It is unutterable what happened to me in the form of feeling: I quickly need your empathy. Feel with me. It was a supreme happiness." I can't remember when precisely I first underlined these words on page 79 of Clarice Lispector's Agua Viva. Each time I read this slim book I find myself highlighting more passages. There will surely come a time when the whole book will have been cast into focus, because no piece of text will have been spared my hungry gaze. This line, though, is special, because of how it is poised just off the center of page 79; ending the paragraph that follows Lispector's declaration: "Because at five in the morning, today, July 25, I fell into a state of grace."

I returned to Lispector because on Sunday morning, on July 8, I found myself in a state of unutterable sublimity. For a few months I'd been wrestling with decision-making that I reasoned was part of the process we call 'adulting'; do I continue to live in Delhi; do I continue to dedicate myself to the same person I have for ten years; do I continue to freelance as extensively or do I embrace relative poverty so I can write more. After I'd landed at Isha's home in Goa, we happened to speak about this very millennial term. Her conclusion was exquisitely simple. Adulting was about embracing and embodying the spirit of learning. It was something she was able to say with confidence because for the last many years she has found great fulfilment and joy in committing herself to the vocation she has chosen for herself — teaching. I had been carrying this thought with me since then; and when I returned to Delhi and woke up to Mona's nurturing aura, after conversations over coffee and paranthas, realised we'd both arrived together, however separately our journeys had been, on a similar platform of future departure. We had both realised that the trick was really to be rooted in ourselves; to not allow anything other-ly to shatter our confidence in our individual intuitions. When I visited Dharamshala to meet Partho, I felt great validation just seeing myself through his eyes; he revealed to me how much I had grown and transformed as a person.