The Lake, The Tree, The Unsaid

A dry leaf fell near my shoe and crumbled when I tried to straighten it.

I was sitting under the banyan again, near the lake. The air had that early-coolness that disappears once the day gets busy. The water looked calm, but it was never still for long, tiny ripples kept appearing, as if something unseen was always moving beneath.

I used to come here often enough for the walk to feel like a habit, not a plan. A few people passed by most mornings. The same quiet nods. Familiar faces that never became friends, and that was fine. The lake held everyone without asking for introductions.

I didn’t come here to think better. I came because my thinking had begun to feel like a tangled thread, pull one end and the knot only tightens. The questions were ordinary but stubborn: Where am I headed? What am I missing? Why does effort still feel incomplete? Why do I keep second-guessing myself after all this time?

Under the banyan, those questions didn’t get answered. They simply lost some of their sharpness.

The tree stood close to the water like it had always belonged there. Its trunk was thick and rough, and its roots sprawled out in every direction, some buried, some exposed, like the tree wasn’t interested in hiding how it stayed upright. The branches didn’t reach for height the way younger trees do. They reached outward, wide and low, as if shelter mattered more than showing off.

When the wind moved through its leaves, it wasn’t dramatic. It sounded like a steady, unhurried presence like a room that stays calm even when you walk in carrying too much. Once in a while, a branch would creak, not as a warning, but as a reminder that age has its own language.

And then there were the small, plain signs of time: a leaf dropping without ceremony, a bit of bark loosening, a root pushing up through the soil as slowly as a thought you can’t rush.

That’s where the tree began to teach me, without trying.

It made me see that life is not one clean motion forward. It is also the quiet work of release. The banyan didn’t cling to what had dried up. It let it fall. Not because it was careless, but because holding on to everything would eventually become a kind of burden.

I used to think strength looked like constant pushing: more effort, more control, more certainty. But the banyan suggested another kind: staying steady while the days pass through you. Doing your work without needing applause for it. Growing in ways most people won’t notice, because the important changes often happen below the surface.

We often chase “growth” as if it must always look impressive. But some growth is private. It looks like fewer explanations. It looks like choosing what deserves your energy. It looks like learning to stop arguing with every passing doubt.

I don’t sit there every morning now. Life shifts, schedules change, and places that once held you gently become memories.

Still, on restless days, I think of that banyan by the water. Not for answers.
For steadiness.

A tree that drops what is done, keeps what matters, and continues—quietly—without rushing the day.

A Great Quote

“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious.
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are,
beneath all the layers the world has placed upon you.”
— Carl Jung

Book Review: “Cairn — Kathleen Jamie (2024)”

I read Cairn the way you notice a small pile of stones on a hill path. Nobody put it there to impress you. It’s simply a quiet sign: someone stood here, looked around, and left a marker before moving on.

That’s the shape of this book too. It isn’t a single long argument or a neat story. It’s made of short pieces notes, micro-essays, little turns of thought placed one after another. You don’t “finish” it so much as you keep returning to it, the way you return to a familiar bend in a walk.

What I liked most was the restraint. The writing doesn’t show off. It watches. It names things clearly, and then it lets them sit. There’s a calm intelligence in that, like someone who doesn’t need to win you over with big lines. The attention is steady: to weather, to bodies, to age, to small domestic scenes, to the outer world that is slowly changing shape.

The best moments are often very ordinary on the surface. A small observation. A passing memory. A detail you might overlook if you were rushing. And then you realise the book is doing something else at the same time. It keeps bringing you back to impermanence quietly, without making a sermon out of it. Not in a gloomy way. More like a clear-eyed way.

One line that stayed with me—because it arrives without drama and leaves a deep mark—goes something like:

It’s simple, almost plain, but it holds a whole shift of life inside it. That moment when you stop thinking you’re the centre of time, and begin to feel how old the world is, how it keeps moving, how it doesn’t pause for anyone, yet still gives you your small window to be here.

There’s also a quiet conscience running through the book. Not the loud kind that lectures. The quieter kind that looks at the damage we’re doing and refuses to dress it up. At points, you feel the weight of the living world—sea, animals, weather, the human habit of leaving mess behind and the writing doesn’t soften it for comfort. It just lets you see it properly.

Now the laggards, because they’re real.

If you like a book that builds in a straight line, this one may frustrate you. The pieces can feel abrupt. You’ll settle into a thought, and it ends. Sometimes you want it to stay longer in a room, but it leaves early.

But if you read it the way it seems to ask to be read slowly, a page or two at a time, it becomes something rare: a book that keeps you honest without being harsh.

In the end, Cairn doesn’t give you “lessons.” It gives you markers. Small stones placed along the path of being alive: here is what was seen, here is what was felt, here is what time is doing to us and to the world.

And somehow, after you close it, you find yourself walking a little more carefully—more awake to what you usually rush past.

P.S.: If this newsletter brought you calm, pass it on to someone who’d enjoy the silence too.

About : Every two weeks, I sit down to write a quiet note: something like a pause in the middle of a restless day. Inside, you’ll find small reflections on change and growth, a line or two that lingers in the heart, and a book that has left me seeing the world a little differently.

Think of it less as a publication and more as a letter with the kind of words that steady us when the world moves too fast.