When the Wind Returns to the Sail

A few months ago, I caught myself staring at a flickering cursor on an empty screen. No deadline. No urgency. Just an unsettling stillness. It wasn’t quite sadness, and it wasn’t burnout.

It was languishing—that quiet fog that dims even the good days, where presence is replaced by mere persistence, and joy becomes a distant visitor.

Oddly, I wasn’t alone in it.

A friend I’ve known since school—five years in the same classrooms, laughter over shared notes and silly rivalries—came to mind. He went into accounting, I into engineering. We stayed in touch with a call or a dosa meet every few months, something we both cherished.

But the last few meetings weren’t the same. He was slower, quieter, sometimes didn’t show up at all. He’d always been someone you could set your watch to—punctual, precise, deeply engaged. But lately, even his clients had begun to complain. Missed deadlines. Unanswered queries. A man once celebrated for clarity now seemed to drift.

He hadn’t played his violin in months, though it used to be his daily companion. The case, he said, stayed closed.

I had to nudge him—gently, persistently—to speak to a therapist. He went once, admitted it helped, but never followed up. It wasn’t defiance. It was something deeper. Like he had misplaced himself, and wasn’t sure where to start looking.

My guru’s words surfaced in those days like a quiet bell:

“You must separate your work and its result in the timeline. Don’t wonder if you’ll reach the hive while collecting nectar. The strength you don’t know you have will reveal itself when you surrender to something that energizes you. If your job tires you, but the loss of your potential doesn’t stir you—pause. Look around. You have to find yourself. Quickly.”

So I invited him to join a cause I was supporting—an NGO helping rescue and rehabilitate survivors of human trafficking. At first, he came out of courtesy. But soon, something changed.

He started by reviewing accounts. Then mentoring staff. Then traveling to remote border villages near Nepal. He became involved—not just in the work, but in its heartbeat. Somewhere in those far-off places, while rebuilding broken systems, he began to rebuild something within himself.

He called me one day from a dusty outpost near the border. No big words. Just a quiet sentence: “I think I’m useful again.”

When he visited last, I noticed something. After dinner, he sat on the verandah, folding a simple cotton handkerchief. Slowly. Carefully. Aligning the corners, smoothing the creases with deliberate ease.

He looked at it, smiled—not at me, but at the handkerchief—and said, “Perfect.”

Not because everything was fixed. But because something had returned. A presence. A quiet joy. A sense of self, perhaps.

It struck me: maybe the cure for languishing isn’t reinvention. Maybe it’s remembrance.

Of the things that once moved us. The rituals that ground us. The causes that call us to surrender, not to obligation, but to meaning.

Sometimes, the wind returns.
Not because we chase it.
But because we open the sail—and wait.