I was questioning my worth every single day. At some point, that became my default setting. Waking up uncertain, restless, hard on myself.

Now I feel calm and composed. I observe my thoughts mindfully. I used to get irritated by them, used to fear them. Now I let them pass the way they come. I understood their nature. They are just doing their job, bringing what is present in the mind to our attention.

That shift did not happen on its own. Here are the five things helping me get better every day.

Cold Shower

I take a 30-second cold shower immediately after I wake up. It has become my morning ritual. Some days before I even reach the bathroom, my mind says to take a break and go with the hot shower today. But the moment I open the tap, my brain automatically turns the handle to cold.

Meditation

I meditate twice a day, once in the morning and once at night before bed, usually for 30 minutes each. The morning session helps me start the day with clarity. The evening one is quieter. It is a chance to sit with the day’s thoughts, let them settle, and reflect on what passed.

10 Minutes Walk

Right after morning meditation, I take a 10-minute walk to feel the fresh air and catch the sun when it is out. I walk no matter the weather, rain, winter, any of it. I witness the changes in nature and feel them slowly and mindfully. There is something grounding about stepping into whatever the day has to offer.

Park

During my working break, I spend around an hour in the park. It is a habit now. Even on busy days I get at least 20 to 30 minutes of sun. The sounds of the water fountain, ducks, birds, children playing, and old people laughing together. It summarises an entire life in an hour. I feel joy just witnessing that span of it. Sometimes I laugh listening to their jokes. Sometimes I smile at a child or wave at them.

15 Minutes Reading

I read every day. I have finished 2 books this month. Some days I do not understand everything, some days I resonate with every word and feel it intensely. Either way it is stretching something in me. The ability to focus, to sit with ideas, to stay curious.

These five habits are helping me stay calm, focused and composed. They are slowly building my self-confidence back up. My mind has started believing that I can do something consistently. That if I put effort into something every day, I can build whatever I want in life.

That is not a small thing. For a while, I did not believe it at all.

I have a simple rule when choosing what to read, watch, or listen to. Is it real? Is it inspired by something that actually happened? That one filter has shaped almost everything I consume. Books, documentaries, podcasts, films. If it happened to a real person, I’m in.

A few weeks ago I started reading a book called Attached. It answered several questions I had been sitting with for a long time. About how I love, why I feel things so deeply, why connection matters to me the way it does.

This Saturday, I took a train to a small village called Auvers-sur-Oise, about an hour north of Paris, to be somewhere, to be present.

It’s the place where Van Gogh spent the last 70 days of his life. In those 70 days he painted 74 paintings. One painting per day, roughly, while everything inside him was falling apart.

I am not a painter. I don’t know how to read a painting the way someone trained in art would. But standing in that village, the narrow streets, the fields that looked exactly like the ones in his paintings, the small room where he slept, something hit me that I didn’t expect.

I recognised him. Not the genius. Not the madness. Not the stories built around broken artists. The person underneath all of that.

A man who struggled with romantic relationships his entire life. Who could not make love stay no matter how hard he tried. Who poured everything he couldn’t say out loud into his work. Without stopping. Almost like he had no choice. As if painting was the only language that never failed him.

And through all of it, his brother Theo. Who wrote to him, showed up, believed in work the world had not yet noticed. And at the very end, when Van Gogh lay dying, Theo was there holding his hand.

I thought about my sister when I read this. She is that for me. The one who sends a message on the hardest days telling me I was built for something bigger. The one who gave me a blank diary and in doing so gave me a way to speak. Pure, steady love from one person. It can hold you together in ways nothing else can.

What moved me most was not Van Gogh’s talent. It was his refusal to stop.

He was in pain. He was lonely. And every morning he picked up a brush and went back to the fields. Not because things were fine. Because he had something to say and he was going to say it anyway.

Writing these blogs has become that for me. I have learned that I need somewhere to put what I feel. Writing is how I process, how I reach out, how I stay honest with myself about where I actually am.

This Saturday in Auvers was part of the same thing. Instead of staying inside with my thoughts, I went somewhere. I stood in the fields Van Gogh painted. I breathed cold air. I was present, even for a few hours, in something larger than my own head.

He left behind one line. Words his doctor said to him, that Van Gogh wrote down in a letter and clearly could not let go of either:

“How difficult it is to be simple.”

