2024

2024 was a tough year in many aspects. It was also a time for deep reflection, and as a result, instead of lists, I want to share a realization I had towards the end of the year. Hopefully, 2025 will be easier, and I'll return to my usual format.

The realization hit me with the quiet force of obvious things long overlooked. All this time, I had conceived life as a continuous stream, an unbroken thread from birth to whatever lies at the end. A single, fluid narrative that carries us through existence, like an endless process running in the background of consciousness.

This belief sat unexamined in my mind, a background process running without supervision. It shaped how I processed experiences, how I navigated challenges, how I measured time itself. Like deprecated code that no one questions, it influenced every interaction with my own existence.

Then came the shift. Life isn't a river - it's a collection of moments, discrete chunks of existence with clear beginnings and endings. Call them scenes, paragraphs, fragments - the name matters less than the concept. Each segment stands alone, complete in itself, yet connected to the larger narrative. Like packets of data, each containing its own piece of the story, each important in its own right.

What makes a moment? It's a contained unit of experience, bounded by change. Sometimes the boundaries are obvious - a trip, a meeting, a conversation. Other times they're subtle, marked by internal shifts in perception or understanding. These boundaries act like delimiters in a complex string of experiences, creating structure in what once seemed formless.

The beauty of these fragments lies in their completeness. Each holds its own story, its own emotional weight, its own lessons. A difficult meeting becomes a closed chapter rather than a harbinger of endless stress. A perfect afternoon with family becomes a complete story rather than a fleeting point in an endless timeline.

This reframing grounded me in unexpected ways. No state, good or bad, extends forever. Each difficult phase carries its own expiration date. Each joy becomes more precious for its impermanence. The knowledge that "this too shall pass" transforms from platitude to practical truth, a built-in feature rather than an external comfort.

During a trip to London in December, this perspective became my anchor. Each overwhelming day wasn't an endless state but a contained moment. Each period of rest wasn't a failure but a necessary pause between scenes. The anxiety, the exhaustion, the sensory overload - all became a little more manageable when viewed as temporary states rather than permanent conditions.

It's a deceptively simple shift in viewpoint. From the continuous to the discrete. From the endless flow to the carefully bounded. When you can step into this observer's mindset, even challenging times become manageable chapters rather than endless narratives. It's like switching from an infinite scroll to a paginated view - suddenly everything has structure, everything has limits.

Endings become as important as the beginnings. They remind us that change is constant, that no single state defines us. In dark moments, memories of better times serve as proof that good scenes will come again. In times of joy, the awareness of impermanence makes each moment more vivid, more worth preserving. Each fragment becomes a testament to the richness of existence, rather than just a point on an endless timeline.

This perspective offers a new way to process both past and future. Previous difficulties become contained stories rather than recurring nightmares. Future challenges transform into bounded experiences rather than endless threats. The good moments, too, gain new significance - they're not just pleasant interruptions in an endless flow, but complete experiences to be fully lived and remembered.

This isn't an easy mental switch to maintain. The old river-view of life runs deep in our consciousness, a deeply embedded pattern that resists refactoring. But of all the perspectives I've gained in this challenging year, this fragmented view of existence has proved the most valuable. It offers both some peace in difficult times and heightened appreciation in good ones.

Everything ends. Everything begins again. Life flows not as a river, but as a sequence of moments, each complete in itself, each offering its own lessons and gifts. And in this understanding, I've found a new way to navigate the complexity of being. Each fragment of life becomes its own story, its own adventure, its own opportunity for growth or rest or joy.

In the end, this perspective doesn't diminish life's continuity - it enhances it. By recognizing the boundaries between moments, we can better appreciate each one's unique qualities. We can learn to read our lives not as an endless stream of consciousness, but as an anthology of experiences, each worth examining, each contributing to the whole in its own distinct way.

So here's to 2025, a year of moments, of contained experiences, of complete stories. May it bring us all the lessons and joys we need, each in its own time, each in its own way.