Fragments of the Quiet Mind

I used to believe in karma—naïve, I know. That moral ledger balancing debts and credits, handing out justice on time. Turns out, karma’s broken. Or maybe it never existed, just a myth we told ourselves to sleep at night. The worst people don’t just slip through the cracks. They built the cracks. They thrive in the ruins, stacking money on the bones of those who trusted them. It’s not a game anymore. It’s a machine—greedy, ruthless, and programmed to reward the cruelest operators. The bad don’t just get ahead—they consume whole worlds, leaving scraps for the rest. And here we are, pretending fairness is around the corner while the cold truth settles in: the world belongs to those who take without guilt, who use without mercy. Kindness is weakness. Empathy, a liability. The soul is currency no one wants to buy. Sometimes I wonder if the good are just ghosts in this system—forgotten, erased, slowly fading into silence while the vultures feast. No grand justice is coming. No reckonin...

It was a quiet morning in Baguio, I'm off to my usual morning run, when I heard a child speaking broken Ilocano with a cadence that didn’t quite belong here. His mother, wrapped in layers too thin for the mountain cold, held his hand too tightly—like someone afraid of losing something else. I didn’t ask where they came from. I didn’t need to. You can recognize dislocation even in silence. It has a certain weight. Like a suitcase packed with the wrong memories. We talk about refugees as if they all cross oceans, but some just cross rivers, or barbed wire, or city lines. And some don’t even move at all—they’re just slowly pushed out of the center of their own lives. Not every exile is geographic. Sometimes, it’s spiritual. Cultural. Bureaucratic. We measure displacement in kilometers, but it is better measured in lost language, eroded rituals, in the way children forget how to name the trees their ancestors worshipped. What makes a home isn’t the walls, but the ability to imagine ...

I used to think the universe was out to get me. Not in a dramatic, lightning-strikes-twice kind of way, but in the quiet, petty way it forgets to answer your prayers and lets your socks vanish in the dryer. You know, the small stuff that feels personal even though it obviously isn’t. Eventually, I stopped waiting for signs. Stopped thinking the traffic light was red because I needed to slow down metaphorically. Maybe it was just red. Maybe the universe wasn’t teaching me anything—it just was. Motionless in its vastness, humming its own tune, not even aware I existed. And weirdly, that helped. There’s a strange relief in realizing no one’s scripting your life behind the curtain. That fate isn’t micromanaging your heartbreaks or curating your triumphs like some cosmic film editor. Things just… happen. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you don’t. And it’s not personal. It never was. But that doesn’t mean it’s meaningless. You can still assign meaning. Stitch it into the fabric of or...