तुम तकल्लुफ़ को भी इख़्लास समझते हो ‘फ़राज़’
दोस्त होता नहीं हर हाथ मिलाने वाला

You mistake formality for sincerity, “Faraz”
Not everyone who shakes your hand is a friend.

I have been thinking about this couplet by Faraz for weeks now. Turning it over. Holding it up to the light of my own experiences and watching what it reflects back.

Faraz wrote it in Urdu. But I have lived it in every language I know.

In the good times, people will listen to every word you say.

They lean in. They laugh at the right moments. They remember things about you. There is warmth in the room and you mistake it for love. Which is a very human thing to do, and a very painful thing to unlearn.

But then something shifts.

Maybe life quietly rerouted you through one of its harder seasons. Maybe something didn’t go the way you had planned, or the way people expected it to. Maybe you are simply going through something that hasn’t announced itself on the outside yet, but lives quietly beneath everything, in the weight of your silences, in the things you stopped saying out loud.

And slowly, so slowly you almost don’t notice, the ears fold inwards.

The whispers they could once hear from across the room, now even your words spoken plainly, spoken twice, spoken with everything you have, dissolve somewhere before they arrive. You are not quieter. They have simply stopped listening.

The ignoring quotient increases. The replies come slower. The invitations become fewer. And you are left holding conversations you thought were mutual, wondering when exactly you became the only one carrying them.

Then comes the part nobody talks about.

The performance of help.

Sometimes, for the sake of their own self-image, their own quiet need to be seen as a good person, they will offer something small. A minor gesture. A reluctant favour. But even in that small offering, you can feel it. The tone of their voice. The expression that flickers across their face before they compose themselves. The help that arrives with a hidden tax. Your dignity, quietly charged at the door.

The other day I was reading about something called thin-slicing. The human ability to read micro-expressions, shifts in tone, the invisible language of a room, all within milliseconds. Before a word is spoken. Before a thought is fully formed.

The research simply confirmed what the soul already knows.

The victim always knows.

And here is the darkest truth I have had to sit with. Sometimes the one doing it knows too. It is not always unconscious. Not always accidental. Sometimes it is a choice. A quiet, deliberate wielding of perceived superiority.

And the wound it leaves is not ordinary.

A single experience of being made to feel unworthy, of feeling the room shift, the tone change, the warmth withdraw, leaves a mark that does not erase easily. Any future encounter of even half the intensity lands on already bruised ground. The person shrinks a little more. Trusts a little less. Wonders, in their quieter moments, whether they are worthy of human equality and love.

I know this. Because I have been on both sides of it.

In my first year, there was a moment I still think about.

Someone asked a friend their CGPA. Just like that, casually, the way people ask things without thinking about where they land. But that semester, my friend had been through something. The kind of something that life doesn’t make room for, that no grade could ever hold or explain. And the question, innocent on the surface, was about to do what those questions do.

I felt it before it happened. So I said something else. Changed what we were talking about, quietly, without making it a thing. Without letting my friend feel seen in the wrong way.

I didn’t have a name for what I did that day. I just knew what it felt like to be on the other side of it. And I didn’t want that for someone I cared about.

There is a concept in psychology. The idea of creating a space where another person does not fear humiliation or exposure. Where they can simply exist without bracing themselves.

I did not learn this from a book. I learned it in a college corridor, because I had felt what the absence of it does to a person.

There will be people who walk with you in the sunshine and are simply not there when the rain comes. Not dramatically. Just quietly, suddenly unavailable. Friends who remembered your name when it meant something to them. Mentors whose interest had terms and conditions you were never shown.

It hurts in a specific way, that kind of loss. Not because you asked for too much. But because you gave without keeping score, and somewhere along the way assumed they were doing the same.

I have had to learn, and it has not been a quick or painless lesson, to stop resting my weight on people. Not because people are bad. But because they were never meant to hold that weight. Every person who has passed through my life, who stayed or left, who helped or hurt, was moving according to something larger than either of us understood at the time.

We all are.

Carried. Shaped. Held by a hand that has never, not once, let go.

So I stopped asking people to be what only one thing can be. I turned, slowly, toward the hand behind all of it. The One playing the music, not the instruments through which it moves.

And still, after everything, I find myself returning to this one thing.

When someone is suffering quietly, before they have found words for it, sometimes what they need is not advice or solutions or even time. Sometimes it is just one person who notices. Who asks a real question and actually waits for the answer. Who doesn’t flinch at what comes out.

I don’t think that is a small thing. I think it might be the biggest thing.

To choose, when the world is telling you to protect yourself, to simply show up for someone instead.

To lighten a human heart.

The mystics knew something the rest of us are still learning. That love is not felt in the grand moments. It moves quietly, through ordinary hands, in the spaces between words, in the moment one soul decides to carry a little of what another soul is holding.

That is seva. That is love.

That, I believe, is God finding a way through.

