" Do so much DARK that it's unreasonable for you to not succeed. "
The unrefined version of life is what is actually common for the masses. People judge you by the experiences you share; sometimes they lack clarity, sometimes vision, sometimes both. And somewhere beyond all of that stands a part of me, unfazed by the noise. I never cared much for approval, and I moved on, always looking toward a horizon that seemed brighter than whatever surrounded me in the moment.
My hunger has never had limits. Neither has my search.
In India, we had the Xth Board examinations, and results were declared in a way that now feels ancient—you had to send an SMS to receive your marks. The day the results were expected, I fell asleep in the afternoon.
In my sleep, I woke up, picked up my father’s old Nokia phone, typed my roll number, and sent the message. I remember reading the reply: subjects, numbers, marks, everything clear, word for word.
Then I woke up for real.
And everything happened again, exactly as I had seen it. The same sequence, the same movements, the same place, the same phone in my hand. Picture by picture, like a replay of something already lived.
This was in Gujarat.
What strikes me now is not the event itself, but my reaction. I was completely unfazed. Nothing in life had ever excited me too much, and nothing had shaken me too deeply either. I simply observed and moved on.
As a child, I was always the one who would go an extra mile to help others. I remember a remark written in my nursery report card:
“A special kid who goes out of his way to help others.”
I never understood what my teacher saw in me. I helped people, yes—but it never felt like an ability or a virtue. It felt normal, almost automatic.
Sometimes, remembering that line still surprises me. The core of one’s origin is a strange thing. It reveals itself to others long before it reveals itself to you.
When I was in the 5th or 6th class, living in North India, I began to have a recurring dream.
A man appeared, almost every night, for months. I could never hear his words, yet I understood him completely, as if meaning bypassed language and went straight into the bones. He looked like an ordinary Kashmiri Hindu uncle—slightly balding, quiet-faced, tired eyes.
He showed me fragments of his life, and always, the same end: he had grown weary of living and had taken his own life with a revolver.
I never saw the final moment, only the inevitability of it, the weight of it, the emotional residue that lingered like an aftertaste.
What stayed with me most was not fear. It was the feeling—the guilt, the heaviness, the silence that follows an irreversible decision. To feel that as a child was strange, yet I accepted it without panic.
Later in those dreams, I would see him again, but not as a man. I would see a large python, somewhere near water, in a place where people crossed using a rough ropeway. Years later, when television and National Geographic became common in our homes, I realized that what I had seen resembled a python closely.
I still do not claim to understand what those dreams meant.
But I took three things from them:
- I was not afraid of experiences others might find disturbing.
- Ending one’s life carries a depth of consequence that words cannot express.
-Existence moves in ways that are not always linear or predictable.
I have never thought of myself as different. But I am often amazed at what life has allowed me to experience and endure. Over time, I began to journal, to write things down. Writing felt natural because my experiences never needed exaggeration. There was never a need to invent when reality itself felt so dense and layered.
Stories, I realized, were not something I needed to chase. They were already there, waiting.
In Maharashtra, when we were children, evenings often ended with a small ritual of fear and laughter. My siblings and I would barter horror stories just to gather the courage to switch on lights in dark rooms. They had elaborate tales learned from friends; horror, for them, was entertainment.
For me, it was something quieter.
Somewhere deep inside, a phrase began to take root: “In the end, we win.”
I never knew exactly what it meant, but it felt like a signature written at the bottom of my existence.
One of my earliest lessons in consequence came in the most unexpected way.
As a small child, angry with my sister and wanting revenge without understanding what revenge truly meant, I took a large wooden thorn and planted it upright in the cracked ground of a nearby field. I must have been five or six.
The next day I forgot about it completely.
That afternoon, after an argument, my sister chased me. I ran toward that same ground, thinking she would give up if I went far enough. She didn’t. I ran to the center—and stepped directly onto the thorn I myself had planted.
It pierced through my slipper and went deep into my foot.
Pain has a way of teaching faster than any lecture. That day, the idea of karma stopped being a word and became a memory etched in flesh.
I was not an easy child. I survived things that now sound improbable: a swelling on my back as a toddler the size of a football, a pot of boiling milk spilling onto the floor and burning me when I slipped past my mother in a moment of distraction.
My mother still says that I did not cry the way most children would have.
Perhaps she is right. Or perhaps I simply learned early that pain, like everything else, passes.
Looking back, I do not see these moments as extraordinary or supernatural. I see them as threads—some dark, some quiet, some almost invisible—woven into the fabric of a life that has always felt older than its years.
And the story is far from over.
Because hunger does not fade. And the search does not end.
Somewhere ahead, beyond what I can yet see, there is still more horizon waiting. The spirt woven in the fabric of being-human experiences and enjoys, that's why tagged it under Spiritual Experiences.
Greetings! Love and Light from Aastha Musings~