Pieces Of My Heart

Still Becoming

January 17, 2026 at 8:55 pm (Articles, Fairytales, kids stories, mental health, My Reflections, MYSTERIOUS, philosophy, psyche, research, satire, stories)
Tags: articles on wordpress, blog, blog post, creative writing, dailyprompt, dailyprompt-1821, inner self, introspection, lifelessons, PaletteNPixels, parables, pieces of my heart, stories, Writers on wordpress

If you could un-invent something, what would it be?

Foreword:

Most people, when asked what they would un-invent, reach for something large and villainous. Social media algorithms. Nuclear weapons. The reply-all button.

I did too. Briefly.
Then my mind wandered, as bored minds often do toward something far less dramatic and far more suspiciously involved in my daily discomfort.

Because history shows us this…humanity doesn’t suffer most from what it invents loudly, but from what it invents casually – the ideas that slip in without a launch event and then rearrange our inner furniture.

Somewhere along the way, we invented “over”.

No instruction manual. No warning label. Just a quiet assumption that things are supposed to end neatly, conclusively, preferably on time and with emotional closure included.

It seemed harmless. Practical, even.
And yet, here we are, rushing conversations, grieving prematurely, panicking at pauses, and treating unfinished moments like unpaid bills.

So no, I won’t be un-inventing an app today. I’m aiming higher or perhaps deeper. Either way, this is where the detour begins.

Most people would un-invent social media algorithms.
The invisible puppeteers.
The endless scroll.
The dopamine drip that knows you better than you know yourself.

I considered it. My bored brain did too. Then it took a detour.

Let me start with a story. There was once a village that feared sunsets.

Not because they were ugly but because everyone believed the sun left. Each evening, doors were bolted. Stories were stopped mid-sentence. Lovers pulled away too soon. Children rushed their games, terrified of being caught unfinished.

One day, a child asked,
“Where does the sun go when it ends?”

No one had an answer. So they invented one…

“It’s over”.

The child grew up and noticed something strange. The sun never actually disappeared. It just continued elsewhere. Quietly, faithfully, without ceremony.

So the child did something radical.
He un-invented the ending.

The next evening, no doors were locked. People lingered. Stories wandered. Love stayed longer than planned. Nothing ended. It only changed rooms.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, our brains were politely rewired. Not by trauma or tragedy, but by calendars, deadlines, and the deeply persuasive belief that life prefers neat conclusions.

Neuroscientists call it pattern recognition. I call it mental furniture we never remember buying. Once the brain learns that things are supposed to end, it starts searching for exits everywhere – conversations, relationships, even joy. Especially joy.

The mind, helpful creature that it is, loves closure the way a cat loves sitting in boxes.
It doesn’t ask whether the box is comfortable.
It just climbs in and decides this must be where things stop.

If I could un-invent something, it wouldn’t be an app, a machine, or an algorithm.

It would be the ending.

Not the natural kind – the kind that arrives gently when something has run its course.
But the manufactured ending we invented so we could control uncertainty.

We un-invented patience and replaced it with conclusions.
We un-invented curiosity and replaced it with closure.

We invented:

This phase is over.
That chapter is closed.
That version of you is done.
That relationship ended.
That dream failed.

Endings made life easier to label. But harder to live. Because the moment we invented endings, we also invented:

Regret
Nostalgia
Fear of starting
Fear of staying
Fear of becoming

Endings taught us to rush joy. To grieve things that were merely changing. To abandon moments that only needed more air.

Even technology didn’t invent this problem, it merely amplified it. Algorithms didn’t teach us to scroll endlessly. They learned it from our fear of stopping before something feels complete.

We don’t actually want infinite content. We want reassurance that nothing meaningful will vanish if we look away.

So what if we un-invented endings?

What if relationships weren’t declared “over” but “evolving”?
What if failure was just a sentence that refused to end with a period?
What if grief wasn’t proof of loss, but evidence of continuation in another form?
What if life wasn’t a series of doors slamming shut, but a hallway with poor lighting and excellent acoustics?

If we stopped ending everything so decisively,
we might finally learn how to stay.

So here’s the question I’ll leave you with…

What in your life isn’t actually over, but you’ve been calling it an ending because you don’t know what else to name it?

