As usual, my evenings follow a gentle rhythm: a walk, tea, puja, and a few pages of reading. I prefer keeping it that way. This time, unhurried, is almost sacred for me. Off late, the terrace has become my retreat. Open sky, slow steps, and a deliberate choice to be alone. Calm, for me, is not the absence of sound but the presence of awareness.

That evening, as Aigiri Nandini played softly in the background, I began my rounds. Somewhere between one lap and the next, I noticed a bird perched on the parapet wall. It sat there without flinching, without urgency. I smiled instinctively and continued walking, assuming it would fly away, as birds usually do.

But it didn’t.

By the second, third, and then the fourth round, the bird was still there. Nearly ten minutes had passed. I paused. Not because the bird demanded attention, but because its stillness did. It wasn’t resting in the casual way birds often do; it seemed absorbed, as if it were in the middle of a thought.

That’s when the question surfaced: Can birds think this deeply? Can they hold space like this? So steady? So anchored?

Almost on cue, it moved its head, looked straight at me, eyes meeting mine for a fleeting second and then turned away. Not startled or curious. It looked just… uninterested. As though my presence was incidental, while whatever occupied its inner world mattered more.

Ornithology tells us that birds are not merely instinct-driven. Their stillness often signals vigilance, assessment, and decision-making. A pause before action. Different neural wiring, yet remarkable clarity. What looked like contemplation was, perhaps, focus. Efficient, grounded and unburdened.

A quiet envy stirred in me.

I began to wonder what it might be carrying. What challenges defined its life? What did survival look like from its vantage point? And inevitably, the comparison arose. We too perch on edges. We too pause between decisions. Yet unlike the bird, our pauses are filled with doubt, restlessness and a constant need to justify ourselves.

Modern loneliness often comes not from being alone, but from losing the ability to sit with ourselves without noise. The bird, perched between sky and stone, seemed grounded. Alone, yet not lonely. Regulated, not compelled. Nature, in that moment, felt less like a backdrop and more like a quiet guru, reminding me that stillness does not need permission.

The bird didn’t escape, didn’t engage and definitely didn’t try to impress. It simply was. And in that quiet encounter, I realised that stability is not loud, wisdom is not restless, and presence does not seek applause.

After some time, I came down from the terrace carrying that insight with me.

And almost immediately, life found a different expression.

There came, Bhavith! A 3-years old, in pre-nursery, living next door. He ran towards me with uninhibited joy.
“Haaaiii… Aunty!” he called out, breathless.
“The halwa you kept for me was tasty. Naku ishtam.”

Before I could respond, his day unfolded in excited fragments. His teacher had given him a star for creating a hand-print animal.
“Sheeba miss, gave me a star,” he announced.
“I made a hand-print animal. A meow.”
He lowering his voice conspiratorially, “I made it blue.”

Then came a small pause with a slight frown. “Twisha said… meows are not blue.”

He shrugged it off with enviable ease.

“I like blue,” he said.
“Sheeba Miss said my cat is cute. I named him Rory.”

Before I could react, he ran inside and returned moments later with the painting.

It wasn’t perfect. The lines were uneven. The shape slightly confused me. It was funny and unmistakably him. And what struck me most was not the artwork, but the way he held it out. No hesitation or nervous scanning of my face for approval.

He stood there, owning something imperfect without embarrassment. Just confidence, as if the world has no reason not to like it.

Piaget would place him in the pre-operational stage where symbolic thinking blooms and logic bends to imagination. But standing there, theory felt secondary to wonder. What I was witnessing was courage in its purest form: the courage to imagine freely and present oneself without fear of being “less than…”

Later, Bhavith’s mother mentioned that morning he had gotten ready unusually fast. His six-month-old sister had a mild fever after vaccination.
“He knew we had to be quick today,” she said.

Awareness and Sensitivity at three! Social intelligence already unfolding…

I couldn’t help but think: what happens to this child as he grows? What if we preserved this innate nature, instead of sanding it down for uniformity?

Somewhere along the way, we educate children in such a way that by adulthood they are terrified of being anything less than genius, less than successful or less than perfect. They begin to coil inward. They stop opening up. The spontaneous smile disappears. In its place arrives a serious, guarded face. Polished, accomplished and perfectly unapproachable.

Extremely successful and utterly unhappy!

What a satirical tragedy that in teaching children how to win, we forget to teach them how to be.

As I stepped into the puja room for the evening prayer, the day settled into a quiet coherence.

The bird on the parapet.

The child who imagined a blue cat.

Nature offering grounding.

A child offering possibility.

Different teachers, same lesson!

Nature never rushes and yet, everything blooms!

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The Bird and the Blue Cat