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Ink & Imagination, Lugbe, Abuja (2026)

03/05/2026

I once spent an entire Sunday afternoon arguing with someone in my head. A conversation that hadn't happened. About a thing they probably didn't even remember. I lost the argument, by the way. In my own imagination. On a sunny day when I could have been outside.

That's not thinking. That's a disease.

And apparently, according to Ryunosuke Koike, former Buddhist monk, current master of Tsukuyomi Hall in Japan, and author of this tiny but mighty book, I'm not alone. Most of us are walking around with a brain that's basically a runaway train, and we've convinced ourselves that this is just what being human feels like.

It's not. And The Practice of Not Thinking is here to prove it.

First, the title is a little misleading. Koike isn't asking you to become a brain-dead cabbage. He's asking you to stop worshiping every thought that floats through your head like it's a sacred message from the universe.

Most of your thoughts, he argues, are not profound. They're not helpful. They're not even real. They're just habits. Loops of desire, anger, and uncertainty that play on repeat because you've never learned how to step off the track.

The book is 144 pages. Short. Brutal. To the point. No fluff. No "close your eyes and visualize a peaceful meadow." Just a former monk telling you, sometimes gently, sometimes not, that you are the source of most of your own suffering.

4 Lessons That Followed Me Around:

1. Most of your thinking is just worry in a business suit.
Koike asks a question that stopped me cold: Is this thought helping me solve an actual, present-moment problem? Or is it rehearsing the past or inventing a future?

If it's the second one, it doesn't deserve your attention. This wrecked me because I've always believed that worrying is a form of caring. That if I stopped thinking about a problem, I was being irresponsible. Koike says no, worrying is just a bad habit. It feels productive. It isn't. The real work isn't solving every problem in advance. It's learning to tolerate uncertainty without spinning out.

2. Your body is smarter than your brain.
Koike isn't a fan of abstract thinking. He wants you in your senses. Right now. Not after you figure everything out. His argument: your body lives in the present. Your mind lives everywhere else, past regrets, future anxieties, alternate realities where you said the perfect comeback. When you drop into a sense, touch, sound, breath, taste, you're pulling yourself back to the only moment that actually exists.

3. Stillness is not emptiness. It's home.
This is the heart of the book for me. Koike writes that we've become addicted to busyness. We fill every silence with a podcast, every waiting moment with a scroll, every uncomfortable feeling with a distraction. We've forgotten how to just be.

But here's the thing he wants you to know: the peace you're looking for isn't at the end of your to-do list. It's not hiding behind the next promotion or the next relationship or the next vacation. It's available right now. In the pause between thoughts. The mind that never rests isn't sharp. It's exhausted.

4. Wanting less is not deprivation. It's freedom.
This is where Koike gets controversial. He argues that most of our suffering comes from wanting things to be different than they are. Not just big things, little things. The temperature. The traffic. The way someone said hello. We're constantly fighting reality, and we're exhausted from the fight.

His solution? Stop fighting. Not in a passive, give-up way. In a strategic, save-your-energy-for-what-matters way. Does that mean you can't want a better job or a healthier body? No. But it means you stop making your happiness conditional on getting them. You do the work. You let go of the outcome. And you notice that you're okay either way.

Peace doesn't arrive when life calms down. It arrives when you do. Now go outside. Feel the air. Stop arguing with people in your imagination. You're allowed to just be.

01/05/2026

Impossible itself says I m possible 😍

01/05/2026

Some books demand to be read in one sitting, cover to cover, like a thriller you can't put down. This is not that book.

And Then I Chose Myself is the opposite. It's a book you keep on your nightstand. A book you open when you're feeling small. A book you flip to a random page when the voice in your head is being especially cruel. A book that meets you exactly where you are, messy, tired, healing at your own slow pace, and says, gently, "Stay here with me for a minute."

Chiara Mercurio has written 101 short reminders. Some are a single paragraph. Some are barely three sentences. Each one is like a small, warm hand on your shoulder. They're not complicated. They don't require a philosophy degree or a meditation practice. They're just... true. The kind of true that makes you exhale.