© Rohini 2009–2025.
All text, prose, images, and artwork presented herein are the original intellectual property of the author. All rights reserved.
No part of this content may be copied, reproduced, distributed, displayed, or used in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

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1 Comment

This Too Shall Pass, My Little Sparrow

January 17, 2026 at 10:57 am (Articles, Fairytales, kids stories, mental health, My Reflections, MYSTERIOUS, philosophy, psyche, research, satire, stories)
Tags: articles on wordpress, blog, blog post, creative writing, inner self, introspection, JusJoJan, JustJotit, lifelessons, PaletteNPixels, parables, pieces of my heart, SoCS, stories, Stream of Consciousness, Writers on wordpress

In response to Linda G. Hill’s #SoCS Stream of Consciousness, JustJotit, JusJoJan for January 17, 2026

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Your prompt for #JusJoJan the 17th and Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: favorite saying Use it any way you’d like. Enjoy!

I don’t remember the exact sound of Nana’s footsteps, but I remember her saying.

It arrived before everything else, before advice, before scolding, before bedtime stories. It floated into rooms like a soft ribbon and wrapped itself around my small, nervous heart.

“This too shall pass, my little sparrow.”

She said it when milk boiled over and I cried as if the world had ended. She said it when my knees were bleeding and I thought pain was permanent. She said it when my mother slammed doors and silence sat heavy at the dinner table. Nana never raised her voice to compete with chaos. She whispered wisdom instead, as though truth didn’t need volume to be heard.

I was little then. Little enough to believe adults knew everything. Little enough to think Nana had stitched calm directly into her skin.

Her house smelled like old books, eucalyptus oil, and something unnamed, maybe time itself. The ceiling fan hummed in tired circles, and Nana rocked gently, always gently, as if she were careful not to disturb the day. I would curl beside her, my head resting on a lap that had known loss, survival, and love in equal measure.

When I was scared of the dark, she said it. When I failed my spelling test, she said it. When my best friend stopped speaking to me without explanation, she said it again.

“This too shall pass.”

At first, I hated the saying.

I wanted things to stop passing. I wanted hurt to freeze so I could examine it, understand it, control it. Passing felt like loss. It felt like goodbye.

But Nana would smile, that slow, knowing smile, the kind that comes from living long enough to watch grief soften at the edges.

“Even joy passes,” she would add quietly, “so hold it close when it visits.”

I didn’t understand then. Not really.

Now I do.

Now I am grown. I wear a smart watch and answer emails and pretend to know what I’m doing. I stand in kitchens that are not hers, listening to different ceiling fans hum their own tired songs. Nana’s chair is empty. Her hands are dust. Her voice lives only in the soft echo of memory.

And life…oh, life has tested that saying.

It tested it the day I stood in a hospital corridor, holding news that split my future in two. It tested it when love left without explanation, taking laughter and leaving silence behind. It tested it when I stared at my reflection and didn’t recognize the woman looking back – older, braver, more broken.

In those moments, I wanted Nana to be wrong.

I wanted pain to be the exception. I wanted grief to be permanent so at least it would be predictable.

But pain did pass. Not cleanly or quickly, and definitely not without leaving scars.
Still, it passed. And joy returned. Quieter this time, softer, but real.

I hear Nana now in places I least expect her – at traffic lights, in waiting rooms, in the pause between one breath and the next. Her saying has followed me into adulthood like a gentle hand at my back, nudging me forward when my legs shake.

“This too shall pass.”

Not as a dismissal, or as a denial, but as a promise.

A promise that I will not always feel this lost. A promise that the heaviness in my chest has an expiration date. A promise that moments, both good and bad are visitors, not residents.

Sometimes I whisper the saying to myself the way she did, like a secret meant to soothe the universe.

Sometimes I say it to children who cry over spilled dreams and skinned knees. Sometimes I say it to the mirror.

And when I do, I feel her.

I feel the warmth of her lap. The rhythm of her breath. The quiet courage she slipped into my life through a simple sentence.

My favorite saying was never just words.

It was Nana teaching me how to survive time. How to trust change. How to stay soft in a world that hardens people.

And if you listen closely, when your heart is aching, when joy feels fragile, when life feels unbearable you might hear her too.

Whispering.

“This too shall pass, my little sparrow.”

7 Comments

Plop, the Sound That Fell Out of the Sky

January 17, 2026 at 9:51 am (Articles, Fairytales, Humor, kids stories, mental health, My Reflections, MYSTERIOUS, philosophy, psyche, research, satire, stories)
Tags: articles on wordpress, blog, blog post, creative writing, inner self, introspection, lifelessons, PaletteNPixels, parables, photography, pieces of my heart, Ragtagdailyprompt, RDP, stories, Writers on wordpress

In response to Ragtagdailyprompt

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RDP Saturday: PLOP

Foreword:

In a world crowded with pings, crashes, clicks, dings, booms, and the occasional unnecessary thud, there exists a small, well-mannered word that refuses to shout.
It simply arrives…Plop.

