I came home today from the gym all sweaty and smelly and quite content. As I threw my bags on the bed and settled down, I had a great urge to open up my laptop and check something online. Lately I’ve been becoming increasing aware of this internet addiction that seems more and more unavoidable.

I resisted and just laid myself down on my bed staring at the ceiling. Perhaps for the first time I noticed how beautifully the walls of my house are painted. As I lay there glancing unthinkingly over the small bumps and glitches on the ceiling an old memory decided to revisit, it wasn’t a well preserved one, was not even a fragment in time, but it was vivid, it was simply the smell of a freshly painted wall in some old house from my childhood, butterscotch colored, glistening under a tube-light, and I remembered finding it beautiful.

I always cherish these moments when a memory from deep down resurfaces, if only momentarily. You probably have a lot of shared memories with others, but there are these small snippets which are exclusively yours, your thoughts, observations, feelings, and emotions, probably the most unique thing about you. And we rarely appreciate them. Emotions are complex things which are hard to name and English does not have a name for this one. It isn’t nostalgia, it’s mildly happy but not joyous, it isn’t revelationary or epiphanic, it’s a gentle breeze rolling through the meadows on a damp summer morning.

I’m not the first person to say this but it is so easy to lose this feeling more than ever today.

Asimov wrote this beautiful short-story Green Patches about how humans are inherently anarchical and perhaps that’s a feature and not a bug, and in which the state of anarchy is threatened by a small green patch. I think we’re very much in the same scenario now, what is at stake is our uniqueness.

Whenever I can, I try to resist the temptation to merge with the internet, and I try to let my mind linger. I mostly fail and it is excruciating, but what choice do I have. The only weapon we have against losing our uniqueness is being alone, appreciating and nurturing the small things that make us us and setting them free and letting them mould us every once in a while.

The irony of sharing this on the web is not wasted on me, but nobody’s perfect. Louis CK has something to say about this as well in his wildly exaggerated way, about the forever empty and the sadness of being;