I bought this book during a really hard season. I had just ended a relationship with someone who made me feel like I was too much and never enough, simultaneously. I was exhausted. I had given so much of myself away that I wasn't sure what was left. A friend sent me a screenshot of one of Mercurio's passages, something about how you can't pour from an empty cup, and how the people who love you will never ask you to, and I bought the book before I finished reading the screenshot.

I'm glad I did.

The format is deceptively simple. Each reminder stands alone. You can read one a day, like a vitamin. You can read ten in a row when you're spiraling. You can read the same one twenty times until it finally sinks in. There's no wrong way.

7 Lessons:

1. Choosing yourself is not selfish. It's survival.
Mercurio reframes this beautifully. We're taught from a young age that putting ourselves first is somehow wrong, especially if you're a woman, especially if you're a caretaker, especially if you've been raised to make everyone else comfortable. But Mercurio argues that choosing yourself is actually the most generous thing you can do. Only when your cup is full can you genuinely offer anything to anyone else. Choosing yourself isn't taking from others. It's making sure you have something to give.

2. Your body keeps the score of every time you betrayed yourself.
One of the most powerful reminders in the book is about the physical cost of people-pleasing. The tight shoulders. The knot in your stomach. The exhaustion that no amount of sleep can fix. Mercurio says: your body is not punishing you. Your body is telling you the truth that your mind has been too afraid to say. Listen to it. The anxiety before a phone call with a certain person. The dread before a family dinner. That's not weakness. That's data.

3. You cannot heal in the environment that broke you.
This one hit hard. Mercurio writes about how we often try to heal while still staying in relationships, jobs, or homes that are actively hurting us. It's like trying to treat a wound while someone keeps stabbing you. You can meditate, journal, and affirm yourself into exhaustion, but if you're still in contact with the person who makes you feel worthless, healing will be nearly impossible. Sometimes choosing yourself means leaving. Not because you're weak. Because you're finally strong enough to admit what's true.

4. The voice that says "you're not enough" is not your real voice.
Mercurio calls this the "imposter inside." It sounds like you. It uses your words. But it's not you. It's the accumulation of every criticism, every rejection, every message you've internalized from people who couldn't see your worth. Your real voice is quieter. Kinder. It says "you're doing your best" and "it's okay to rest" and "you belong here." The work of healing is learning to tell the difference between the two voices, and then feeding the right one.

5. Grief is not a problem to solve.
We want grief to be linear. We want to feel sad, process it, and then be done. But Mercurio honors the messy, looping, unpredictable nature of real grief. You don't "get over" losing someone you loved, whether they died or whether they turned out to be someone you didn't recognize. You learn to carry the grief differently. Some days it's heavy. Some days it's light. Some days it ambushes you in the cereal aisle. That's not a sign you're broken. That's a sign you loved.

6. Boundaries are not walls. They are doors.
I love this image. Mercurio says that boundaries get a bad reputation as cold or unloving. But healthy boundaries aren't about keeping everyone out. They're about deciding who gets in, and under what conditions. A boundary is not "I will never speak to you again." A boundary is "I will speak to you when you speak to me with respect." It's not a wall. It's a door with a lock. You decide who has the key.

7. Rising and shining doesn't mean you stop hurting.
The subtitle promises healing, rising, and shining. And Mercurio delivers—but not in the way you might expect. She doesn't promise that you'll wake up one day and never feel pain again. She promises that you'll wake up one day and feel the pain and choose to live anyway. Rising is not the absence of struggle. Rising is struggling and still getting out of bed. Shining is not constant happiness. Shining is letting your survived story be a light for someone else who's still in the dark. That's the real healing.

This book is not going to fix your life. No 101 reminders can do that. But it will sit with you while you fix it yourself. And sometimes, that's exactly what you need.

I've gifted this book to four people now. Each time, I've written the same note inside the cover: "Read this when you forget that you matter."

Because you do. And this book will remind you.

30/04/2026

There is a moment in this book that does not announce itself as important. It arrives quietly, almost like any other page, and then it settles somewhere inside you with a weight you cannot easily shift. Long after you have finished, you find yourself returning to it, turning it over, wondering how something so simple could hold so much. That was when I realized what this story was actually doing.