No drama, performance, and no notifications attached.
Plop is a pure word. It doesn’t demand attention, it earns it. It is the sound of something landing safely, of endings that don’t bruise, of moments that choose gentleness over noise.

And so I decided to write a story for children.

Not because children need magic. They already live in it but because adults often forget where they left theirs.

This story is an attempt to follow Plop back to that place. A place where wonder still fits in a pocket, where sounds have feelings, and where softness is a kind of strength.

If, while reading, something inside you loosens, smiles, or settles quietly into place…

That’s not an accident.

That’s the child in you awakening.

Plop.

Once upon a time, on a morning that smelled like warm milk and sunshine, something very small fell out of the sky.
It did not crash. It did not bang. It did not boom.
It went…Plop.

Right into the middle of Daisy Dewdrop Meadow.

The meadow gasped. Flowers leaned in closer.
Ladybugs paused mid-polish. The clouds blinked.

“What was that?” whispered the grass. Nobody knew. Because Plop was not a thing you could see. It was a sound that had gotten lost.

Plop, the Lost Sound

Plop had once belonged somewhere very important.

Long ago, Plop lived in the Valley of Sounds, where whooshes rode the wind, giggles lived in bubbles, and thunders practiced being dramatic behind mountains.

But Plop was different. Plop was small, soft and round at the edges. It helped raindrops land politely. It taught berries how to fall without hurting themselves. It tucked sleepy tears safely into pillows.

Plop was the sound of gentle endings. But one day, while the sounds were busy being loud and impressive, Plop rolled too close to the edge of the sky and …Plop. Down it went.

The Child Who Heard It

Everyone else in the meadow went on with their day. Except for Mel. Mel was a child who noticed things. She noticed when leaves were nervous. When shadows felt lonely. When silence needed a friend.

When Plop landed, Mel felt it in her toes.

“Oho,” she said softly. “Something’s missing.”

She knelt and pressed her ear to the ground.

And there it was again…Plop. But quieter this time, shyer.

“Don’t worry,” Mel whispered. “I hear you.”

Plop wiggled with happiness. Sounds love being heard.

A Journey Through Dreamlands

Mel decided Plop must belong somewhere else.
So she placed it carefully in her pocket. (You can do that with sounds, if you believe.)

Together they traveled through places where magic hides:

The Puddle Library, where reflections borrowed faces

The Forest of Humming Moss, which sang when tickled

The Hill That Exhaled, rising and falling like a sleeping giant

Everywhere they went, Plop changed things. When Plop dropped into a pond, the water calmed. When Plop fell onto a worried stone, the stone sighed. When Plop landed between two arguing birds, they forgot what they were arguing about.

Plop reminded the world how to land gently.

The Sky Remembers

At last, they reached the tallest place of all – the Cloud Staircase. Above it shimmered the Valley of Sounds. The loud sounds were panicking.

“Rain is crashing!” cried Splash.
“Leaves are falling too fast!” shouted Thud.
“Tears are hurting people!” sobbed Sniff.

Mel reached into her pocket.

“Maybe you’re looking for this.”

She released Plop.

It floated upward like a soap bubble and slipped back into the sky.

The moment it returned, rain softened, fruits fell kindly, hearts landed without breaking.

The Valley of Sounds sighed in harmony.

What Plop Teaches Us

Plop waved goodbye. (Yes, sounds can wave.)
Before disappearing, it whispered something only Mel could hear.

“Not everything needs to be loud to matter.
Some things change the world by arriving gently.”

Mel smiled, and Ever Since Then…

If you listen carefully, you can still hear Plop.

In a spoon sinking into soup.
In a snowflake touching your glove.
In the moment your worries finally let go.

And when you hear it…You’ll know that something has arrived safely.

Plop.

6 Comments

The Box We Leave Behind

January 17, 2026 at 9:18 am (Articles, Fairytales, Humor, kids stories, mental health, My Reflections, MYSTERIOUS, philosophy, psyche, research, satire, stories)
Tags: articles on wordpress, blog, blog post, creative writing, FOWC Fandango's One Word Challenge, inner self, introspection, lifelessons, PaletteNPixels, parables, pieces of my heart, stories, Writers on wordpress

In response to Fandango’s One word Challenge #FOWC.

