I often return to a memory from when I was not more than five years old. I was sitting outside my house with an empty milk packet in my hand. I washed it, poured a little water into it, and through the translucent plastic the water looked almost like ice. Like many children growing up at that time, ours was a home without a refrigerator.

As I squeezed and turned the packet in my hands, I became convinced that if I held the water in just the right way, I could somehow make it freeze. I don’t know where that idea came from. But the conviction was real. Every tiny movement felt like progress. The possibility itself made the game irresistible.

Soon, there was no house, no street, no passing time. There was only me, the milk packet, and five spoons of water. I don’t remember when I gave up. Like most childhood games, it simply dissolved into the next one.

But unlike the others, this moment never left me. For more than thirty-four years, it has returned to me with surprising clarity. Every now and then it appears, exactly as it happened, and I am always amused at its randomness before moving on. I never asked why this particular memory had survived while so many larger moments had disappeared.

Now that I am forty, it returned once again. This time I decided to leave the question for a while to marinate. What strikes me now is that I am still that child, completely absorbed in an experiment. Only the experiments have changed.
Since then I have held many different things in my hands, ideas, music, relationships, careers, identities, beliefs. I have turned each of them around, wondering if something unexpected might emerge if I paid enough attention. The experiment that occupies me today is much stranger than making ice inside a milk packet. It is to find out whether aspiring to be an honest human being is, in itself, a meaningful way to live.

I am still that child. Still holding something. Still turning it this way and that. Still wondering if attention alone can transform it. Back then, the experiment was about ice. Now it is about goodness.

I never managed to make the water freeze in my hands. And I cannot honestly say that I have found much evidence that goodness is meaningful, or even that it matters in the way we hope it does. The mystery remains.

I guess the mystery and the observer need each other. The observer exists only as long as there is something that refuses to be understood. I think once the mystery disappears, there is only observation. And then another question quietly arrives.

If I was the child playing with water. What was it that was watching the child?
The mystery remains.

P.S: Tell me what experiments you have been quietly running in the labs of your mind…

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