~ Agrim | EternalWriter

We anticipated yesterday. We are anticipating right now. We will anticipate tomorrow. And somewhere in this endless rehearsal of the future, we made a quiet, unconscious decision — that we are the ones in charge. That the weight of this life is ours to carry. That we are both the driver and the passenger of this strange, sacred journey.

But consider this for a moment.

If you had to travel 500 kilometres — through highways you’ve never seen, weather you cannot predict, roads that may or may not be under construction, would you rather drive yourself, or have a trusted, experienced driver take the wheel, at no cost to you?

I would choose the driver. Every time.

Not out of laziness. But out of knowing myself. I know that gripping the wheel for hours will drain something in me — not just energy, but presence. I will arrive at my destination already spent, already somewhere else in my mind. But if I surrender the wheel to someone who knows the road better than I do. I arrive whole. I arrive there. I could rest, I could think, I could simply be, and give my full attention to what actually matters when I get there.

Why is this so easy to understand on a highway and so terrifying to live?

We carry anxieties that were never ours. We make plans that crumble. We build futures in our minds, only to watch life quietly laugh and reroute us — not to punish us, but to show us that the map we drew was never the full territory.

There is a Sanskrit word that holds a truth most of us are never told: Alpajña (Al-pug-yah).

It means — one of limited knowing. That is what we are, each one of us. We are beings of partial sight. We see a few episodes of a story and declare ourselves experts on the plot. We live through a handful of chapters and think we know how the book ends.

We build the entire architecture of our lives — our choices, our fears, our definitions of success and failure, on the narrow foundation of what we have been allowed to see.

And here is the thing no one talks about.

I know this not as philosophy. I know this as lived experience. As seasons that made no sense from the inside — seasons of loss, of waiting, of watching everything I thought I knew quietly come apart. And only in hindsight, always in hindsight — did I see the shape of what was being made.

Something was being written that I was not the author of.

I could not have planned it. I could not have predicted it. And if I had been given the pen — I would have written something so much smaller.

That is the mercy of not knowing.

We hold onto a verse from Gurbani in our home — quietly, without performance, like a lifeline that was always there:

That is the only prayer that has ever fully made sense to me. Not — fix this. Not — give me what I want. But simply — whatever You will.

This is what I mean when I say — the Unknown is not your enemy.

Every rejection is a redirection. Every detour is the route.

I don’t have a large circle of friends. But I have found spiritual mentors, life mentors — people who have shown me how to see. And I have something I can only call a friendship with God. A companionship that lives beneath all the noise of this world.

And I have come to know this in my bones -

His Holiness Satguru Baba Hardev Singh Ji Maharaj once said something that has lived in me like a quiet flame -

I have turned that sentence over in my hands a thousand times. In moments of confusion, in moments of loss, in moments where the road disappeared entirely and I stood there with nothing but the dark and whatever faith I had left.

And slowly, slowly — I understood.

The Unknown is not a void. It is not punishment. It is not chaos dressed as destiny.

It is an invitation.

An invitation to stop being the author of your own story and become something rarer — a witness to it. To watch, with wonder and without grasping, as something far greater than your plans quietly unfolds around you.

You were not meant to see the whole road. You were meant to walk it.

Step by step. Breath by breath. Held, even when you cannot feel the hands.

I don’t know what I don’t know. And for the first time — I am grateful for it.

The road ahead is not empty. It is not uncertain.

It is held.

And you — with all your questions, your grief, your longing, your beautiful limited sight —

you are held too.

~ Agrim | EternalWriter

It unravels something ancient, something that was always there beneath the noise of living — beneath the deadlines, the expectations, the performances we put on for a world that rarely stops to ask how your soul is doing.

I have spent years feeling things I couldn’t name. Observing people and wondering why we hurt each other in the same ways, generation after generation. Sitting with questions that had no Google answer. Feeling the presence of something vast and nameless in the most ordinary moments — a stranger’s eyes, a song at 3am, the specific silence after crying. A stillness that holds you from within, that needs no proof, no scripture, no argument. It simply is.

Nobody talks about these things. Not really.

So I decided to.

Chronicles of this Soul is not a blog in the way you might expect. There will be no life hacks here. No productivity tips. No carefully curated version of a life that only existed long enough to be photographed.

What there will be — is truth. The kind that lives in the uncomfortable spaces. Reflections on the human psyche, on spirituality without religion, on the experiences that quietly reshape us. On being the kind of person who feels everything and is still learning what to do with that.

I write for the ones who think too deeply and sleep too little. For the ones who have always felt slightly out of step with the world — not broken, just tuned to a different frequency.

For The unheard. The unseen. The eternal.

As my ashes dissolve into the formless and I transcend the smallness of what this world asks me to be - I find that I carry only one thing with me. Not status, not certainty, not answers. Only the grace of something boundless that I have been shown, that lives in me now like a light I cannot switch off — and would never want to..

Just this. The writing. The witnessing. The soul that refuses to go quiet.

I am a spiritual being having the human experience.

And these are my Chronicles.

~ Agrim

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