I did not expect a book like The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer to reach for me the way it did. On the surface, it looks like a story about love separated by war, about a young woman in Nazi-occupied Poland and the man she cannot have, about the choices history forces people to make when there are no good options left. But that description is too small for what this book becomes, because this is not just a story about what is said. It is a story about what is carried, about the words that live inside people for decades because the moment to speak them passed, or because speaking them would have cost too much, or because survival required silence.

It moves between two lives that should feel distant from each other and somehow do not. Alice, in the present day, trying to hold together a life that looks stable from the outside and is quietly fraying underneath the weight of motherhood, marriage, and a child whose needs reshape everything. And Alina, in the past, young and certain and in love, before war strips certainty down to its barest form and asks her to choose not between right and wrong, but between impossible and unbearable.

What stayed with me is not just what happens to them. It is what they endure without language.

Alina’s world narrows slowly at first, then all at once. The rules change. The air changes. The way people look at each other changes. And inside that, her love for Tomasz does not become grander or more dramatic. It becomes quieter, tighter, something she has to hold onto without knowing if it will ever be returned to her in the form she recognizes.

There is a kind of heartbreak in that which feels different from the kind we are used to reading. It does not rush toward you. It stays at a distance just long enough for you to settle, and then it lands with the full weight of everything that was left unsaid.

Alice’s story, set decades later, mirrors this in a way that feels almost unsettling. Her life is not shaped by war in the traditional sense, and yet the exhaustion, the isolation, the quiet sense of losing yourself inside the roles you are trying so hard to fulfill carries its own kind of silence. Her son’s autism is not written as a device or a lesson. It is written as a reality that reshapes every conversation, every plan, every version of what her life was supposed to look like.

Through her, you begin to understand something the book never states outright but returns to again and again: that love is not always visible in the ways we expect. Sometimes it looks like patience that no one sees, sometimes it looks like choosing to stay when leaving would be easier, sometimes it looks like carrying words you may never get the chance to say.

And this is where the book reaches its deepest place.

Because what it is really asking is not whether love survives, but what happens when it has nowhere to go. What happens when time, circumstance, and fear close every door that might have allowed it to be spoken. What happens to the people who are left holding it.

There is a quiet courage in this story that does not feel heroic in the traditional sense. No speeches, no grand declarations, just people making decisions in moments where there is no certainty, no reassurance, no promise that what they are choosing will ever make sense to anyone else. And still, they choose. Still, they love. Still, they carry what cannot be said.

By the time this book reveals what it has been building toward, it does not feel like a twist. It feels like recognition, like something that was always there, waiting for you to see it clearly enough to understand what it meant.

I finished this book and sat with it for a long time, not because I did not understand it, but because I did. Because it leaves you with a quiet awareness that there are things in your own life you have not said, words you have postponed, feelings you have convinced yourself will wait for a better time.

And it asks, gently but without letting you look away,

what if they don’t.

30/04/2026

“Through deep research and evocative storytelling, Celeste Headlee shows us how to break free from constant pressure and live the life we truly want.” – Arianna Huffington

We live in a culture that glorifies busyness, where exhaustion is worn like a badge of honor. Yet Celeste Headlee’s Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving challenges this toxic narrative. With a blend of science, history, and personal insight, Headlee dismantles the myth that productivity equals worth. She is a respected journalist and speaker whose TED Talks have reached millions, and in this book she offers a roadmap to reclaiming balance, joy, and meaning in everyday life.

Here are the 7 key lessons from Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee:

1. Busyness is not productivity
Headlee reveals that much of what we call “work” is simply busywork. We confuse activity with achievement, filling our days with tasks that do not move us forward. The lesson is clear: true productivity is about impact, not hours logged. By focusing on what matters, we can accomplish more while doing less.

2. Rest is essential, not optional
Modern culture treats rest as a luxury, but Headlee shows it is a necessity. Our brains and bodies need downtime to function at their best. Without rest, creativity and problem-solving suffer. This lesson reminds us that rest is not wasted time; it is the foundation of sustainable success.

3. Technology should serve us, not enslave us
The constant ping of notifications and emails has created a cycle of distraction. Headlee argues that technology must be used intentionally, not allowed to dictate our lives. By setting boundaries, we reclaim focus and free ourselves from the illusion of constant availability.

