How to be a person

May 13, 2025

Yearn. There’s no use resisting it. It seems to be something old, inseparable from us, as if the universe began that way, with a kind of wanting. The word desire comes from the Latin desiderare — to await what the stars will bring. Maybe that’s why we look at the vast expanse of elsewhere with such longing. Not so much for what it might bring, but for what it already is. A mother. A sibling. A lover. Anything and always separated. An invisible wire stretches taut across the universe — from us to there, wherever there is. It pulls at the heart. We yearn. Even when we seemingly have everything.
Decide on a point B to go to from wherever you are. Take the longest route possible. Walk it. Look out constantly for someone you could help, or a way to be useful. When you find such a moment, leap at it. Think it is a competition. Think it is a race. Think this and only this is why you woke up today.

Notice what makes you happy. Turn it into a ritual. Give it a name. Assign a myth to it - your own, personal myth. Let it be meaningful only to you. Now practice this sacred ritual every day.

Now and then, sit down on the cold, tiled floor of your bathroom and let the old ache in your chest uncoil. Cry. Cry also to films, songs, books, poetry. And don’t just cry alone. Cry with people. We are the only species on Earth to have emotional tears. Some say we developed this a million or more years ago, because we wanted to express what we felt and didn’t have words for it (still true). Another theory is that we wanted to show solidarity, of how similarly we felt to someone else and didn’t have words for it (still true). Either way, we cry because we care or seek care. And what could be more human?

Listen to the sound of a beep-beep punctuating your day and consider whether it is a tempo or a bird. Learn to distinguish between the two.

Look there, outside your window, bees hover around the yellow gulmohar. The throw on your chair is yellow. The post-its on your board are yellow. The cover of a book someone gifted you is yellow. Look at the way someone tells you they know you. You may be disappointed when you read the book and realise they don’t. But it is still something - this attempt to make sense of someone else. Actually, it is everything, this business of making sense. It is how the bees reach the gulmohar trees - making sense from scent and weather and color and memory. But you were looking at colors and you have a habit of digressing. You want to tie one thing to another thing, like fixing a botched job of someone who put the world on a burner and forgot it off and now everything’s in a million pieces and you’ve made it your life to bring it back together.

There is a person you love. There is a language you know. Take three days or a week, but not longer. Find the words, the exact words, for how they make you feel when they’re around. String them together. Edit. Enunciate. Stretch them like a rubber band between your hands - and test their rigidity. We don’t want them to be elastic. We don’t want words that can bend for many different people or many different scenarios. Once you have this string of words, write them on a page and post it by the slowest means available to the address of the person you love - doesn’t matter if it’s where you live too. Then, randomly, borrow their phone to make a phone call, but go to their voice recorder and record your words on a voice note. Hand them the phone back, but never tell them what you left in it. Put these words also in an email and schedule to send a year later. Finally, when all of this is done, sit down with them, no one around, dusk or dawn or your favourite time of the day, and say what you’ve always wanted to say, like you are a bird and this was the song you were born with.

Return to nature, again and again, no matter how far you go from it, come back. It is an exercise in muscle memory. Return to nature to remember all that you are. Return to write yourself back in all the ways you’re disappearing.

Let some things slip your mind, let some things no longer arrive in the same way anymore. Not all memory will serve you. Some forgetting is survival.

Most days, the spirals are unavoidable. The beautiful thing about having a mind that spirals at a speed we can’t fathom is that we have a body within which it resides. Breathe. Put the ground on your feet. You’re here. You can walk, and jump, and leap. And you’re not sinking, even though your mind has you believe it. Look around your room, then at your body, and only believe what you can see.

Talk to inanimate things. Talk from inanimate things. They each carry time, your life history.

“prioritize being over doing.
live poetically not just productively.
experience life through the senses not only through the mind.” - Esther Perel

I wrote a part 2 of this for Vogue! Read here. 10 new ways to lean into humanness in 2026.