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The word prompt is: Gathered

There was once a woman who lived at the edge of a village, where the road thinned and people rarely passed. Every evening, she walked the same path, bending to pick up what others overlooked – a button fallen from a coat, a torn page from a book, a feather caught in the dust. She placed each item in a small wooden box at home.

No one understood why she did this.

When asked, she would smile and say nothing.

Years later, when the woman passed away, the villagers opened the box. Inside, they found not junk, but memory. The button belonged to a child’s jacket she had once sewn. The page was from a poem she used to read aloud to her husband. The feather had been given to her by a stranger on a day she nearly gave up hope. What she had gathered was not debris – it was evidence that she had been alive, attentive, and grateful.

Only then did the village understand…some people gather to possess, and some gather to remember.

We like to believe that gathering is an action of the hands. In truth, it is an action of the heart.

We spend our lives gathering.

Not always objects, though we do that too. We gather keys, dust, photographs, receipts that no longer remember what they were for. But more quietly, more invisibly, we gather moments. A laugh that surprised us. A sentence someone once said that never left. A silence that felt heavier than words.

Time gathers us before we ever realize it.

As children, we gather wonder. The world comes to us unfiltered, and we collect amazement the way pockets collect stones. As adults, we gather responsibility, disappointment, resilience. By the time we grow old, we are gathered into memory itself, stitched together by what we loved, what we lost, and what stayed.

To be gathered is not merely to be brought together. It is to be held.

A family gathered around a hospital bed is not just a group of people in one room – it is fear, hope, regret, and love standing shoulder to shoulder. A crowd gathered in protest is not noise; it is conviction finding a voice. A single person gathering their thoughts before speaking is performing a quiet act of courage.

Even grief gathers. It gathers in the chest, in the throat, in the spaces where someone used to be. And yet, so does healing. Slowly, imperfectly, piece by piece.

In our lives, we gather far more than we notice. We gather glances that linger too long, words that wound or heal, moments that return to us years later uninvited. We gather failures and call them lessons. We gather love and call it fate. Even silence, when repeated often enough, gathers meaning.

Perhaps that is the miracle of the word. Gathered does not erase individuality. It allows fragments to exist together without demanding they become the same. We are not asked to lose ourselves – only to arrive.

To be gathered is not to be crowded; it is to be connected. A gathered life is one where scattered experiences are allowed to sit together, where pain is not erased but placed beside joy, where meaning is formed not by perfection but by accumulation.

In the end, we are all collectors of something intangible. And when our lives are opened, by time, by memory, by those who come after, what will be found is not how much we owned, but what we chose to gather.

When everything else falls away, what we have gathered is what remains – love given, lessons learned, kindness offered when it was hardest. A life is not measured by how much it scattered, but by what it managed to gather and who was gathered along the way.

And maybe that is all any of us are doing…gathering ourselves, again and again, until we feel whole.

4 Comments

Where the Sky Begins

January 17, 2026 at 1:55 am (Articles, Fairytales, kids stories, mental health, My Reflections, MYSTERIOUS, philosophy, psyche, research, satire, stories)
Tags: articles on wordpress, blog, blog post, creative writing, Friday Fictioneers, inner self, introspection, lifelessons, PaletteNPixels, parables, pieces of my heart, stories, Writers on wordpress

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Written for Rochelle Wisoff-Fields’ Friday Fictioneers prompt.

The photo appears to be looking up at a cathedral ceiling with inset stained glass windows. Below the windows looks like a walkway with arched openings.

The child entered the stone rotunda to escape the rain and, without knowing why, looked up. Above, a great dome rested on columns shaped by patient hands, holding the sky in place. Light poured through small stained windows, breaking into color, teaching that truth arrives in fragments.

In the quiet middle of looking, the child understood – the stone did not imprison the heavens, it pointed beyond them. When the rain ended and the child stepped outside, the world felt wider.

What once seemed like limits had become horizons, and faith was no longer a ceiling, but an invitation to keep looking upward.

3 Comments

Carrying Home Inside Me

January 17, 2026 at 12:38 am (Articles, Fairytales, Humor, kids stories, mental health, My Reflections, MYSTERIOUS, philosophy, psyche, research, satire, stories)
Tags: articles on wordpress, blog, blog post, creative writing, dailyprompt, dailyprompt-1820, inner self, introspection, lifelessons, PaletteNPixels, parables, pieces of my heart, stories, Writers on wordpress

Daily writing prompt

Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?

