The night is on its way out.

It feels good to be at the keyboard, typing while thoughts are still stretching, not yet arranged into order. Soon morning will arrive and patterns will lock everything into place.

Outside, my elderly neighbour steps out, yoga mat on one shoulder, a large bag on the other. Her husband usually drops her by car. Today he doesn’t. It’s too cold. Too dark. She goes anyway. A pattern she lives within.

Patterns do that. They pull you out of bed even on the coldest winter mornings.

The year ends tonight. A neat chronological marker. Most of what we lived inside these three hundred and sixty-five days was repetitive, automatic, predictable. And yet, as the calendar thins, introspection arrives right on cue.

Perhaps that, too, is a pattern.

Identifying patterns has become a preoccupation for me ever since I began understanding neuroscience in a bid to understand the brain: this extraordinary predicting apparatus we are born with. Not as a detached scientist or philosopher, but as someone living squarely inside its contradictions. A paradox holder.

On one hand, I am clutching the last few days of the year. The 2025 coupon expires soon and if not now, then when? So I make lists. The customary India Gate visit my seventeen-year-old........

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