passed off as art.

critics should always ask: fun for whom? fun at whose expense? fun toward what end?

thinking is joy. by hearing sides — we can keep nuance alive.

“you’re talking about her — she’s already won.”

this is a common fallacy — as provoking discourse does not mean artistic success.

the idea that “starting a conversation” equals victory — no matter the substance of that conversation — bears no philosophical truth. in fact, in media studies, this is known as the “discourse fallacy”: mistaking attention for merit.

“starting a discourse” can mean you’ve made something polarizing, not profound. controversy is not the same as meaning.

to put it bluntly: if all that matters is “we’re talking about it,” then we’d have to call every propaganda film and viral scandal a masterpiece.

when a pop album floods social media, that’s proof of visibility in an attention economy — not of artistic depth.

what matters isn’t whether discourse happens — but what kind. one can deepen understanding and challenge assumption, and refine taste. the other can be a commodification of outrage, as my friend pointed out early in the essay.

we’re not playing someone’s marketing game by engaging critically — but rather exercising cultural literacy.

hate, actually

to think critically is not to be cruel. it’s to care about what we consume and what it says about us.

my friends and i are passionate about art, and the conversations it inspires. this is a defense of that passion.

to engage deeply with what we love and dislike is respect — for art, intellect, and the world it mirrors.

the idea that silence and uncritical enjoyment are virtues, deserves critique itself.

study or read more on this topic

p.s. you can find copies of the books at dear jane bookshop. proceeds from purchases go towards supporting independent bookstores.

books:
hans robert jauss, toward an aesthetic of reception (1982)
bell hooks, reel to real: race, sex, and class at the movies (1996)
angela mcrobbie, feminism and youth culture: from jackie to beyoncé (2009)
theodor adorno, aesthetic theory (1970)
henry jenkins, textual poachers (1992)
john fiske, reading the popular (1989)
aristotle, poetics (penguin classics)

essays:
stuart hall, “encoding/decoding” (1980)
laura mulvey, “visual pleasure and narrative cinema” (1975)
roland barthes, “the death of the author” (1967)

documentaries:
the great hack, american factory, the act of killing, the century of the self, hypernormalisation, the social dilemma, manufactured landscapes, exit through the gift shop, the four horsemen

films:
the truman show, perfect blue, tár, they live, parasite, black swan, network, fight club, velvet buzzsaw, the lives of others, american psycho, the king of comedy, sorry to bother you, her, ex machina, the social network, dr. strangelove, black mirror

Prelude

Our places of dwelling are ordinary places we pass through every day, and they shape our nervous system far more than we notice. For instance, I’m always hyperactive, have too little time and too much to do. I have too many ideas, too many passions, and too many things.

Collecting books is one such passion, and one of my oldest. And I have always had more space for them in my heart than in my shelves. Collecting diaries is another — found scattered, doodled, scribbled in, or untouched. Stationary is fated to become decorative trinkets or fillers for storage boxes. Clothing stick around for nostalgia, and bottles of lotions — each designed for a different emergency — is a habit inherited from three generations of women in my family. As for the necessities — they occupied a puny piece of the pie.

In essence, I had a nonexistent relationship with empty spaces.

Before continuing, a disclaimer feels necessary.

There is a certain well-intentioned group that considers tidiness a personal identity marker. By no means am I joining any club of condescension.

There is nothing virtuous about tidiness when it is only possible with the existence of time, stability, money, bandwidth, or number of interests. Moralizing orderliness is self-righteousness — and worse than clutter. Einstein, Freud, Woolf, Twain, Edison, and more — lived among materially dense personal spaces. Orwell and Jobs on the other hand — didn’t. It’s a way of life. When one has too much going on, it shows — and when one doesn’t, maybe it doesn’t. Myers Briggs have shown both introverts and extroverts to be equally effective leaders, albeit with starkly different styles and approaches. No one way is superior.

My hope here is a pragmatic but philosophical think piece on spaces. I know organized souls whose lives are swollen with belongings. This too can ooze chaotic energy when encumbered with excess and no room to breathe.

