For over a hundred days, this blog’s pages 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 Practising Mind.
The book’s core philosophy is beautifully simple: true peace and progress come when you stop obsessing over the final product and 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 wrote a blog was June 14th. Sitting down this afternoon, I wondered why it took me so long 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 broke in 2022. I realised that I had lost my mojo to something other than writing on Saturdays and Sundays. It is true that a break can make you rusty; you lose 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’ve noticed I have increased my social circle interactions in the last 10 months, and I have enjoyed every bit of it.
Yet, during this pause, I thought several times about writing about 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 social media or other mediums, or simply the raw experiences I go through in life.
- Introspection doesn’t work every time, but sometimes, on a deeper level, it lets me truly relate to something within myself.
- Connection 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, I found 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.
The first looked backwards—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 realisation of how much water has flowed under the bridge. It reminded me how beautiful it is to revisit the things, places, and 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 in articulating thoughts clearly and commanding 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, organising 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 making sense of the media around me, introspecting on my missing mojo, and connecting them all.
We live in the space between these three things. We carry a quiet, internal desire to practice mindfulness and 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 share our voice with confidence.
You don’t break a creative freeze by waiting for the perfect moment. You break it by synthesising 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 fed it my last 310 blogs to generate this blog.