I don’t have an answer. I’m not sure he did either. But there is something quietly reassuring in knowing that one of the greatest artists who ever lived was also just a person carrying the same questions the rest of us carry.

That is why real stories reach me. Not because they have answers. Because they prove that someone else was in the room too.

Five years ago on this date, I left.

Not dramatically. No grand speech, no clear vision of what was ahead. I just picked up my bags, said goodbye to the people I love, and walked up the staircase of an international airport carrying everything I felt hope, fear, uncertainty, courage, excitement all tangled together, none of them winning.

I didn’t know what the new life would look like. I hadn’t anticipated how it would treat me. I just knew I was leaving.

I hadn’t expected luxury. I didn’t have high hopes or big dreams. Just normal ones the kind most people have and rarely say out loud.

A simple life. A decent family. A tiny house to live in. Coffee on the terrace in the morning. Sleeping under the summer sun. A small corner to meditate. A little bookshelf. A room where friends could gather for life’s quiet, precious moments.

That was it. That was the whole dream.

5 years later, that dream is still not here. What does that actually feel like?

It makes you question everything, sometimes in the middle of the night after a terrifying dream, sometimes in the middle of the day when you’re failing at work, sometimes at dawn while taking the metro back home, staring at nothing.

Am I doing the right thing? Am I being too selfish about my career? I have one life, is it worth staying away from the people I love? Will they still be there in a year? Will I be happy a few years from now?

Is it worth crying alone during festivals? Is it worth celebrating your birthday feeling hollow the entire day? Is it worth walking alone through the hardest moments when all you needed was someone to just hold you?

These questions rise up, sit heavy on top of everything and then quietly disappear. Not because you found the answer. Because a new problem arrives and takes their place. What to prepare for tomorrow’s meeting. What to wear. Where to eat.

The biggest questions of your life, swallowed by the smallest ones.

I haven’t found the answer yet.

But then one phone call from your mom. Asking whether you woke up. Whether you ate on time. Whether something is bothering you at work. Whether you went to the office or stayed home. She doesn’t ask about your ambitions or your five year plan. She just wants to know if you’re okay today.

A text from your girlfriend asking how your day was. Telling you everything will be alright.

A message from your sister saying you were built for something bigger than this moment of doubt. That she believes in you even when you don’t.

Your little nephew asking when you’re coming back waiting for you with his remote control aeroplane, his remote control superman.

A stranger waving at you during your lunch run. Nothing more than that.

These small things. These tiny, ordinary, almost invisible things, they pull you back. They remind you that you are breathing. That you are alive. That even across the distance, even through a screen, even in a wave from a stranger, there are people who hold you. Quietly. Without making a big thing of it.

That is what kept me here.

Maybe the simple life you dreamed of, the terrace, the coffee, the tiny house maybe that’s still coming. Or maybe you’re already living something you didn’t know how to dream about back then. Not the life you painted. But a life that is teaching you to paint differently.

Five years ago, I walked up that staircase carrying hope, fear, uncertainty, courage, and excitement. All at once. I didn’t know which one would win.

I still don’t have the terrace. I still don’t have the tiny house, the bookshelf in my own corner, friends around my table on a quiet evening. The simple life I dreamed of is the one that wasn’t even ambitious & is still somewhere ahead of me.

But I’ve stopped waiting for life to get calm before I start living it. That calm is not coming. I know that now. There will always be another question at 2am, another festival spent alone, another birthday that passes quietly in a city that doesn’t know your name.

What I have instead is a mom who calls to check if I ate. A sister who believes in me on the days I don’t. A little niece waiting with a remote control aeroplane. Small things. Ordinary things. Things I didn’t think to paint on the canvas five years ago because I didn’t know yet how much they would matter.

Maybe that’s the life. Not the one you planned. Not the one you dreamed standing at the bottom of that staircase. But the one that quietly builds itself around you while you’re busy asking if it’s worth it.

I walked up that staircase alone, carrying everything I hoped for.

Five years later, I’m still walking. And somehow, that is enough.

My sister gave me this diary when I was back in Nepal in October. It’s just a blank canvas, but the effort she made to find it and give it to me at this point in my life — that’s what matters.

I had been stressed since Friday. Spiralling thoughts were bothering me and I couldn’t sleep well. This morning I woke up with a strange feeling in my body, no clear plan, but a quiet certainty that I needed to do something. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I had to get out.