4. Human connection is more valuable than efficiency
In the pursuit of speed and convenience, we often sacrifice relationships. Headlee emphasizes that meaningful connection enriches life far more than shaving minutes off a task. Investing time in people builds resilience, happiness, and fulfillment that no efficiency hack can replace.

5. Work-life balance is about values, not hours
Balance is not achieved by perfectly dividing time between work and leisure. It comes from aligning daily choices with personal values. Headlee encourages readers to ask: “Does this activity reflect what I care about most?” When the answer is yes, balance follows naturally.

6. Slowing down leads to deeper living
The book highlights how slowing down allows us to notice beauty, savor experiences, and live with intention. Rushing through life robs us of meaning. By choosing to slow down, we gain clarity and appreciation for the present moment.

7. Redefining success is liberating
Success is often measured by wealth, status, or productivity. Headlee challenges us to redefine it in terms of joy, connection, and well-being. This shift frees us from external pressures and allows us to live authentically, guided by what truly matters.

Do Nothing is a refreshing, thought-provoking book that dismantles the cult of busyness and offers a practical path toward a more fulfilling life. Celeste Headlee’s insights are both urgent and timeless, reminding us that slowing down is not laziness but wisdom. If you are ready to break free from the grind and rediscover what it means to live fully, this book is a must-read.

29/04/2026

There’s a quiet kind of loneliness we don’t talk about enough—the kind that shows up even when you’re surrounded by people, the kind that whispers, you don’t quite fit here.

That’s the space The Gift of Not Belonging by Rami Kaminski steps into. And it doesn’t try to fix that feeling. It sits with it. It listens. And, unexpectedly, it reframes it as something almost… sacred.

This isn’t a loud book. It doesn’t shout for your attention or try to impress you with complexity. Instead, it feels like a quiet conversation you didn’t realize you needed—one that gently pulls you inward. Kaminski explores what it means to feel like an outsider, not as a flaw to overcome, but as a perspective to embrace.

What struck me most is how the book challenges a belief many of us carry without questioning: that belonging is the ultimate goal. That if we could just find the right place, the right people, the right version of ourselves, everything would finally click. But Kaminski leans in the opposite direction. He suggests that not fully belonging—never quite fitting into a single box—can actually be a kind of freedom.
And that idea lingers.

Because when you’re not tied to one identity, one group, one expectation… you start to see more. You question more. You become more aware of the layers in people, in systems, in yourself. There’s a clarity that comes from standing slightly outside the circle.

But the book doesn’t romanticize the experience either. It acknowledges the ache—the moments of isolation, the quiet wondering of “why not me?” It just refuses to let that ache be the end of the story. Instead, it turns it into something meaningful. Something purposeful.

Reading this felt less like consuming a book and more like holding up a mirror. The kind that doesn’t distort or flatter—but shows you something honest. Something you may not have had the words for before.

It’s the kind of book you don’t rush. You pause. You reread lines. You sit with thoughts a little longer than usual. And when you’re done, it doesn’t leave you with a neat conclusion—it leaves you with better questions.

Maybe that’s the point.
Maybe belonging isn’t always about finding where you fit.
Maybe sometimes, it’s about understanding why you never quite did—and learning to see that not as a failure, but as a different kind of gift.

Have you ever felt like you didn’t fully belong somewhere you were supposed to?

29/04/2026

Based on the book in your photo, ***Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents* by Lindsay C. Gibson**, here are four powerful lessons and takeaways:

# # # 1. Recognizing the Four Types of Emotionally Immature Parents
The book helps you make sense of your childhood by categorizing emotionally immature parents into four distinct types. Recognizing these can help you understand that their behavior is a pattern, not your fault:

* **The Emotional Parent:** Driven by their feelings, prone to overreacting, and highly unstable. They often rely on their children to soothe them.

* **The Driven Parent:** Extremely goal-oriented and controlling. They focus heavily on external success and perfection while dismissing emotional needs.

* **The Passive Parent:** Avoids conflict and deep emotion. They may be the "nicer" parent but will often fail to protect their children from an abusive or dominant partner.

* **The Rejecting Parent:** Withdrawn, dismissive, and derogatory. They actively avoid intimacy and seem bothered by their children’s needs.

