After spending all of 2025 speaking to ChatGPT therapists, falling in love with AI boyfriends and losing the joy of creating visuals in our heads to Sora, we are walking into 2026, where expression will continue to be mediated, autonomy easily outsourced and the self proofchecked and emptied of its mistakes. Such a year, then, is also an opportunity. An opportunity to hold taut with bare hands the width and expanse of humanness. To lean into the ways we notice things. To permit ourselves vulnerability and courage. A year to practice, ever more deeply, the full spectrum of our peculiar capacities.
1. Let your errors delight you
When your voice veers off-key at the height of the octave, when lose turns into loose and you can’t abort the email, when the clay you were moulding into a mug slumps into an ashtray, laugh. Consider that erring is sauntering. This is how you see the worlds that exist alongside the one you meant to be in. The word ‘error’ did originally mean ‘wander’. Wander, famously, does not mean being lost. Enjoy the meandering. Savour the detour. Inefficiently, gallivant into meaning.
2. Search hard for the words, but do not expect adequacy from them
You will know this best when you have to comfort a friend who has lost a parent. There are no words that can reorient the ground that shifts in an ordinary instant. None that can prevent the dreams where they experience loss again and again.
When loving someone, distrust eloquence. Carry their bags. Peel the pomegranate. When their laces come undone, bend down, tie two knots, not one. Walk with them through the street where the dogs they’re afraid of lurk; stay up when the intrusive thoughts are too much. There are a million beautiful love poems, but none that soften the knots of living as much as the rolling and squeezing of the trapezius. That is the work of two hands.
3. Insist on a potluck
When you sit down to eat, you will ask where the food comes from. Where did you learn that recipe? How did you make it? You will learn that the spinach chicken pulao came from the necessity to pack nutrition and save time, the kokam in the fish curry came from his grandmother’s farm, the rice kheer with puri is the only reason she enjoyed pujas at home. You will learn what ‘heirloom’ means, what a nicely repackaged mistake is. In the end, you will learn that no plate of food is complete without another’s help. That is the main point.
4. Notice the accidental discoveries that drastically improve your day
The folded currency note in your pocket. The song you had saved for later resurfacing through auto-play. A meeting with an old acquaintance you bumped into and spoke with, instead of, as usual, avoiding their gaze. Make a ritual out of good accidents. Become the cause of them. Drop an email to a classmate. Queue songs from artists you’ve never heard. Leave notes in your back pockets.
5. Make a song
Make a song that you’d send to space. Make a song that if you were sick and hopeless, you’d listen to comfort yourself. Start with a swoosh of the ocean swelling in the kitchen when the coffee comes to a boil. Then the chirrup of the sparrows nesting inside the tooth gap of an old roof. The car alarm that goes off every day without fail can be the percussion. Add the groan of the lift, the hum of electricity, the fan whirring. Include in the chorus the giggle of the girl across from your flat, and, from two floors below, a beginner fumbling on the piano. Include also the strum of the stream you live by or its urban, electronic version from the cat’s water fountain. For the last verse, record your own raspy voice calling out the name of the last person you speak to before you retire for the night, then loop it sixteen times and let it swell to the high octave of your yearning. You can call this song ‘The Signs of Life.’
6. Learn the art of making someone laugh
This requires a small disappearance of the self. An inversion of an idea. An abandonment of straight lines. A stitching of two moments across time. When you can do all of this and invoke a laugh that rises from the pit of the stomach, when you are able to spill a human into giggles, consider it your day’s earnings.
7. Become a cat
Know where your body ends, and things begin. In the morning, sit in the full spectrum of the sun. Find your way back home entirely by smells. Purr into the frequency of the universe from the corner of the bed. Join the Intergalactic Association of Feline Intelligence. Learn whatever they know about rest without the guilt. About dangerous curiosity. About failing but never renouncing elegance.
8. To learn where you came from, sit by a river and close your eyes
There are trinkets inside the water’s throat, an unhurried song the redstart sings. Consider not fire but flow as the origin of things.
9. Learn ways of being from unexpected teachers
Learn how to pay attention from paragliders. They read what is essentially invisible by watching how it touches the visible—the drift of a single leaf, the angle of a flag, the sensation on the back of the neck, the forehead, the cheek. They watch how the clouds change shape to measure the tenacity of the wind.
From a potter, you learn orientation. I discover at the wheel that the clay mirrors you. A slight tilt to the left and left is where the mould leans. And so, you reorient to the centre, except it is the toughest thing to do. There is no measuring tape, no technical means with which to calibrate. You only have your own hands, what they hold and the soft intersection of the two.