But I am not interested in a discourse of organization. What I am interested in is the notion of befriending emptiness in life — a serendipitous philosophy I sowed into my life not long ago.

Last year, I moved into a small apartment in a new building with tons of existing amenities and got rid of three quarters of my possessions. It felt like three quarters of stress had left my body. Six months later, nearly everything in my apartment was something I needed and all else had gone to Goodwill.

Maintaining empty spaces is a difficult feat for most given the relentless accumulation of life — but the benefits are hefty enough for the effort to be justified. That said, it must come after an understanding of felt empty spaces. That’s why I refer to it as a philosophy rather than a process.

intertext

Japanese culture fosters a deep connection between empty spaces and a functional lifestyle. That’s where Zen Buddhism and Marie Kondo hail from. Having had to study them this past year, here is how I fell in love with emptiness at my new place:

1. Clear one surface and keep one thing on it

Put back one object that sparks joy — a lamp, a book, a candle. Notice how the room exhales. And don’t forget to exhale with it.

Thoreau warned, “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

2. Leave space for ma

Choose one wall, shelf, or corner and let it stay completely blank for a week.

The Japanese concept of ma means gap, pause, or space — it’s the interval that makes form possible. And it’s absolutely essential.

A blank wall, an empty corner, a bare stretch of dresser: allow a room to breathe.

3. Remove “work” from bedroom

Take a basket and remove anything that feels like work and asking something of you — laundry, unopened mail, gadgets.

Every object whispers and demands: dust me, fold me, fix me — pick me, choose me, love me.

Even if you ignore it — it’s still a stimulus.

4. Choose your main characters using the danshari method

To create true intimacy, let a few objects stand out — but choose the objects wisely. They must be meaningful objects. On any surface, allow only three objects at most. A lamp, a plant, and a book are enough. Let those be the main characters in your room.

In The Great Gatsby, the mansion overflows with silk, wine, and gold — yet no one inhabits it.

Abundance without intimacy is another kind of emptiness altogether — not the kind we want.

In Lost in Translation, the sparse Tokyo hotel rooms — one bed, one chair, one suitcase — create an intimacy through absence, without which, the characters wouldn’t find themselves.

Like people, things have energy and can also be wrong for you. Try the Marie Kondo method and keep what sparks joy.

5. Embrace wabi-sabi

Let one imperfect object remain on a cleared surface. Make sure it’s meaningful to you. Give it room to matter.

This is a great guide for what to decorate your bedroom with. Wabi-sabi tells us incompleteness and imperfection can be beautiful — so when picking an item, don’t be afraid of a chipped mug or a frayed blanket. These only shine when not drowned in excess.

postscript

As someone whose space, for the better part of her life, looked like Virginia Woolf’s desk piles — I felt that I was well-positioned to write this. I am understanding of chaos. The principle of doing things at my own pace, one thing at a time, has saved me and made it possible to experience the sweetness of emptiness.

It doesn’t seem feasible to adapt any philosophy of life overnight. We’ll have moved mountains if we begin with one corner. As Daoism says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

I continue to regularly remove my possessions — and eagerly await, with butterflies in my stomach, what it creates. It’s a love affair I did not see coming and intercalating it into my life has been a delicious slow burn.

the slow philosophy

a chic guide to current affairs, intellectual intimacy, philosophy, and overlooked works. for those who love secondhand books, quiet hours, and thinking alongside others. personal philosophical essays, weekly reading guides, and monthly postcards.

By tulipe mctipton

One time, while my mom was away for a meeting, a diabetic patient of hers sat in her office for a routine administering of an injection, refusing to let mom’s new assistant touch her.

“I want her to do it,” she wailed, pointing at me.

I was seven.

But I had seen my mom do it a hundred times so I picked up the syringe and gave the middle-aged woman her shot right in the belly. She departed radiant while mom’s assistant scowled at me like I’d just shoved that injection into his dignity!

My earliest childhood memories are of hospitals, clinics, and chambers. No matter how many good nannies with great recs came her way, my mom refused to leave me with any. Every nanny sucked, according to Mom. Many thanks to this logic, I grew up in the shadow of her vocation as a doctor — not any doctor, but the chief of nutrition of my country.