View all responses

Once, in a small village bordered by fields and sky, there lived an old gardener who was known for his trees. He planted them not for fruit he would eat or shade he would enjoy, but for travelers he would never meet. Every morning he watered saplings that would take decades to grow. When asked why he labored so tirelessly, he smiled and said, “Love is knowing I won’t be here, and planting anyway.” The villagers thought this was foolishness.

Years later, when the gardener was gone, children played beneath those trees, weary travelers rested in their shade, and birds found homes in their branches. Love, it turned out, had been quietly at work long after the hands that offered it had disappeared.

When I am asked, when did you feel this kind of love, my mind returns to something just as quiet and enduring. It wasn’t a single dramatic moment or grand declaration. It was a thousand ordinary choices made on my behalf, especially when I did not know how to ask for them.

I am neurodiverse, and as a child I struggled to fit into the rigid shapes the world often demands. School was not kind. Bullying arrived early, confusion followed often, and loneliness became familiar. Yet at home, I was never treated as strange, broken, or “other.” My parents never made me feel like an outcast for being different, never framed my needs as inconveniences, never let me believe that something was wrong with me for not blending in.

When the world pushed back, they stepped forward. When I could not adjust, they helped me learn how. When things were overwhelming, they intervened without overprotecting, supported without suffocating. Even in the most difficult, terribly lonely, and upsetting times, I was never made to feel like an anomaly. I was treated normally and that, I have come to understand, was extraordinary love. Not the kind that puts you on a pedestal, but the kind that anchors you firmly on the ground and says, you belong here exactly as you are.

Love often looks like that. It is not always softness. Sometimes it is tough, corrective, quietly firm. It teaches restraint, perspective, and balance. It asks us to let go of certain things so that what truly matters can remain happy and whole. My parents’ love did not shield me from reality; it equipped me to face it. They modeled fairness instead of judgment, analysis instead of assumption. Over time, that way of seeing the world began to flow through me like a second bloodstream.

I carry that love forward now. When someone offends me or behaves unexpectedly, my first instinct is not to condemn but to understand. It’s what they are, I tell myself. That does not mean I excuse harm or abandon boundaries. I am human, and I do lose my balance at times, but for the most part, I deal with situations like a professional observer of life. Calm, measured, reflective.

That is their legacy living on in me perhaps…the ability to pause, to assess, to respond fairly. Perhaps it helps that I am a Libran, inclined toward balance by nature, but even that inclination needed nurturing, and love was the soil.

This same quiet love reveals itself in the tireless striving of a father who works not for recognition but for security, ensuring his children are fed, cared for, and given opportunities he may never claim for himself.

It lives in the mother who does everything and then goes beyond that, whose labor is invisible precisely because it is constant. Her love fills spaces before they are noticed, sustains others while asking little in return. Much of this love is unseen, uncelebrated, and unnamed but it is the architecture of stability.

Beyond human relationships, love appears in places we often overlook. Nature gives without condition. The sun rises for everyone. Rain falls without bias. Trees offer shade and oxygen without knowing who will pass beneath them. There is no expectation of gratitude, only a steady offering. In that sense, love is everywhere, quietly sustaining life, asking nothing back.

And yet, threaded through all love is the knowledge of impermanence. I know I have been deeply loved, and I know that everyone and everything I love will eventually leave through change, distance, or time itself. This awareness does not lessen love; it sharpens it. It teaches us to cherish without clinging, to give fully without demanding permanence. Love becomes an act of courage precisely because it will not last forever.

Perhaps that is why we long so intensely for connection. Love reminds us that we matter beyond our usefulness, that our existence resonates in someone else’s life. It steadies us, reflects us, and gives meaning to our struggles.

But life also asks us to learn how to function when love is absent – to carry its lessons internally, to become what once held us. To operate with love is to feel nourished; to operate without it is to discover strength, discernment, and self-trust.

There is an old teaching whispered in the Upanishads about a seeker who asked his teacher, “What is that, knowing which everything is known?” The teacher did not answer immediately. Instead, he placed a lump of salt in a bowl of water and asked the student to return the next day. When the student came back, the teacher asked him to taste the water. “It tastes salty,” the student said.

The teacher asked him to taste it from the middle, from the edge, from the bottom. Each time the answer was the same. The salt had dissolved, unseen, yet it was everywhere. “So it is with truth,” the teacher said. “So it is with love. You may not see it, but it permeates all that is.”