# # # 2. Letting Go of the "fOLLOW u Fantasy"
Many adult children hold onto a subconscious belief—a "healing fantasy"—that if they just achieve enough, act the right way, or explain their feelings clearly enough, their parent will finally change and give them the love and validation they crave. A core lesson of the book is that **healing begins when you grieve and let go of this fantasy**. You must accept your parents exactly as they are, acknowledging that they likely do not have the capacity to change or provide the emotional depth you need.

# # # 3. Understanding How You Adapted (Internalizers vs. Externalizers)
To survive an emotionally barren environment, children typically adopt one of two coping mechanisms:

* **Externalizers** act out, blame others, and expect the world to fix their problems.

* **Internalizers** (who are the primary audience for this book) believe that if they just try harder, fix everyone else's problems, and suppress their own needs, they will eventually win love.

Realizing you are an internalizer helps you stop taking the blame for other people's emotional shortcomings and start prioritizing your own well-being.

# # # 4. Practicing "Observational Detachment"
Gibson provides a practical tool for interacting with emotionally immature people without getting hurt: becoming an observer. Instead of getting sucked into their emotional chaos or trying to force a genuine connection, you step back and observe them objectively—almost like a scientist studying a subject.

By managing your expectations, communicating clearly but briefly, and setting firm boundaries, you can protect your peace and stop taking their emotional limitations personally.

29/04/2026

“Honor thy father and mother.” We’re taught that early. That forgiveness is the moral high ground. That letting go is what healthy adults do. And then Alice Miller comes along and quietly unsettles all of it.

She shows us that your body has been keeping the record all along. Even when you decided to forgive. Even when you made peace with it, talked it through in therapy, arrived at understanding, extended grace, showed up at the table, and called it healed. Your mind may have accepted the story.

Your body never did. It kept the original copy. And when I finished the last page, I realized my chronic fatigue, my "random" bouts of anxiety, that persistent tightness in my chest weren't random malfunctions. They were signals. My body wasn't failing me; it was finally telling the truth I had spent decades trying to outrun.

1. The body is the most honest witness you will ever have. It cannot be reasoned out of what it knows.
You can forgive with your mind and still flinch at a tone of voice. You can declare yourself healed and still go cold when someone raises their hand too quickly. The body stores what the mind was never allowed to process. Miller's most crucial insight is this: the symptoms are not the problem. They are the message. And until the message is read, it will keep being sent.

2. The commandment to honour your parents has silenced more survivors than almost anything else.
Miller takes on the fourth commandment, not to dismantle religion, but to name what it has been used to do. The cultural and religious insistence that children owe their parents honour regardless of what those parents did has kept generations of adults defending the very people who hurt them, calling it virtue. Loyalty that requires you to lie about your own wound is not loyalty. It is self-erasure wearing a holy name.

3. Premature forgiveness is not healing. It is a faster route to the same illness.
Forgiveness offered before the anger has been felt, before the grief has been permitted, before the truth has been told to at least one honest witness, that forgiveness is not resolution. It is suppression with better branding. The body knows the difference. And it keeps the score either way.

4. You are allowed to be angry. The anger is not the wound, it is the beginning of the way out.
Many of us were taught that anger is dangerous, ungrateful, a moral failing. Miller says the opposite. The anger a child was never permitted to feel at the adults who harmed them, that anger, finally felt, finally named, finally given its rightful address, is one of the most healing things available. Not because it punishes anyone. Because it tells the truth about what happened, and truth is the only thing the body has ever been asking for.

5. We Don’t Outrun Our Shadows
We think that by becoming successful, moving to a new city, or building a tidy life, we have "beaten" the past. But Miller shows us through the lives of geniuses like Dostoevsky and Kafka that the body will eventually present the bill. Suppressed emotions aren't gone; they are just redirected into migraines, back pain, and autoimmune struggles. The body is the only historian that never lies.

Alice Miller's goal is not to make you a "good" child. She wants you to be a whole human. And that wholeness only starts when you finally listen to the historian living under your skin.

Ink & Imagination

03/05/2026

01/05/2026

01/05/2026

30/04/2026

30/04/2026

29/04/2026

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29/04/2026

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