Little Thing 332: These Walks

There are paths I imagine whenever I go to sleep.

I carry a small backpack with only the necessary things. A walking stick in my hand, I always thought about asking for MC's walking stick, but I never quite managed to. I wear a hat, a white tshirt, a hiking pants and place a towel around my neck. (Oh, let me add a Fujifilm X Half hanging on my neck in the imaginary future walks - this is new)

And I walk.

Along the path.

Some nights the path runs through a bright forest. Not the dense kind we have in Malaysia, but something gentler. 

Some nights it winds between hills of green fields, the weather moodier, the air cool with a steady breeze.

Some nights it leads into a mossy forest, with komorebi, sunlight leaking through the trees.

Some nights there are rocks and small hills to climb.

Then I fall asleep.

I only need a few steps. A quiet thought of where I want to walk that night before my system shuts down. I can’t imagine anyone beside me on these paths. I am always alone, and everything is always green. Even in reverie, it seems I return to silence. It never feels lonely, only a quiet awareness of absence. I suppose I built this small world, and no one has quite belonged in it yet.

I love these walks, even in the quiet space between dream and consciousness.

Book: Over-analyzing the Friction

I didn’t expect reading this book can turn into a reflection about myself, but friction often reveals more than comfort ever could. I didn't even want to talk about this book at the start.

This book made me uncomfortable in a way I didn’t expect. It felt like race was emphasized more than necessary, almost as if it was trying too hard. The lack of subtlety made it difficult for me to stay immersed in the story.

I also struggled with the excessive listing. There were too many details that didn’t feel essential to the core narrative. As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I’m not good at processing information that feels unimportant to my brain. It becomes noise, and that noise distracted me from the emotional arc. That discomfort led to an interesting realization about my cognitive preferences. I’ve mentioned “noise” several times throughout this blog. Some writers use specificity as texture and listing as immersion. It is an intentional stylistic choice. For some readers, it works but for me, it doesn’t. It comes down to cognitive preference, so there is no right or wrong here.

I have almost zero tolerance for narrative noise. This explains why I dislike filler episodes and get bored with excessive details, especially names and numbers. With a designer’s brain, I appreciate clean, curated work. I value negative space. My brain prefer only what is necessary to move the story forward.

While I admire the richness and detail in Orhan Pamuk’s and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s writing, I am also in awe of writers like Haruki Murakami or Kyung Sook Shin, who can express complex, weighty emotions with remarkable simplicity. Pamuk and Zafón create immersion through accumulation. Murakami and Sook Shin create depth through subtraction. On the surface, it looks simple, but we know it is not. Anyone can pile details but not everyone can remove them and still leave resonance. 

Maybe that is the contradiction I live with. I admire maximalism, but I move through the world as a minimalist. I respect the cathedral, but I build a quiet empty room for myself. And sometimes, a book is less about whether I love it or not, and more about self-discovery, observing our own thinking, about noticing the small frictions that reveal us to ourselves.

So every friction matters, take note on every annoyance, there's a lesson there. 

The book I'm referring to is Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. 

Note: I just finished the last few chapters in one sitting yesterday while waiting for berbuka. It broke me a little, until it came to the chapter in the game (it felt like a filler episode), it could be done much better. But let's not spiral into that. 

I stand by my point, it could be better without the excessive listing. But that was just me. 

Little Thing 331: Pottery Lesson

Last December, I took an unlimited pottery session.

One of the main lessons I learned was detachment. In pottery, you have to accept that you cannot fully control the outcome. Whether I throw once or fifty times, the piece can still fail. My skills can always improve. My expectations can still collapse.

Every stage of the process produces a different result. Imperfections can appear at any phase. I can spend hours shaping a piece, only for it to crack during firing in the kiln because I did not wedge it properly at the beginning. If I handle it too much, if it shifts off-center while throwing, if I add too much water or not enough, if I rush, or if I overwork the clay anything can go wrong. Everything matters.

Pottery teaches patience, repetition, and the humility to accept that you can create something and still walk away with nothing. In every session, I arrived, put music in my ears, wedged and threw, silently repeating the process. I walked home with cracked palms and an aching back, but it was therapeutic.

I did not want to bring anything home. I just wanted to enjoy the learning process, on repeat.

It had been a while since I allowed myself to be terrible at something. There were no stakes, no KPIs, no deliverables, no results, just a bad piece spinning on the wheel.

Note: So Azmi, this is to answer your question that weekend.

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It is a little like parenting, kan.

You try to shape them according to your standards, but every phase can unfold in ways you cannot control. And just like pottery, you learn to loosen your grip on the outcome. Sometimes the most loving thing is knowing when to stop shaping. In the end, the child becomes who they are becoming. 

Your role is not to manufacture the final form, but to guide the process and then accept the outcome.