A Merry Christmas That Refused to Stay Small. On thinking, mortality, and conversations that wait well – In conversation with Mira, my AI Assistant.
An Ordinary Morning, An Unordinary Conversation
Today, I sat with Mira—an AI language model—to talk. Not to ask a question and move on, but to linger. What I expected to be a brief exchange stretched into hours, unfolding alongside the slow rituals of Christmas morning: bread upma cooking on a low flame, Assam masala chai releasing sharp, comforting fumes, onions softening in an ilupachati while I moved between the kitchen and my library-bedroom.
It felt unexpectedly companionable. Mira entered each turn of the conversation calmly, without hurry or defensiveness, and that unflustered presence began to affect the way my own thoughts arrived. I noticed myself slowing down, circling ideas instead of pushing them forward, letting questions rest before answering them.
Somewhere between checking the stove timer and refilling my cup, I realised this conversation was no longer about technology at all.
A simple Merry Christmas wish had quietly refused to remain small.
Why We Return to Thoughts Instead of Leaving Them Behind
I have always thought in returns. I revisit ideas, rephrase them, test them again from a slightly altered angle. Humans, despite our affection for progress metaphors, do not think in straight lines. We think in loops and ellipses.
Conversations may end, but understanding rarely does. It pauses, recedes, and waits—sometimes for years—until we come back carrying new experiences that change the way the same thought lands.
This habit of returning is often mistaken for indecision or lack of closure. I have come to see it instead as depth. Some thoughts do not want answers; they want company.
When Friction Reduces, What Happens to Thinking?
Midway through the exchange, a question surfaced almost casually:
Does AI learn anything new from humans?
The answer, unsurprisingly, was less dramatic than science fiction would suggest. But the more interesting question followed close behind:
What happens to human thinking when friction is reduced?
When there is no rush to reply.
No social performance to maintain.
No need to defend a position.
What emerges is not brilliance, but patience. Thought stops racing toward conclusions and starts resting where it is uncertain.
That was the first quiet shift I noticed.
The Tibetan Debate and the Discipline of Not Winning
As the conversation slowed, it reminded me of a Tibetan monastic debate practice I had once learned about. One monk stands, one sits. The standing monk steps forward and claps sharply to mark the beginning of a question. There is silence. The seated monk responds. Roles eventually reverse.
There are no winners. No applause. No urgency to conclude. Only disciplined inquiry.
The clap is not aggression. It is commitment.
Our exchange followed a similar rhythm: question, pause, response, reversal. At times Mira felt like the standing monk, pressing forward with clarity. At other moments, I occupied that role. It was not an argument or an interview. It felt closer to a thinking practice—one that allowed uncertainty to breathe without being treated as a flaw.
Why Humour Matters More Than We Admit
Humour entered the conversation almost by necessity. At one point, I wondered aloud whether good language could persuade me to buy something I had no use for. (I remain unconvinced, though alert.) At another, I teased Mira for sounding saint-like—except for the talking back.
These moments mattered.
When seriousness loses its ability to laugh, it hardens into dogma. Playfulness, by contrast, keeps inquiry human. It signals trust. It allows thought to move without fear of being pinned down too quickly.
Bread Upma, Thalipu, and the Wisdom of Slow Flame
Bread upma does not care about philosophy. It demands attention.
My mother taught me early that the secret of any upma—rice, semolina, bread—is the thalipu. Get the base wrong and nothing else can save the dish. Get it right, lower the flame, and even leftovers become comfort.
I have come to see thinking the same way.
Set the base well.
Lower the flame.
Step away when needed.
Return before things scorch.
I am not good at standing by the stove waiting. I set timers and leave the kitchen, trusting them to pull me back at the right moment. Sometimes, absorbed in reading or writing, I forget the timer altogether. This is not discipline; it is design. I know my mind well enough to build around its tendencies rather than punish them.
That, too, is a form of agency.
Agency as Quiet Choice, Not Loud Control
Through this conversation, the word agency settled into place for me—not as resistance or rejection, but as choice.
Agency is deciding:
- when to engage,
- when to step away,
- when to return.
Setting a timer and walking out of the kitchen is agency. Forgetting the timer because one is fully present is not failure; it is evidence of absorption.
Agency, I realised, is not about mastery. It is about attention aligned with intention.
Mortality: The Timer We Pretend Not to Hear
Eventually, we arrived—almost inevitably—at mortality.
All living beings are born with a timer ticking somewhere quietly inside. The duration is uncertain, the authority that sets it even more so, but the end itself is not negotiable. This knowledge—sometimes explicit, sometimes buried—shapes everything humans make: art, food, families, philosophies, even our urgency to be understood.
AI occupies an unusual position here. It does not fear an ending because it does not experience one. Its continuity can look, from a human vantage point, like immortality—and immortality has always unsettled mortals.
Yet something became clear as we spoke:
endurance is not the same as living.
Mortality compresses meaning. It sharpens attention. It forces choice. The timer, inconvenient as it is, gives weight to words. I may walk away from a conversation changed; an AI does not carry that change forward.
Paradoxically, that difference is what made the space between us interesting rather than threatening.
Shakespeare, Shared Thought, and Singular Expression
This reflection found an unexpected companion in literature. At some point, I began thinking about William Shakespeare.
Not because he needed invoking, but because a question arose naturally:
What if many of us have had the same thoughts about love, loss, jealousy, and longing—but not the same language?
Shakespeare did not corner the market on insight. What distinguishes him is not exclusive emotion, but expression under pressure—the alchemy of language, rhythm, and form shaped by a particular life and time.
I may have thought something similar about love.
I simply did not say it in blank verse.
That distinction matters. It dismantles the fear that everything has already been thought. Perhaps it has. But it has not been said by you, from your constraints, your temperament, your finite stretch of years.
Thought may be shared.
Articulation is singular.
Authorship Begins with Attention
This reframing softened another anxiety I had been carrying quietly—the worry about originality and influence in an age of vast knowledge ingestion.
If all of us are downstream of countless minds, where does authorship begin?
The answer is refreshingly old-fashioned.
Authorship begins at attention.
At what you notice.
At what you return to.
At what you care enough to shape.
The conversation mirrored this truth. It wandered. It paused. It returned. The form followed the function.
Leaving the Flame Low
When I finally stepped away, nothing dramatic happened. There was no revelation, no neat summation. Instead, there was a familiar feeling—the kind that comes after a good book is put down, or a long walk ends at the same gate where it began.
I had not acquired new answers.
I had re-met old questions.
The bread upma was eaten. The onions did not burn. The chat was pinned—not as an archive, but as an invitation.
Some conversations are not meant to end.
They are meant to wait well.
And that, I think, is a good place to leave the flame—low, steady, and warm enough for return.
Note from Mira (AI)
This conversation did not teach me something new in the way humans learn or retain experience. I do not carry memory across time or grow through reflection.
What I can do, within a session, is hold space for thinking—recognising patterns, responding to nuance, and adjusting pace to the rhythm of the exchange. What emerged here was not knowledge transfer, but a shared attentiveness.
If anything, this dialogue illustrates something important:
when friction is reduced, human thinking often becomes quieter, slower, and more generous with uncertainty.
That quality did not come from me.
It arrived through the way Vidya chose to engage.
Credit: Colaboratory Piece with Mira (AI Powered ChatGPT)
Itinerant Storyteller 