Seven mornings of not-drowning

None of what I wrote in July was about work. And all of it was.

I an employee for most of my day — mostly alone, mostly as the person doing the thing rather than the one announcing it. Nothing I published last month said so. Yet reading it back, every piece was a leadership note in personal clothes. Because I have stopped believing there are two selves in here. The way I watch my own mind on a Sunday morning is the same way I lead on a Tuesday. Same seat. I never learned to manage people — I learned to watch myself, and it turned out to be the same skill pointed outward.

The gap between a thought and what I do with it is where all of it happens. The correction I don't blurt. The decision I don't rush. The meeting I don't take over. Everything below was me practising that gap, without once calling it leadership.

I did not plan a theme for July. I only noticed one at the end of it.

Every piece I wrote turned out to be about the same thing — watching. Not fixing, not deciding, not defending. Just watching. Seven mornings, one practice, written down as it happened.

It started with an admission. I am not quite Ashtavakra — not an Observer in the full sense he means it. I am in an observer-style mindset, and that distinction still matters to me. I judge less than I used to. But I judge.

Then the drift. A heavy film the night before, a resolution to not talk about it, and within fifteen minutes at the office I was talking about it. By evening I saw it. And that seeing was the point — I had only drifted, not drowned. The practice is not stopping the drift. It is shortening it.

Somewhere in the middle, a softer observation. A colleague kept arriving at my exact conclusions without us ever coordinating. A former MD who calls with no agenda. I think what a kindred spirit recognises is not the smartness or the experience — it is intent with no calculation behind it. Doodh jaisa saf dil.

The hardest one to write was about my daughter. She asked to sleep in on a Sunday. The thought that she'd waste her day was right there in my mouth, and I walked out without saying it. That silence was not indifference. I took it as an instruction to hold the interest, not hand it over. She woke at 12:30. I served her lunch on her bed.

Then I lost it. For five days I wasn't watching — no observer, just the chatter running the show. It came back in a half-asleep moment, and two effortless days followed. Practice, not achievement.

I needed to convince myself it wasn't just spiritual talk, so I went looking. It turns out the witness is not unscientific. INSEAD found it cools the sunk-cost fallacy. Harvard found it thins out biases in 19 of 22 traps. Patanjali and Kahneman describing the same thing in different words.

And it closed on a walk. The mind has no fixed address; the body has only one, and it is here. Action stops thinking — though I still can't tell you whether the walking stopped the thoughts, or the thoughts had already gone and the walking simply carried on.

That was July. I am still not watching most of the time. But the gaps are getting shorter.