For over a hundred days, the pages of this blog have been entirely quiet.
If you write often enough, you learn that silence has its own weight. Sometimes, a pause happens because life gets busy; other times, it happens because life gets heavy, and the words simply need time to settle beneath the surface. Breaking that silence can feel daunting, as if the first post back needs to be a grand re-entrance.
But this week, I’ve been carrying a quiet reminder around in my bag: a copy of Thomas M. Sterner’s The Practicing Mind.
The core philosophy of the book is beautifully simple: true peace and progress come when you stop obsessing over the final product and instead focus entirely on the process. It’s about loving the “doing” rather than worrying about the outcome. Carrying it felt like a silent, gentle nudge. I didn’t need to write a masterpiece to return; I just needed to practice the simple, mindful act of putting pen to paper again.
The last time I had written a blog was on June 14th. Sitting down this afternoon, I found myself thinking of why it took me so much time to bring back my discipline of weekly writing. This time, the hiatus stretched to over 100 days—a stark contrast to the 42-day silence I had broken back in 2022. I realised that I had lost my mojo onto something else other than writing on Saturdays and Sundays. It is true that a break sometimes makes you rustic; you lose out on the momentum, and then you just go with the other things you have picked up along the way. In my case, that is exactly what happened. I noticed that I have increased my social circle interactions in the last 10 months, and I have enjoyed every single bit of it.
Yet, on several occasions during this pause, I had thought of writing about some funny incidents, anecdotes, and other things in my life. It could be as simple as reading a page of a book and connecting it with past incidents from my journey. After all, the three pillars of my blogging experience have always been Comprehension, Introspection, and Connection.
- Comprehension of content through either social or other mediums, or simply the raw experiences I go through in life.
- Introspection—it doesn’t work every single time, but sometimes, at a deeper level, it allows me to truly relate to something within myself.
- Connection, which is more about what I have learned in my life or from books and others, and consciously relating it back to an incident or learning.
Looking for a reset today, those three pillars suddenly came alive in real-time. While carrying this book on deliberate stillness, my digital life took me down a completely different path. I found myself drifting through YouTube, bypassing the endless stream of rapid-fire “Shorts” to sit intentionally with two videos that left a profound, contrasting impact on me.
The first was a look backward—the iconic scene from Casablanca where Ilsa asks the piano player, “Play it once, Sam, for old times’ sake.” When Sam reluctantly plays As Time Goes By, Rick storms over, only to freeze when he catches her eye. It is a masterpiece of unsaid words, heavy nostalgia, and the realization of how much water has flowed under the bridge. It reminded me of how beautiful it is to revisit the things, the places, and the routines we once loved, even if time has passed and things feel a little rustic now.
The second video was a sharp, modern pivot—a masterclass on how to articulate thoughts clearly and command space. The speaker spoke dynamically about concepts like “over-preparing,” standing out, and dropping the habit of hedging our words with phrases like “I think” or “perhaps.” Her message was about intentionality—owning your voice, organizing your expertise, and putting it out into the world with conviction.
Sitting there, looking at the book on my table, the image on my screen, and the open browser tabs, the dots suddenly connected. My pillars were at work. I was comprehending the media around me, introspecting on my missing mojo, and building a connection between them all.
We live in the space between these three things. We carry the quiet, internal desire to practice mindfulness and find a reset. We feel the nostalgic pull of the past and the weekly routines we temporarily stepped away from. And yet, the modern world demands that we step up, articulate our thoughts, and confidently share our voice.
You don’t break a creative freeze by waiting for the perfect moment. You break it by synthesizing the world around you—the book in your pocket, an old black-and-white movie scene, and a piece of modern advice. You close the loop by simply showing up.
The pen is moving again. The practice continues.
NB – I used google Gemini with the prompts and feeding my last 310 blogs to generate this blog.
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