Returning to New York…

From the writings of Hari Nair—Founder of Leela Life and a global expert in Indic wellbeing knowledge. I’ve always been a traveller, mainly because I’ve always been an explorer. Changing physical context has been one of the simplest ways to explore everything else — new cultures, new ideas, new peoples, new moralities, even new geologies. But that phase of exploration — moving outward, covering ground — eventually runs its course. You see enough to know a lot — and to realise that more of the same isn’t the same as seeing more.

These days, I find myself returning instead. Like my last 5 or 6 trips to New York City over the past 18 months — same neighbourhood, same hotel, sometimes even the same room. The familiarity isn’t dull; it’s revealing. Each time I notice something I hadn’t before — the way the morning light moves across the room, a small corner I had never really seen, the strange quirkiness of the coffee maker. And I’ve also realised this. The modern mind rushes to label such repetition as boredom; but this notion of boredom is often just a hurdle that the gods place before us, so that we don’t see beauty too easily. If we stay with it, life changes.

I’ve come to see that this way of moving applies to building as well — whether it’s a company, an initiative, or a body of work. Being calm and intentional doesn’t reduce impact. It doesn’t even take more time. You simply get to the right place in about the same time you would have by rushing about. Except you’ve been calm, and the world you inhabit has been calmer for it.

That’s the posture with which I’m building Leela Life. Not as a race to scale, not as a chase for expansion, but as a steady unfolding. Person by person. Conversation by conversation. The right work, with the right people, at the right time. That feels right.

I know that with acceptance will come scale — most likely, large scale. And I also know that, in a few years, once it reaches a certain scale, my work at Leela Life will be done. At that point, I intend to wander off and talk to animals. But that’s another story.

In any case, I’ve now been back in NYC for over a week.

And once again, I find myself returning to the same cadence. The same streets. The same hotel. The same slow noticing.

And more “boredom”.

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