Jan 02, 2026: Will the world offer itself to me, Kafka?

The morning started with some more ruminatory daydreaming. Stuffing myself full of other people’s talents until it felt less like inspiration and more like bingeing, scrolling, absorbing, hoarding brilliance that wasn’t mine to metabolize. My imagination couldn’t digest it. It curdled. What came back up wasn’t admiration anymore but a sour mix of anxiety, insecurity, a softer and sadder kind of jealousy that doesn’t want to steal, just wants to understand why it never became. Regrets also tagged along, uninvited but very familiar, reminding me of all the timelines I ghosted. I lay there overstimulated and undercommitted, feeling both expanded and hollow, like I had traveled everywhere I was not allowed to, without ever leaving the bed. The day had not even asked anything of me yet, and I was already exhausted from rehearsing lives I don’t live. I came across a few words of Franz Kafka that made me want to start writing this morning:

It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you to be unmasked, it can do no other, it will writhe before you in ecstasy.

- Number One Hundred and Nine from Zürau Aphorisms, translated by Michael Cisco¹

The words did not feel motivational, but quietly accusatory, so I feel like my act of writing is an act of defense. Like they were asking why I keep mistaking motion for access, why I believe arrival requires spectacle. Which felt weirdly familiar because Kafka's words have never provided me momentum. Rather, I have always felt as if he is providing me permission to stop pretending that effort should always look productive. Be still, he says. Do not even look for a shortcut, or a hack. But, that's also the part that unsettles me the most. Because, more often than not, stillness feels less like peace and more like risk, like "तूफान से पहले की शांति" (Toofan se pehele ki shaanti - Calm before the storm). There is no scrolling to buffer the discomfort, there is no work to hide-behind, there is no imagined future-self to rehearse. Just the raw fact of myself being here, completely unmasked before anything else can be. 

I do not know if the world will writhe before me in ecstasy. Will the world writhe before me, Kafka? I do not know. This feels quite dramatic, and even suspicious, Kafka. But maybe writing doesn't begin with brilliance or discipline or having something worth saying. For some, it begins when they think. For some, when they open their lips. For some, when they twirl their pens in their hands. I think, nowadays, for me, writing begins when I stop outsourcing my attention. When I sit long enough for the noise to thin and whatever’s been circling quietly finally gets impatient. This morning, at least, I stayed. That felt like something.

- Oizys.

¹ Cisco has given commentaries in his book and reading the commentary No. 109's Aphorism felt like someone switching on the harsh light after a long, indulgent dusk. Not in a clarifying manner, more like someone sharpening the unease. What stayed with me is this idea that belief isn’t optional and that skepticism doesn’t float free of faith but squats inside it, often disguised as refusal in some people. So, even the posture of “nothing satisfies my idea of truth” is already a value system clearing its throat. Hence, there is no neutral ground. We are always standing somewhere, even when we insist we’re hovering or just spectating. I keep circling his phrase prescriptive madness with the red marker of my mind's rumination. Belief as something donkey-stubborn, almost embarrassing in its insistence. Not elegant, not defensible, just chosen and held. That lands uncomfortably close to writing (and like something else too, guess what...?). To sit and wait, as Kafka suggests, isn’t passive but a kind of sanctioned madness for refusal to chase events with the decision to affirm that stillness will yield something, even when there’s no proof it will. Especially then. Further, Cisco’s reading of the world (not as illusion!) but as desiring entity unsettles me more than the Buddhist version ever did (as much as I know of). The idea that the world wants something, anything from me, not metaphorically, not sentimentally, but actively, but proactively, the idea swells me. That when I stop moving, stop distracting myself, it doesn’t dissolve; it advances. Strips. I do not think the writhe is going to transcend here. Maybe, it will insist? Or, demand? The world trying to win me back from my own withdrawal unconsentingly. That makes the stillness feel less safe, less holy. More exposed. So, that’s why I avoid it. Because if the world really does exist like that... wanting, pressing, writhing. offering itself; then my inertia isn’t neutral anymore. It’s actively and proactively evasive. My endless preparation for starting something, my rehearsals, my daydreams of becoming are ways of not standing still long enough for the encounter to happen. Beckett understood this, apparently. Reduce the stage until what remains has no choice but to speak; no spectacle, no lineage, no backstory to hide behind. Just attention as an act of faith, crude and irrational and embarrassingly sincere. Kafka recoiling from his own aphorism makes sense to me. There’s something dangerous about saying the world will come to you if you stop. It comes and it removes all the excuses. It suggests that maybe nothing is missing except the courage to be still and accept whatever shows up... desire, boredom, accusation, embarrassment, failure, or nothing at all. And maybe that’s the risk I keep postponing. Not failure. Not inadequacy. But belief, in its most unpolished, donkey-like form.