I curled up in the corners of her offices, conferences, and chambers, the one at home even named after me. I sucked on lollipops and hung out with technicians in radiology and sonography rooms like they were friends. I watched hypnotically as centrifuges spun, and listened to pharma reps fight for their lives to sell hot new drugs to anyone with a lab coat — even me, whenever I slipped one on. (The coats flung off my shoulders and dragged behind me, but they didn’t seem to care!)

Out of that jumble of exposure — of being among people’s life-long commitment to service and care — I’ve carried certain lessons.

I’ve had a chance to reflect on those years recently — and from that, here are five needs that I’ve identified that we all share, but rarely discuss:

Trust & safety

I learned early that medicine wasn’t always unanimous — approaches to healing varied widely and so did the philosophies behind them. (And to think they all learn the same things in medical school!)

But I think one thing is universal: most people, more than anything, want to feel safe. They want to trust someone. In fact, they could get extremely sick and tired of not having those things.

Most of my mom’s patients were children — kids used to being told to zip it by every adult in their lives: parents, teachers, doctors, priests.

But inside Mom’s chamber, they stood tall and proud, because there, their voices mattered most. She listened to them with the same seriousness adults, for whatever reason, only seem to reserve for each other. (Honestly, a livelong child at heart, she probably genuinely connected with them more than she ever did any adult).

This led to incidents like this:

Parents would come to her complaining about their kids — that they listened to no one, were troublemakers, and ate nothing at all!

Within weeks, they would watch — in mathematical confusion — as those same children devoured full plates three times a day on their own, without a prescription.

One of the things Mom advocated for was never speaking about children in absolutes — she told parents, in front of the kids, “I don’t believe you. She doesn’t seem like she’s like that.”

Instead of “she never eats,” she had parents try: “she’s just a discerning eater with a strong sense of taste and prefers well-prepared meals.”

Under this newfound, dignified identity, most kids changed their behaviors almost overnight.

The lesson I take from this is that we all want to feel safe so we can finally speak and live our truth.

The woman who once asked me to give her an injection wasn’t looking for clinical skill but trust, and she couldn’t find it in the nasty eyes of my mom’s assistant. The kids ate and stopped being trouble when they felt safe to be someone — not boxed in.

Not to say this stuff is that easy. Quite the opposite in fact — it’s extremely difficult to build safe, trusted environments. But it feels worth the try.

Giving freely

Mom once had the audacity to offer free annual check-ups to every child in my school. So one modest morning, our home filled with children for an entire day.

I remember sitting on the cool floor tiles of the waiting room, watching classmates file through — playing with those waiting their turn — with my Barbies, Play Doh, clothes.

Truth is, ours was always a full house. My uncle, aunt, grandmother, and feral little cousins all lived with us under one large roof. We shared meals and pants.

Whenever my mother brought home a toy or a treat, she always brought three — one for each child.

My friends drifted in and out of our home as well. They raided my bookshelves, closets, and kitchen. Nothing was truly off-limits.

For me, there was no point in owning something if I couldn’t share it.

Years later, reminiscing about my childhood made me realize that the most memorable moments of my life were never about what I’d received but what I gave away: the lollipop surrendered, the book lent, the toy handed over.

This is the paradox and the privilege of generosity: in giving, we are enlarged. What we extend outward circles back, to make us more whole. Not to bash altruism with selfishness but gifting and giving freely is sometimes the truest joy.

Taking one for the team

There are times when generosity requires gall. It requires standing in the way of harm.

Mom wasn't just their doctor — she was a companion, a trusted friend. People came to her when they needed any kind of care — not just physical pain.

Once, in high school, a close friend of mine had a breakdown, came to our house, and didn’t want to go home. We knew her parents would be furious, and unleash hell. But we didn’t pressure her to leave and she stayed for as long as she needed. My mom gave her food, and didn’t ask a single question.

When it was time, we drove back.

