A Quiet Gift for the New Year

The year arrives the way morning light does, slowly, without asking permission, slipping into the room even when the curtains are half drawn. We like to imagine January as a fresh page, but most of us enter it carrying the same old weight: unfinished plans, crowded thoughts, a few tired hopes, and that gentle wish to live a little better than we did yesterday.

I’ve learned that a new year doesn’t need grand declarations. It needs small, honest returns. A pause before the day begins.

So I kept something aside for you, quietly, the way one keeps a warm shawl ready for a cold evening. It’s a small eBook, free, as a thank you for being here and reading along. Not a loud handbook, not a set of rules, and not another thing to “finish.” More like a companion you can open when life feels a bit too fast, when your head is full, or when you can’t quite hear yourself clearly.

Inside, you’ll find gentle reflections, practical prompts, and a few pages you can return to again and again. If you read only a little, that’s enough. Let it meet you where you are on a quiet Sunday, on a tired weekday night, or on a morning when you feel scattered and you want to come back to yourself without force.

Here it is—yours to keep: [Download the eBook here]

And if you do open it, just hit reply and tell me one line that stayed with you. That small sharing always makes the gift feel real.

A Great Quote

“Every time a man gives way to vanity, every time he thinks and lives in order to show off, this is a betrayal. Every time, it has always been the great misfortune of wanting to show off which has lessened me in the presence of the truth. We do not need to reveal ourselves to others, but only to those we love. For then we are no longer revealing ourselves in order to seem but in order to give. There is much more strength in a man who reveals himself only when it is necessary." - Albert Camus

Book Review: “The Living Mountain — Nan Shepherd”

This is not a book about “conquering” a mountain. It is a book about being corrected by one—about letting rock, weather, light, and silence reshape the way you look at your own life. Shepherd wrote it during the Second World War, and yet it stayed unpublished for decades, like a private notebook kept in a drawer until the world was ready to listen.

What makes it rare is its patience. She doesn’t chase drama. She walks, she returns, she walks again—and slowly the Cairngorms stop being scenery and start feeling like a living presence. The mountain becomes less “out there” and more like a teacher that doesn’t speak in words. The sentences carry a kind of clean air; you can feel that she isn’t trying to impress you, she’s simply trying to notice properly.

There’s a tenderness in the way she treats the body, too. Not as something to discipline into silence, but as something that knows—through breath, fatigue, cold hands, and the simple fact of being alive on a slope. A good part of the book’s power is exactly this: it reminds you that understanding isn’t only thinking; sometimes it is walking until you are honest.

What it gives you (if you read it slowly)

• A calmer relationship with time—because the mountain doesn’t hurry, and neither does the best attention.

• A deeper sense of “enough”, not the motivational kind, but the grounded kind that settles in your ribs.

• A strange, relieving humility: you realise you don’t have to make life loud to make it meaningful.

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

About : Every two weeks, I write a short note.

It’s made from simple things: what I’m seeing more clearly these days, one line I’ve carried around, and one book that stayed with me after I closed it. Just something you can read in a quiet corner and move on with your day a little lighter.

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.