Catching Up, Slowing Down

(Please text me if you also didn't know that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were childhood friends.)

I’m letting go of an old, untold resistance, and finally watching all the mainstream movies that everyone was done discussing in 2004.

On a long December plane ride, I watched Forrest Gump and ugly cried. (It’s not me, it's the plane).

I texted my friend from the flight to let him know that he was right and that I should have watched the thing earlier.

And then last Sunday, I watched Good Will Hunting.

The thing about an almost thirty year old movie is that it feels like a time capsule - you sort of vaguely remember it without having quite lived it.

I didn’t know that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were childhood friends.Or that they co-wrote the film. What a gift to create something so beautiful with a friend. Good for them.

Caught up with my best friends right after and expressed my feelings about the movie. They cant wait for me to discover Harry Potter when we’re all fifty.

But the movie left me unsettled.

I felt a pang of envy toward the sheer privilege of Will’s journey. Two grown, white, privileged and accomplished men fall over themselves to rescue another white man. How novel.It’s a type of mentorship fantasy that feels almost laughably distant in the very practical business era that is 2025.

If you pause enough, you’ll notice problems and people quietly struggling everywhere you look. More willing, earnest support could go around.

I suppose one step in the path to self emancipation, in a world where no one is coming to save you, is to drop the woe is me stuff and help other people if we can. So we offer to edit Z’s resume so he can start an earnest job search, and you sit with N to untangle a web of sad thoughts and map a way forward.

You start a type of pay-it-forward chain and trust that it will circle back, eventually.

The idea is to create an opening for goodness.

*

If you look closely, you’ll see that the Moon, Saturn and Venus aligned. Cannot recommend Stellarium enough.

I was in Bangalore for of the past weeks. A real perk of being in the city is that through the day, you have a heightened awareness of the sky.

The sky feels pulled closer to your face. Through phone calls and walks and the daily hummings of traffic, you’re aware of this kaleidoscopic blue screen above you with clouds floating by and the colors shifting. It’s like a trapeze.

I love to take a nightly post shower walk. It is windy in Bangalore, and you can see the stars. ​​January has been especially celestial. Just yesterday, we witnessed a ‘planet parade,’ with Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus aligning in a rare cosmic display. Earlier this month, Venus shone at its brightest, and we watched Venus, Saturn, and the Moon form a perfect straight line.

There’s a quiet homecoming and relief in this. You get the sense that your small, tucked-away apartment life is linked to the grandeur of the universe. Life feels more held together somehow, when you do that.

*

“Is it fun to write every week? What’s the point if it's not fun?”

“Fun? Not always. Sometimes I’m squeamish. I’ll stall. I’ll stare blankly at the cursor. The words fight back.

But it's always satisfying.”

Of late, I’ve been ambivalent about showing up here weekly. It seems my ADHD-hyperfocus is ebbing.

That, and then there’s a certain clear feeling I’m having about writing when I feel moved to, rather than because it's the weekend.

“Is writing still a thing?”

I can understand the question. But it does reek of a certain era in time where writing was considered too sentimental and domestic if you were a woman, and too self absorbed and egotistical if you were a man.

As I see it, writing is the foundation of civilization. If you think of it, writing is everywhere. Especially in 2025. It’s on emails and websites and newsletters and marketing. Even the endless abyss of videos on Youtube and elsewhere really all just start with writing.

I’m thinking about creating without strain and creating with clarity. From a place of quiet, gentle inspiration, rather than from a breathless ‘have to do this’ urgency.

It’s a new year, and I’m changing some things.

Here’s what’s up. I intend to show up here monthly at most and bi-monthly at best, with attempts at more languid, lived-in writing.

I write because I find that it brings me to the truth. And that is often a thing of beauty.