Love, like that salt, is rarely visible in its pure form. It dissolves into effort, sacrifice, patience, restraint, fairness, and quiet endurance. It becomes the way we think before we judge, the way we pause before we react, the way we choose balance over bitterness. It becomes the legacy that flows through us long after the hands that offered it are no longer there.

Perhaps this is why scriptures across time return again and again to love not as emotion, but as essence. Not something to possess, but something to be.

Perhaps the real question is not whether love will remain, for nothing ever truly does, but whether we will recognize what it has already become within us. When love dissolves into our ways of seeing, choosing, and responding, it no longer announces itself, it acts through us.

Like salt in water, its presence is no longer visible, only tasted.

And so the question rests there, unhurried and enduring, like the shade of a tree planted by hands long gone, when love has shaped you and moved on, will you know how to live as its continuation – both in its warmth, and in the space it leaves behind?

2 Comments

Relatively Chill

January 16, 2026 at 8:42 pm (Articles, Fairytales, From Great Minds, mental health, My Reflections, MYSTERIOUS, philosophy, psyche, research, satire, stories)
Tags: articles on wordpress, blog, blog post, creative writing, Friday Faithfuls, inner self, introspection, lifelessons, PaletteNPixels, parables, pieces of my heart, stories, Writers on wordpress

In response to Jim Adams’s Friday Faithfuls Challenge: Galilean Relativity

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Respond to this Friday Faithfuls challenge by writing anything about concept of motion where an object travels from one place to another, or discuss anything that relates to position, velocity, inertial frames, observers and experiments, or explain why old ways of thinking should be abandoned when new scientific information proves a new truth, or anything else that you feel fits...

The Bus That Didn’t Know It Was Moving

Every morning at exactly 8:17, a city bus waits for me at the corner. One day, half asleep and clutching my coffee like a lifeline, I sat down and immediately panicked.

My coffee didn’t spill. My bag didn’t slide. My body didn’t feel dragged backward like in the movies.

Yet, outside the window, shops were gliding past. Trees were politely moonwalking in the opposite direction.

For a solid ten seconds, I wondered, Are we moving… or is the world rearranging itself around me?

That, unknowingly, was my first very personal encounter with Galileo Galilei.

A Small Parable About a Very Confused Passenger

Imagine a little sparrow sitting inside a wooden carriage. The carriage begins to roll smoothly down a road. The sparrow hops, flaps, pecks at imaginary crumbs, entirely unaware that wheels are spinning beneath it. To the sparrow, nothing has changed. The floor is still the floor. The air behaves. Gravity minds its own business.

Now imagine a farmer standing outside, watching the carriage go by. To him, the sparrow is moving at the speed of the carriage plus the speed of its hops.

Same sparrow. Two observers. Two very different stories.

Galileo smiled at this kind of confusion.

When Motion Isn’t What It Feels Like

Before Galileo, people believed motion was obvious. If something moved, you felt it. If the Earth were spinning, surely we’d be flung off like loose socks in a washing machine. Since we weren’t airborne, the Earth must be still. Case closed. Philosophy approved. Everyone went home.

Galileo, however, had the audacity to say…What if motion is sneaky?

He proposed that if you are inside a smoothly moving system – a ship, a carriage, or yes, a modern city bus you cannot tell whether you’re moving or standing still unless you look outside or experience acceleration. Inside, the laws of physics behave exactly the same.

Drop a ball. It falls straight down.
Pour water. It doesn’t slant.
Sip coffee. No tragic spills.

Motion, it turns out, is relative.

Motion, According to People Who Ruined Our Comfort Forever

Galileo’s big reveal was almost disappointing in its calmness. Motion, he argued, doesn’t announce itself. You don’t feel speed; you only notice changes in speed. There is no absolute stillness, just different points of view politely disagreeing.

Just when everyone was getting comfortable with this idea – fine, motion is relative, we can live with that, Einstein showed up and said, “Great. Now let’s talk about time.”

Galileo had messed with where you are and how fast you’re moving; Einstein decided your watch was also negotiable. According to him, move fast enough and time slows down like it’s stuck behind a tractor on a single lane road.

Two people can watch the same event and disagree not only about where it happened, but when it happened, and both be correct. Galileo promised the bus ride wouldn’t spill your coffee; Einstein warned it might age you differently. Same commute. Entirely different timelines.

And here’s the unsettling part – inside it all, everything still feels normal. No alarms. No shaking. Just quiet motion and very confident assumptions.

