The life of Krishna

 Krishna was always buried in his work. By day, he coded algorithms for a tech firm; by night, he hunched over his PhD thesis, chasing the elusive breakthrough that would justify three years of sacrifice. His calendar was a mosaic of deadlines, meetings, research papers, advisor calls, with all being color-coded, all urgent.

Friends invited him out. “Next time,” he’d say, waving a hand at his screen. His mother called every Sunday. “You’ll see me in a few more weeks,” he promised, cutting the conversation short. Even his morning coffee was utilitarian, gulped between emails, never savored.

One evening, his advisor asked a simple question: “What’s the most interesting thing you’ve learned outside your research lately?” Krishna opened his mouth, then paused. The answer was nothing. He hadn’t read a book for pleasure, taken a walk without a podcast lecture, or had a meal without multitasking in years.

That night, he left his laptop closed and sat on his apartment balcony, watching the sunset. It felt uncomfortable at first, like stepping off a treadmill mid-sprint. But as the sky burned orange, then purple, something loosened in his chest. The next morning, he worked with strange clarity as an idea that had eluded him for weeks suddenly clicked.

Krishna still worked hard. But he began guarding small pockets of stillness: ten minutes of silence with his tea, a weekend hour sketching in the park. His productivity didn’t suffer; it deepened. The breakthroughs came easier when he stopped strangling them.

Balance, he realized, wasn’t about having time. It was about claiming it, and remembering that a life measured only in output is a life half-lived.