Most of Your Life Is Spent Accumulating in the Dark — Without You Knowing It
The fire does not announce its coming — it only waits for the right spark
Lately, I’ve noticed something shifting in me.
The urge to write has started overflowing. Ideas come in a flood — I sit down and they pour out, one after another, and I can’t stop. It doesn’t feel like work. It feels like release.
This is nothing like how I wrote when I first started. Back then, I had little to say. I’d pick up a pen, stall, write a sentence and delete it, delete it and write it again, sometimes tear the whole thing down and start over. Like trying to squeeze water from dry stone.
Between those two states is a very long stretch of time. I can’t pin down the exact number, but somewhere in the range of fifteen, twenty years.
That gap reminded me of another moment.
I was studying in the UK. After finishing an exam, a few of us went to a nearby restaurant to celebrate, ordered some drinks. Somewhere in that warm haze of half-drunk, my friend struck up a conversation with an Indian guy at the next table. Somehow I drifted into it too.
And then my English just — opened up.
My friend was visibly surprised. Before that night, my English had always been a little halting, a little slow, a little stiff. But that evening, something was different. Whatever I wanted to say came out without effort. No searching, no hesitation.
Did that one drink teach me English?
Of course not.
I’d been studying English since I was a child. By the time I left for the UK, I’d been at it for over a decade. All of that had been taking root, quietly growing inside me. I just hadn’t reached the tipping point yet. That drink, on that particular night, happened to strike a spark at exactly the right moment. If it hadn’t been that evening, I think the tipping point was already close.
My writing these days feels exactly like that night.
Decades of reading. Sporadic attempts at writing. Philosophy, sociology, psychology — books I finished without being able to say exactly what I took from them, but read all the same. All of it had been growing inside me. I just didn’t know. Because before the tipping point arrives, you can’t feel yourself accumulating.
You only feel like you’re not there yet. Still behind. Still stumbling. There’s no external signal that says you’re almost ready. The progress happens somewhere you can’t see, without making a sound.
And then one day — it arrives.
We’re far too accustomed to measuring ourselves in short intervals.
Three months without visible progress, and we start to doubt. Six months without a breakthrough, and we start to waver. A year or two without any obvious change, and we begin to wonder if we were ever going to get there at all.
But some tipping points take decades.
If you’re using the wrong unit of time, you’ll always feel like you’re standing still.
And here’s the cruelest part: most people don’t give up because they haven’t accumulated enough. They give up because they don’t know that they already have. The kindling has been there all along. But the fire hasn’t come yet — so they conclude they must have failed, and they walk away.
One step before the threshold.
I can’t tell you where your tipping point is. I can’t tell you when it will come.
I only know this: the spark will arrive, sooner or later.
As long as you’re still there when it does.