There was a time — not that long ago — when the tunnel had no light. Not at the end, not even at the beginning. Just darkness, thick and unyielding. I had lost my job, lost my footing, and with it, the fragile scaffolding of confidence. Depression is not just sadness; it is the absence of horizon. You cannot even imagine the possibility of dawn.
In those days, the only thing I had was a domain name: Mindzendo.coach. A small corner of the digital world, a name I had registered almost absentmindedly, like planting a seed without knowing if the soil would ever hold.
Then something curious happened. On GoDaddy, an unknown bidder kept raising the price for that domain. Ten dollars, a hundred, a thousand. When it touched six thousand, I was tempted to sell. After all, I was penniless. Six thousand dollars could have been oxygen for someone who was drowning in the whirlpool of life.
But then a thought struck me: if someone else sees so much value in this, and I cannot, then the issue is not with the domain — it is with my eyes. To sell it then would have been to sell not just a name, but the possibility of my own seeing. So I declined.
That refusal was not an act of wealth, but of faith. Faith that value is not always measured in currency, and that sometimes the world tests us by showing us our worth through another's eyes.
It was around then that my friend Komal Jain said, "Why don't you monetise your writing?" At that time, even stepping out of the house felt like climbing Everest. To imagine that my words could carry value, that they could be exchanged in the marketplace of human attention, was almost absurd. And yet, it was precisely then that I applied for an online writing programme.
The irony is not lost on me. I had no money, no certificate, no job, no confidence. But I had a domain name, a friend's suggestion, and a stubborn refusal to sell what I did not yet understand. Out of that refusal, a new path opened.
That online writing programme is one of the most reputed in the world, and would have cost me a fortune. But when I wrote to them — explaining that, in the aftermath of Covid, the NGO I worked with had let me go and I was absolutely penniless — they let me join on two conditions: no certificate, and I was not to broadcast their generosity too widely. I have kept both, as best I can.
The writing programme taught me what no certificate could: that the heart of writing is perspective. It is not about technique. And perspective is born not in comfort, but in crucible. It is born when you sit in the tunnel without light and still choose to see. It is born when you decline six thousand dollars because you sense that the real treasure is not in the offer, but in the challenge.
Looking back, I see that Mindzendo was never just a domain. It was a koan. A question posed by life itself: Do you know your own value?
And writing became the answer. Not a final answer, but a living one. Each word, each act of seeing, became a way of reclaiming that value — not in the marketplace, but in the heart.
The tunnel did not end. It transformed. The darkness became ink. The absence of light became the page. And the act of writing became the lamp.
After the lamp came the books. Three of them, in particular, became companions on the writing path. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott — honest, irreverent, a writer telling the truth about the mess of writing without flinching. Several Short Sentences About Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg — spare, surgical, a love letter to the sentence itself. And Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg — which came to me through Fr. AMA Samy, who recommended it when I asked him to write a preface for my first book, Fallen Flower, Fragrant Grass. ( https://amzn.in/d/02lCskfG ) Goldberg writes about writing the way a Zen teacher writes about sitting — as practice, as presence, as a return to what is already there. I should not have been surprised. The bones, after all, are just another name for the ground.
After living in the Zendo for almost three and a half years, one thing I have learnt: writing is like Zazen. One writes for the sake of writing. One reads for the sake of reading. One sits for the sake of sitting. All of them are complete in themselves. Anything that comes out of them is just a bonus — grace, arriving uninvited.
