Every time I think I’ve reached an answer in life, it is eclipsed by a feeling of aliveness- the rare, electric sense that presence can feel more essential than knowing.

In twenty-three years of living, across experiences both dense and ordinary, I began to notice that this sense of aliveness returned in the same ways.

What follows is a journal excerpt, written in and rewritten since 2023.

Thinking as Proof of Existence

The first is thinking— the fact that consciousness can become real. We imagine, reflect, calculate, and then act. A thought becomes a sentence, a skyscraper, a law, a painting, a civilisation.

Thinking alone is evidence of our existence.

The human brain does not merely store information; it reorganises itself through thought. Across roughly 86 billion neurons, repeated firing patterns modify synaptic strength, selectively reinforcing some neural pathways while pruning others- a process known as neuroplasticity. At the cellular level, learning alters neurotransmitter release, receptor density, and gene expression within neurons, stabilising frequently used circuits while allowing unused connections to weaken. Attention and experience therefore reshape the brain’s circuitry over time, embedding thought into the brain’s physical structure.  

Thinking is the first step in how existence becomes knowable; every other claim of being follows from it.

We do not encounter reality directly, but through the structures of the mind that organise experience, as Immanuel Kant argued. The world appears to us because consciousness actively shapes it. Existence then unfolds through action. For Jean-Paul Sartre, to exist is not simply to think, but to choose- to take responsibility for meaning as it is lived. Taken together, thinking initiates being- perception, embodiment, and action are how existence becomes real.

Religion frames consciousness as participation in something divine: in Christian theology, humans are created imago Dei, capable of reason and moral judgment; in Hindu philosophy, Atman is inseparable from Brahman, the universal consciousness. Physics, meanwhile, encounters a boundary- the “hard problem” of consciousness articulated by David Chalmers- where no equation explains how subjective experience arises from matter. 

By scientific, religious, or philosophical standards alike, the fact that we can think at all is remarkable. Thinking is the condition that allows us to exist meaningfully. 

This rediscovery always lands with an existential weight—and then you realise, almost laughing, there’s nothing to do but to keep thinking.

Time and the Illusion of Certainty

The second is time—and more precisely, the recognition that the only thing that is experientially and causally real is the present moment.

In much of the Western world, we are conditioned to live toward the future. Planning, forecasting, and optimisation dominate economics, education, and even identity. Mathematics refines probabilities; religions offer eschatology; astrology suggests tendencies. But none of these can tell us what will happen with certainty; they only narrow odds.

Looking backward offers no firmer ground. Neuroscience shows that memory is not a fixed archive but a reconstruction, demonstrated repeatedly in the work of Elizabeth Loftus and Daniel Schacter. Each act of recall subtly alters the original event; confidence in memory does not correlate with accuracy. The past persists not as a stable fact, but as an evolving interpretation.

I used to recall a vivid childhood memory with my dad to my therapist Hana.
Sobbing into his chest, his arms cocooned a six year old me after getting lost at the shibuya crossing, one of my first memories of protection.
"But I can't remember if it's real or if it happened in a dream" I would say
"Whether its a dream or a memory - what matters is the narrative it holds now in the present" She replied

Funny how that works.

Other traditions challenge the assumption that time must be mastered through projection at all. In many African philosophies, time is understood as event-based rather than linear: the past remains active through ritual, ancestry, and communal memory, while the future holds meaning only insofar as it is near and socially grounded. Eastern philosophies push this insight further. In Buddhism, impermanence (anicca) dissolves any stable notion of past or future; reality is encountered only as continuous arising and passing away. In Daoist thought, time is not something to be controlled or predicted, but something to move with- an unfolding process rather than a line to be dominated. 

Across every framework, the conclusion converges: experience only ever occurs now.

If this is true, then the present is not just where life is felt- it is where it can be shaped. Choice, attention, and responsibility only ever arise here. 

When you are reading this sentence, this moment—welcome!—is the sole point of certainty and leverage we have on reality.

Everything else-memory and prediction alike-is interpretation. Time, here, is not an abstract horizon, but something lived and renewed through participation.

Love as Action and Continuity

I use the word love often, perhaps a little generously, but never without intention, because I believe it belongs to something far more expansive.

Love not as emotion, attachment, or romance- but
love as the act of extending consciousness beyond the self, and choosing to act on it.

If thinking is proof of existence, and the present moment is the only certainty, then love is what carries both forward through time. Love is not what we feel once, but what we return to-again and again- in attention, care, and responsibility.

Philosophy has long understood love in this way. In The Symposium, Plato describes love (eros) not as possession, but as orientation- a disciplined attention toward what we find meaningful. In Confucian thought, 仁 ren is not an inner sentiment but a practiced virtue, made real through ritual, responsibility, and conduct over time. To love is to direct attention consistently toward what we deem worthy- love as a verb rather than a state.

Modern neuroscience quietly echoes this insight. Human cognition is profoundly social. Research on neural synchrony shows that minds align through repeated co-presence-shared attention, learning, and return. Meaning deepens through sustained interaction over time. Love, biologically, is repetition with intention.

Long before modern science, many Indigenous cultures lived this truth as structure rather than theory. Storytelling, ritual, and custodianship of land were expressions of acts of continuity. Knowledge was carried through shared memory and responsibility to place, to then repeat across generations. Crucially, these traditions allowed for loss, and renewal-stories retold. Practices adapted, cycles broken and remade. Love, here, was a relationship sustained through change.

In this sense, civilisation itself is an expression of love.