Her mother was waiting, purple-faced — and understandably so. It wasn’t the mom’s fault — my friend had a breakup and was feeling extremely down, and uncomfortable talking to her mom.

My mom took the brunt of her wrath — standing quietly in the driveway, letting the woman vent her rage, trying to calm her with no real success.

I remember even our chauffeur, who usually kept his distance, went out of his way to comfort my friend.

Deep down, humans crave the chance to be able to bear burdens for another — to stand in the line of fire so someone else does not have to. She had honored us by choosing to seek our help, trusting us with her pain — not the other way round.

Even when I was very little, I considered being a sister to my little cousins (as hellish as they might have been) one of my most important identities, and it often required sacrifice: standing up for them when they were bullied, taking the blame when they were scolded, and celebrating their joys as though they were my own. And it was an honor. To most of us, it’s a privilege.

Generosity towards yourself

Of course, it’s never a good idea to get carried away. Generosity carries risks. My mom was swindled out of money and time by more than a few scoundrels who mistook her conflated benevolence with naiveté.

One time, a pharmaceutical executive persuaded my mother to become an early investor in his low-cost drug factory. Finding the concept noble, she trusted him, and instead of giving her the promised shares, the swine disappeared with the money.

One time, my Mom won an award from Europe for a research study — and another doctor in her department took full credit for her work and declared himself the recipient. Man literally stole her award.

Understandably, Mom was devastated.

Things will happen. That’s Murphy’s law. The Swiss Cheese Model. You just have to weigh the risks, find the courage, make the best choice possible, and do what you need to do.

Mom ate the frog early. And she simply wears her stories as warnings for those who follow.

I too learned from her plenty — being far less prone to those pitfalls and maintaining stronger fortresses.

Oh, and that doctor who stole her award? Mom pulled every string, went to Europe, revealed the truth, and brought that award back in her own name — publicly humiliating the thief.

Generosity does not mean being pushed over.

Impactful work

Alongside her patients, my mother was also a policymaker. From the age of four, I traveled with her across continents in my frocks - sitting amongst health ministers, scientists, and advocates. I attended summits, epidemiological institutes, and sprawling bureaucracies all over the world.

It’s only recently that I’ve understood the indelible imprint those trips left upon me.

For instance, I saw that most people in the highest echelons of public policy didn’t exactly “mind” the politics — they knew they were fighting against it for a cause. They spoke of their will and endurance against red tape, long hours, and endless obstacles, with pride — because they believed their work mattered.

I remember visiting the rice museum in the Philippines when I was eleven. I hung out with a group of scientists whose life’ mission was to promote better rice farming practices.

I know now why rice was so important to the health culture conversation. In much of South Asia, polished white rice is the overwhelming staple — but it filled plates, not nutrient needs. Children go blind from vitamin A deficiency.

My mother worked on a nationwide campaign to change that — distribution, education, and policy — alongside many stellar colleagues.

Despite the remarkable obstacles they endured for a campaign of this stature and scope, ultimately, their hard work paid off — and from what I understand, blindness rates fell to nearly zero at the end of the campaign’s run.

I was there through much of it but obviously didn’t fathom the scale of it until much later. But even today, impact drives me.

If I can’t see the ripple of what I’m doing — the relief it brings, the safety it creates — I lose interest.

My mother worked grueling hours in one of the hardest fields imaginable — gave her blood and sweat. Yet, she’s the happiest person I know. She’s lived a life of meaning, and still does in retirement. People want meaningful work and are overwhelmingly willing to endure the pain for it.

Ways to carry it

We all want the same things and here are ways to make them a part of our lives:

• Build safety before you offer solutions. People open up when they feel held.

• Give freely, even in small ways. A listening ear, a seat at your table, a word of encouragement — generosity expands us more than it depletes us.

• Stand in the line of fire sometimes. Take a burden so someone else doesn’t have to.

• Be as generous towards yourself as you would a loved one. Protect your time, energy, and dignity. Generosity does not mean you have to erase yourself!

• Seek work that ripples. Aim for work that lightens someone else’s load — even in small, invisible ways.