Diary Of A Mortal

Dear Diary,

It's past eleven and I still can't sleep.

The fan above me is doing its best rotating slowly, pushing the same warm air around the room in lazy circles. It doesn't help much. But I don't mind. There's something about lying here, on this old mattress at my grandparents' place, staring at the ceiling in the dark, that feels more restful than any air-conditioned room I've slept in back home.

My grandparents are already asleep. The whole village probably is.

Outside, there's just silence. The good kind. The kind where you can actually hear yourself think.

I should probably mention nothing is wrong at home. My parents are fine, living their usual lives in the city. I just chose to spend this summer here, in the countryside, with my grandparents. People find that strange sometimes. A young person, willingly, choosing a village over a city in the middle of summer.

But honestly, I needed this.

Cities are exhausting and I don't just mean physically.

Yes, there's the traffic. Yes, there's the crowd. But you get used to those. What's harder to get used to is the feeling underneath all of it. This constant, low level hum of everyone around you wanting more. More money, more status, more followers, more of everything and somehow still feeling like it's never quite enough.

People in cities are always busy. I'm not saying that as a criticism, I genuinely mean it they are always busy. Busy with work, busy with targets, busy with their relationships, busy with their phones, busy worrying about things they can't control. And in all that busyness, the one thing that keeps getting pushed to tomorrow is the simplest question anyone could ask themselves:

What am I actually doing all of this for?

Not in a dramatic, existential way. Just genuinely. What is it that I'm running toward? Or am I just running because everyone else is?

Most people never stop long enough to answer that. And after a while, they stop noticing they never asked.

Here, things are different.

Not better in every way, I'll get to that. But different in a way that matters.

My grandmother knows the names of everyone on this road. Not just names, she knows whose son just got married, whose crop didn't do well last season, whose wife has been unwell. And when something goes wrong for someone, people here don't just offer condolences and move on. They show up. They bring food. They sit with you.

It sounds simple because it is simple. But that simplicity is harder to find than you'd think.

Nobody here is keeping score. Nobody's helping their neighbour because it looks good or because there's something in it for them. They do it because that's just how things work here. You have extra, you share. You're struggling, someone notices. There's a kind of quiet dignity in that a community that runs not on transactions but on trust.

And somehow, despite having less on paper, people here seem more at ease with their lives than a lot of people I know back home.

Now I want to be honest, because I'm not trying to make this place sound like some kind of paradise.

It isn't.

The electricity goes out whenever there's a storm, sometimes for days. The nearest doctor is far enough that a real emergency would be genuinely frightening. The heat, right now as I'm writing this, is uncomfortable in a way that no amount of mental peace fully fixes. Farmers here live season to season, always one bad monsoon away from a difficult year. These are real problems. They don't disappear just because the air is clean.

And yet the people carrying these problems don't seem broken by them.

They wake up early, they work hard, they eat their meals together, they sleep without much weighing on their minds. Not because their lives are easy. But because they haven't let the weight of wanting more pile on top of the weight of what they already have to deal with.

I think about this a lot.

We talk about mental health now more than ever. Stress, anxiety, burnout these words are everywhere. And most of the time, the solution being sold is something you have to buy: a subscription, a supplement, a vacation. But the people here, without any of that, seem to have figured something out that a lot of us haven't.

That peace isn't something you find outside yourself. It lives in your head. And if your head is constantly full, full of comparisons, full of noise, full of the next thing and the next thing...then it doesn't matter what surrounds you. You'll still feel restless.

I'm not saying everyone should leave their jobs and move to a village. That's not a realistic thing to say, and it's not what I mean.

A lot of people in cities don't have a choice. They're there because they have to be, because that's where the work is, where their family is, where their life has taken root. It takes a certain kind of luck to be able to step away, even briefly.

But what I am trying to say is "Sometimes, try to be an observer in the noise and a friend to silence".

I know I'm lucky to be here.

I know that this quiet, this slow, warm, cricket filled summer night is not available to everyone.

And maybe that's the thought that stays with me the most, as the fan keeps turning overhead and the village stays perfectly still outside my window.

Not that city life is wrong or village life is right.

Just that somewhere along the way, for a lot of us stillness became a luxury.

And we stopped noticing when that happened.

The fan turns. I close my eyes. Tomorrow the birds will wake me up, before my alarm ever could.

~Deb