I was looking at my bookshelf, hoping something would pull me in, and that’s when I found the diary. I opened it and started asking myself one question: where do I feel most alive? That question solved a million dollar puzzle. I made up my mind of solo hiking.

There’s a jungle (Forêt de Fontainebleau) near Paris, about 55km from where I live. I packed my things: sandwich, water, power bank, a RedBull, rain coat, the diary, and a pen. I left early. During the commute I planned the route, and I’ll be honest ChatGPT did most of that work. I asked it to plan a 25km hike, it suggested three stops and estimated five hours. I followed it. I’m not someone who naturally takes care of these logistics, so I’m glad about it.

I started hiking around noon and entered the deep jungle. The weather was cloudy and I could hear the crackling of trees. Several had already fallen along the path. I was scared genuinely scared one might come down on me. But as I kept moving, the fear slowly faded.

The spiralling thoughts came with me into the jungle. So did the stomach ache I had been carrying all morning. But step by step, something shifted. I started trusting the nature around me, trusting that it wouldn’t harm me. I passed young couples, old people, retired folks, people with dogs, young guys on bikes. I was not alone in there.

The dogs were harder. Every time one came toward me I quietly moved to the other side of the path. I know they were harmless, but I’ve feared dogs since childhood, a mad dog bit me once, and something from that has stayed. I’ve tried to get past it. Not yet.

I followed Google Maps to the first stop, then deliberately strayed from the path and went deeper into the jungle. At the end I had made a rough irregular loop. It was unplanned and it felt right.

Along the way I felt very alive. When I got lost in thought I pulled myself back to the sounds, the trees, the birds, the mushrooms, everything around me. For some people a winter jungle might look ugly. I love that part. A bare tree with all its leaves dropped and its branches exposed, there is something deeply honest about that. We don’t live our lives always on high. There are times we look exactly like that tree. Nature doesn’t hide it. It just keeps going.

Even for a few moments, it made me remember that I am alive. I am breathing. I am walking. I am aware.

At the end I hiked 22km without stopping. I took a detour through the city afterward, found a good place to eat, and strolled around Fontainebleau palace. On the way back, I felt lighter. Turns out, I know exactly where I feel most alive.

I did not plan to walk 32.29 kilometers. I did not plan much at all.

I woke up around 8:45 in the morning feeling anxious and stressed. That heavy feeling was already there. It reminded me of some of my worst weekends in the past. On those days, I stayed inside, trapped in my own thoughts. I kept asking myself the same questions again and again, going deeper into my thoughts but finding no answers.

Those weekends were full of frustration. I blamed others for my own actions. I felt angry at life. I kept asking myself why I felt this way and whether I was the only one who experienced this. I thought about how hard I had worked to build a better life, and then I questioned if it was worth living like this, constantly chased by my own thoughts. I was very hard on myself and often wondered why I felt so complex.

That was my usual pattern.

But last Sunday, something changed while I was making tea. It happened instantly. I felt the need to do something different. I decided to go for a long walk, without overthinking it.

I charged my phone and my watch. During the walk, I used my phone only twice. Once to take a picture, and once to stay connected with my family.

I walked for almost seven hours.

While walking, I tried to stay in the present moment. I still got lost in my thoughts many times, but each time I gently brought my attention back to where I was. I focused on each step.

I walked from my apartment toward the Eiffel Tower, following the River Seine. Along the way, I passed many famous places like the Musée d’Orsay, Saint-Michel Notre Dame, Louvre etc. I saw people from all over the world. Tourists and strangers filled the streets. When our eyes met, I exchanged smiles with them. These small moments felt warm and human.

I did not carry any water or food. Surprisingly, I did not feel tired. I kept telling myself that I had trained a lot before and that I could easily walk for many hours. That thought gave me confidence and calm.

When I reached my destination, I sat down and meditated for about 30 minutes. I enjoyed the atmosphere around me. People were talking, laughing, taking photos, and running along the river. The energy felt alive and peaceful at the same time.

At the end of the day, I felt different.

I felt alive.
I felt accomplished.
I felt proud that I had done something good for my mental and physical health.

It felt like I was planting a seed for my future.

This was the same path where I used to run last year. This time, I chose mindful walking instead. I truly enjoyed it.

I want to do this more often. It helps me reconnect with myself and recharge my energy.

Sometimes, all it takes is a simple walk to change how we feel.