PROMPT: Best

Daily writing prompt
What’s the best local dish you’ve ever eaten while traveling?

I’m not big on tabulating the “best” this or that. It feels like it hamstrings experience and puts one in a comparison mode in which one is always living half in the past. If it looks good, eat it, and then move on to the next experience — giving that experience your presence.

FIVE WISE LINES [August 2026]

Photograph taken in the desert outside of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

One can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge,
but one cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.

Michel de montaigne

Nothing is lost if one has the courage to proclaim that all is lost and one must begin anew.

Julio Cortázar

Experience is not what happens to you,
it’s what you do with what happens to you.

Aldous Huxley

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.

T.s. Eliot

If we do not possess a ‘sense’ for a given energy -form,
we do not experience its existence.

Robert E. Ornstein in The psychology of consciousness [As quoted in the Bihar School edition of Hatha Yoga Pradipika]

PROMPT: Life-Changing Tip

Daily writing prompt
If you had to give one life-changing tip, what would it be?

Recognize that your experience of the world is not the world, itself. You have tremendous (potentially complete) control over the former, but virtually no control over the latter. #SakshiBhava

Know the Weather [Free Verse]

PROMPT: Habit

Daily writing prompt
What’s one habit that has improved your life the most?

Getting up every morning.

PROMPT: Chaos

Daily writing prompt
Is a little chaos actually good for us?

A little of every kind of stressor is good for us. A human is a system of antifragile systems. Our bones get denser if we load them. Our muscles get stronger when we cause microtears in them. And our minds can cope with a wider variety of experiences when exposed to a wider variety of experiences.

PROMPT: Profound Piece of Advice

Daily writing prompt
What’s the most profound piece of advice you’ve been given? Did you take it?

“Shut the hell up!” Sadly, more often than not, no.

PROMPT: Super Power

Daily writing prompt
What super power do you wish you had and why?

Invisibility. I like to see, but not to be seen.

PROMPT: Quote

Daily writing prompt
Do you have a quote you live your life by or think of often?

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.” – Mark Twain

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet

“What you imagine, you create.” – Siddhartha Guatama Buddha

All restatements of one key principle, that our [mental / emotional] experience of the world is an entirely separate thing from the world itself. The latter one has almost no control over, the former one can reach a state of complete control (granted through painstaking and relentless effort.)

PROMPT: Weather

Daily writing prompt
What is your favorite type of weather?

For being outside in: Mostly Sunny.

For watching unbridled chaos (from a distance, and preferably on video): tornadoes.