At its best, it emerges not from dominance or efficiency, but from disciplined gathering, shared effort, and commitment carried forward through disruption. Even our modern world-so often collapsing and rebuilding-draws its most enduring forms from the same source: people choosing, again and again, to stay in relationship with what matters. Love allows systems to break down without being abandoned, and to be rebuilt without losing meaning.

Love is an action - the choice to continue: to attend a thousand births of who someone is becoming, to listen to a sentimental song again, to learn a new skill again, to let structures fall apart when they must, and to take responsibility for what comes next.

Love is what allows meaning to endure and regenerate.

—

This, to me, is where life feels most alive:
to think, knowing thought itself is existence;
to inhabit the present, knowing it is the only certainty;
and to act- together-so that meaning endures, again and again and again.

Aliveness as a practice to be returned to.

Notes on Discussed Concepts:

1. THINKING AS PROOF OF EXISTENCE

a. Thought as a Material Process (Neuroscience: neuroplasticity, Hebbian learning, synaptic plasticity - Eric Kandel, Donald Hebb)

• Affiliated literature:
  Eric Kandel, In Search of Memory; Donald Hebb, The Organization of Behavior; contemporary neuroscience research on learning and synaptic modification.

• Core claim:
  Thought is not abstract or immaterial. Repeated thinking physically reshapes neural structures, making consciousness a biological force that leaves material traces. Thinking itself is evidence of existence.

b. Consciousness as the Structure of Experience (Transcendental philosophy - Immanuel Kant)

• Affiliated literature:
  Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

• Core claim:
  We do not encounter reality directly. Experience is structured by the mind; consciousness actively shapes how the world appears to us.

c. Existence as Choice and Responsibility (Existentialism - Jean-Paul Sartre)

• Affiliated literature:
  Being and Nothingness; Existentialism Is a Humanism.

• Core claim:
  Existence is not defined by awareness alone, but by choice. Meaning arises through action and responsibility rather than contemplation.

d. Consciousness as Fundamental (Religious metaphysics - Christian theology; Hindu philosophy)

• Affiliated literature:
  Genesis 1:26-27 (Imago Dei); the Upanishads (Atman-Brahman doctrine).

• Core claim:
  Consciousness is not incidental but foundational: either as a reflection of divine reason or as continuous with universal consciousness.

e. The Limits of Scientific Explanation (Philosophy of mind - David Chalmers)

• Affiliated literature:
  The Conscious Mind; “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness.”

• Core claim:
  No physical theory fully explains subjective experience. Consciousness remains irreducible within current scientific frameworks.

2. TIME AND THE ILLUSION OF CERTAINTY

a. Prediction Without Certainty (Mathematics, economics, forecasting)

• Affiliated Concepts:
  Statistical forecasting models; probabilistic reasoning frameworks; risk theory.

• Core claim:
  Models refine probabilities but cannot produce certainty. The future remains fundamentally indeterminate.

b. Memory as Reconstruction (Cognitive psychology - Elizabeth Loftus; Daniel Schacter)

• Affiliated literature:
  Loftus’s false memory research; Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory.

• Core claim:
  Memory is not a fixed archive. The past is continually reconstructed and altered through recall, making it unstable as a source of certainty.

c. Event-Based Time (African philosophies of temporality)

• Affiliated literature:
  John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy.

• Core claim:
  Time is relational and event-based. The past remains active through ritual and ancestry; the future is meaningful only when imminent and socially grounded.

d. Impermanence (Buddhist philosophy)

• Affiliated literature:
  Pali Canon; doctrine of anicca.

• Core claim:
  All phenomena arise and pass away. Reality is accessible only as continuous change in the present moment.

e. Time as Process Rather Than Control (Daoist philosophy)

• Affiliated literature:
  道德經, 莊子 Dao De Jing; Zhuangzi

• Core claim:
  Time is not something to be mastered or predicted, but something to move with. Wisdom lies in attunement rather than control.

3. LOVE AS ACTION AND CONTINUITY

a. Love as Orientation Toward Meaning (Classical philosophy - Plato)

• Affiliated literature:
  The Symposium.

• Core claim:
  Love (eros) is not possession but orientation: disciplined attention toward what is meaningful and enduring.

b. Love as Practiced Virtue (Confucian ethics)

• Affiliated literature:
  論語 The Analects.

• Core claim:
  Love (ren) is not sentiment but enacted virtue, sustained through ritual, responsibility, and conduct over time.

c. Love as Biological Reinforcement (Social neuroscience)

• Affiliated Concepts:
  Research on neural synchrony and shared attention.

• Core claim:
  Meaning and connection deepen through repeated shared presence. Social bonds are biologically reinforced over time.

d. Indigenous knowledge systems intelligence

Affiliated practices:

• Oral law and storytelling traditions in many Aboriginal communities, where law, ethics, and ecological knowledge are transmitted through stories that are retold, adapted, and re-situated for each generation rather than preserved as fixed texts.

• Cultural burning practices developed by Indigenous Australians over tens of thousands of years, in which land is cared for through cyclical, low-intensity fire regimes that accept destruction as a necessary condition for regeneration.

• Ancestral land custodianship among many First Nations peoples, where responsibility to place is understood not as ownership but as an ongoing relational obligation that spans past, present, and future generations.

• Andean ayllu systems, in which communal life is organised around reciprocity and cyclical renewal, allowing social and ecological systems to adapt while maintaining continuity.

• Polynesian navigational knowledge, transmitted through embodied practice, chant, and apprenticeship rather than written instruction, allowing knowledge to survive loss, migration, and disruption.