Krithika, my school best friend once gave me a gift I still carry in my heart. On one of my birthdays, when we were still in school, she calculated exactly how many years, months, days, hours, and minutes I had been by then. I remember her sitting so patiently beside me, doing every calculation by hand behind the notebook, fully focused. It felt less like math and more like love expressed in numbers.
It's been many years since then. She now lives in another city, and life has quietly drifted into something unrecognizable from those days when we hid fiction books inside our textbooks, hearts racing, pretending to study while actually escaping into other worlds, praying the teacher wouldn't notice.
And somewhere along the way, I’ve understood something I wish I had known earlier, life only gets weirder. And it is often the very things that happened in childhood that, years later, helps one find their way back to oneself again. Yet somewhere in between, we lose them, only to return to them later, as if they were never truly gone. Like Luna Lovegood once said, the things we lose have a way of coming back to us, even if not always in the way we expect.
Life is often crowded with things that look like they matter the most money, health, work that keeps us afloat, responsibilities that never seem to end, the endless cycle of chores and obligations. Yet the things that truly feed the soul are so often brushed aside as laziness, distraction, or waste. When in truth, they are sometimes the only reason a person doesn’t quietly break inside. They are the thin, invisible line between merely surviving and truly living. And maybe it is only those who have spent long years just surviving who begin to recognize, what it means to actually thrive.
For me, it has always been books, art, and nature. Always nature. The sky I once used to look at with a strange longing, wondering if I would ever truly get to know it beyond a passing glance. The trails I only walked in my imagination. The rivers I had only seen in stories. The beaches where I dreamed I would one day sit for hours, watching the horizon dissolve into the sea, instead of the narrow balconies where nearly twenty years of my life went by.
And the beautiful thing is that, somewhere along the way, I did. I have stood on those beaches I once only wished for. I have walked those mountain trails I used to daydream about. I have sat beside those rivers. I have watched the sky from places my younger self could never have imagined reaching. Every one of those moments felt like a quiet conversation with the little girl who spent years looking out from a balcony, believing there had to be more.
I think that is why I love travelling so deeply. Not because it lets me escape life, but because it reminds me how much life there is. It makes me feel both incredibly small and unimaginably free at the same time. Small enough to let go of my worries, yet free enough to remember that I belong to something so much bigger than them. Every journey tells me that there is always another trail to walk, another river to sit beside, another horizon waiting to be watched.
There is something about that endlessness. That quiet, overwhelming feeling of being just a small, temporary breath in something so vast it cannot be held or understood. Strangely, that realization has never made me feel insignificant. It has always made me feel lighter, as though the weight I carried inside me finally had somewhere to dissolve.
As I turn 31, my only real motto is to find my way back to myself by returning to the simplest things in every part of life. To keep daydreaming. To keep reading books that make me feel less alone. To keep making art that words cannot always explain. To keep seeking mountains that stand in silent, unshakable grace, rivers that keep flowing without asking for permission, skies that remind me how vast the world is, and horizons that whisper there is always more to discover.
Happy Birthday to Me...
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