The Drama of Everyday Inertial Frames

An inertial frame sounds intimidating, but you live in one constantly. Your kitchen, your office chair, your Uber ride, these are all frames of reference moving at constant velocity.

When you walk forward inside a moving train, you are doing advanced physics while checking your phone. To you, you’re just late for your seat. To someone on the platform, you’re walking and being carried along by the train. Velocity stacks like weekend plans.

This is why your fitness tracker lies politely. It knows how fast you are moving, but not how fast Earth is spinning, orbiting the Sun, or racing through the galaxy like it’s late for a cosmic appointment.

There is no universal couch where the universe sits still. Everything is moving quietly, obediently, without asking our permission.

Why Old Thinking Had to Be Fired

Galileo didn’t just change physics; he offended comfort.

The old way of thinking said:

What we feel must be true
What seems obvious must be right
What tradition says must be defended

Galileo said:

Test it
Observe it
Repeat it

He trusted experiments over assumptions. He chose evidence over ego. And for that, history remembers him not just as a scientist, but as a troublemaker with a telescope.

Every time science advances, it asks us to let go of something cozy. The Earth wasn’t the center. Time wasn’t absolute. Space wasn’t fixed. Motion wasn’t what it felt like.

And each time, humanity resisted, until reality refused to cooperate.

Motion as a Metaphor We Keep Ignoring

Here’s the quiet brilliance of Galileo’s idea – you can be moving enormously and feel perfectly still.

How many beliefs are like that?

We grow up inside mental carriages – habits, traditions, opinions, so smoothly inherited that we mistake familiarity for truth. From inside, nothing feels wrong. The coffee doesn’t spill. The floor feels solid.

It’s only when we look out the window, through science, curiosity, or humility that we realize the scenery has been changing all along.

Motion doesn’t announce itself. Progress rarely shakes the floor. Sometimes, the most revolutionary truths arrive without drama, asking only that we pay attention.

A Question to Carry With You

If motion can exist without being felt, and truth can move while we remain comfortable, and the world can change while we sit calmly sipping coffee…

What belief in your life might be quietly in motion…waiting for you to notice the view outside the window?

Friday Faithfuls Reflection: A Faithful Frame of Reference

Some movements don’t announce themselves. They don’t shake the ground or rearrange our days. They happen silently within understanding, within belief, within the way we see the world. Faith can be like that. Familiar enough to feel still, yet alive enough to be changing beneath our certainty.

Science taught us that position matters, that where you stand shapes what you see. Faith gently suggests the same. What feels delayed, confusing, or unresolved from one frame may already be held, complete, in another. Perhaps truth is not static but relational, revealing itself differently as we move.

So maybe belief was never meant to be immovable only steady enough to travel with us. Maybe mystery is not the opposite of faith, but its horizon.

And if time can bend, space can curve, and reality can exist in probabilities rather than absolutes then here is the question worth sitting with:

What if God is not found at the destination, but in the very motion of our seeking?

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Wood You Believe This Scandal

January 16, 2026 at 10:33 am (Articles, Fairytales, Humor, kids stories, mental health, My Reflections, MYSTERIOUS, philosophy, psyche, research, satire, stories)
Tags: articles on wordpress, blog, blog post, creative writing, Fandango's One Word Challenge, FOWC, inner self, introspection, lifelessons, PaletteNPixels, parables, pieces of my heart, stories, Writers on wordpress

In response to Fandango’s One Word Challenge #FOWC

Scandalous

https://wp.me/pfZzxd-tRZ

Once there was a tree that had spent its entire life doing nothing remarkable. It grew where it was planted, leaned slightly to the left, hosted birds without opinions, and participated in the slow, uncontroversial business of photosynthesis. One day, after years of standing quietly and minding its rings, the tree fell. There was no ceremony. No audience. Just gravity, a soft violence, and the end of uprightness. The forest absorbed the sound and went on with its work.

Elsewhere, far from the forest and closer to Wi-Fi, someone heard about it.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, philosophy asks whether it made a sound. Scandalous asks a better question: who was offended, how quickly, and did they quote tweet it?

Because the tree didn’t just fall. It collapsed with intent. Its angle was suspicious. Its timing problematic. Someone noticed that it fell during an already sensitive week, and someone else pointed out that trees like this have a history. Context was demanded, then dismissed. An expert appeared. A worse expert appeared louder.

