Happy new year!

Time flies. It feels like just a few weeks ago that I arrived in a cold grey Berlin for the first time, having lost a suitcase. But it was 2,192 days ago.

The day I arrived here wasn’t my best, and the next few weren’t much better either. But eventually, things worked out and the city really grew on me. Let me rephrase. Cities don’t grow on people. It is the people, the experiences and the sense of belonging that makes us feel home.

A year before I moved to Berlin, I was living in Nahur, Mumbai trying to make sense of why one set of walls feel like home while the other just a place to sleep. What makes a home, home? Fortunately for me, the important lessons learned then were used time and again whenever I wanted to feel homely in this foreign city, in a foreign country.

This week I’m crowd sourcing some new year resolutions from my close friends inspired by Moxie, and trying to shape the year forward to the best of my abilities. It has been a busy week at work, since everyone is back from vacations. That, and catching up with people that I hadn’t see in sometime means I’m having a packed week.

But I still wanted to find some time to write this article. It is a way of snapshotting this moment in time. Lots of positive changes over the last couple of weeks including a visit to CCC Congress, Freiburg, reading books like Tuedays with Morrie and The Last Lecture and a lot of introspection.

The books and the introspection gave me a profound realization that the passage of time doesn’t stop, and it passes fast if we don’t keep moving, keep growing in life. Not only am I getting older, but so are the people around me. If there’s something I really want to do, now is a good time. I knew this, of course. I just had forgotten it lately.

Thank you for reading!