Within minutes, the forest was irrelevant. What mattered was the reaction. Someone said the tree “had it coming,” which was immediately called violent rhetoric. Someone else said “it’s just a tree,” which was worse. Neutrality, as always, was unforgivable. Silence was interpreted as endorsement. Apologies were drafted, rejected, redrafted, and finally deemed insufficient in tone.

The scandal wasn’t the falling. It was the audacity of falling without a disclaimer.

Threads bloomed like invasive species. Screenshots were taken of opinions that hadn’t finished forming yet. A grainy photo of the tree circulated with arrows, circles, and a red line suggesting intention. The comment section became a symposium where no one listened and everyone cited a source that no longer existed.

Eventually, someone asked the original question again, quietly, foolishly, was this really scandalous? And the answer arrived, immediate and unanimous – yes. And there was a thread about it.

Because scandal is not an event; it is a response in search of oxygen. It does not care whether a sound was made. It only cares that something could be interpreted as having meant something else.

The tree, meanwhile, lay there in the forest, doing what trees do when they fall, becoming wood, becoming mulch, becoming irrelevant. It did not issue a statement. It did not clarify intent. It did not log on. Which, in the final analysis, was its most scandalous act of all.

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The Weight of a Penny, the Swing of Time

January 16, 2026 at 10:15 am (Articles, Fairytales, Humor, kids stories, mental health, My Reflections, MYSTERIOUS, philosophy, psyche, research, satire, stories)
Tags: 3TC, articles on wordpress, blog, blog post, creative writing, inner self, introspection, lifelessons, PaletteNPixels, parables, pieces of my heart, stories, threethingschallenge, TTC, Writers on wordpress

In response to the Three Things Challenge #MM306

Your three words today are:
PENNY
PENDULUM
PICK

#threethingschallenge

https://wp.me/p3RSgb-vS0

A poor clockmaker lived at the edge of a quiet town. His shop was small, his hands were worn, and his pockets were almost always empty. Each night, when the town slept, he counted his coins before closing the door. Most nights, the count ended the same way – a single penny, resting in the center of his palm like a question with no answer.

One winter evening, as he swept the floor, the old grandfather clock in the corner stopped. Its pendulum hung still, frozen between one moment and the next. The clockmaker sighed. That clock had been with him since his youth, ticking through losses, hopes, and promises he never quite fulfilled. He opened its case and found the problem was small – almost insultingly small. A bent pin blocked the gears.

He searched his drawers for tools, but the shop had been stripped bare over the years. All he found was a thin metal pick, once used to tune strings for a guitar he no longer owned. It wasn’t meant for clocks, but it was all he had.

The clockmaker hesitated. He could leave the clock broken and rest, or he could try with something imperfect, something not designed for the task. He chose to try.

Carefully, patiently, he used the pick to free the jammed gear. The pendulum trembled, then swung. Tick. Tock. The sound filled the room, steady and alive.

In that moment, the clockmaker understood something he had missed for years.

The penny reminded him that worth is not measured by abundance, but by presence.
The pendulum taught him that life moves forward only when we allow it to swing back and forth between failure and hope.
And the pick showed him that progress often comes not from the right tool, but from the courage to use what you have.

The next morning, a traveler passed by and heard the clock ticking through the open door. Impressed, he bought the clock for more money than the clockmaker had seen in years. But even as his pockets grew heavy, the clockmaker smiled, not because he was richer, but because he was wiser.

For he had learned this simple truth…

You don’t need more to move forward.
You need faith in small things, patience with time, and the willingness to choose effort over fear.

And sometimes, a single penny, a swinging pendulum, and a humble pick are enough to change the rhythm of an entire life.

4 Comments

Overdrawn, Overdressed, Overeducated

January 16, 2026 at 9:16 am (Articles, Fairytales, Humor, kids stories, mental health, My Reflections, MYSTERIOUS, philosophy, psyche, research, satire, stories)
Tags: articles on wordpress, blog, blog post, Can you tell a story, creative writing, inner self, introspection, lifelessons, PaletteNPixels, parables, pieces of my heart, stories, Writers on wordpress

In response to Esther’s Can you tell a story in 38 words using the following words in it somewhere:

CHAMPAGNE
TOWER
OVERDRAWN
DIPLOMA

https://wp.me/p3vsTb-9d0

At graduation, my OVERDRAWN wallet toasted CHAMPAGNE dreams atop a TOWER of regrets; the DIPLOMA smiled, knowing success begins when humor survives debt, gravity, and relatives applauding the wrong person while I bowed, confetti fell, pants split, oops.

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