The Quiet Grace of Functioning Systems
A reflection on the illusion of control, and the miracle of ordinary functioning.
Today I had to get up at 5:30 to go to the bathroom. After that, I couldn’t quite get back to sleep, but it wasn’t quite morning either. So I lay there in bed, waiting. My eyes were closed, but it wasn’t black inside — it was turning grey. Somewhere at a distance, a few enthusiastic birds were objecting to the light, or maybe the quiet. There were no human sounds yet, no vehicles. I drew myself inward, just to see what was going on inside the body.
Because I had woken up before time, the body wasn’t quite rested. There was a kind of restless energy in my skin, as if it were waiting for something to begin. My chest had a faint burning, for no reason I could place. My limbs pulsed with small sensations that came and went like light waves on water. Though I had nothing to do — not now, not even later in the day — the mind carried an anticipation, the kind that comes after half-satisfying sleep. There were other stirrings in the body too, which I’ve already forgotten, but they were there.
It struck me then — how much is going on inside the body at any given moment. I could feel maybe ten things, but there must be a thousand others happening silently: digestion, circulation, healing, memory formation, cell division, hormones adjusting, organs negotiating space, bacteria having breakfast. All this, without my participation. If my heart started racing, there would be little I could do to calm it. If a headache began, all I could do was reach for a pill. By myself, I could do nothing. That’s the kind of control I have inside my own body.
So when it comes to the mind — this ephemeral thing — it’s no wonder we are rarely in control of its impulses. We can’t stop a thought from arising any more than we can stop the heart from beating. It’s like being a passenger in one’s own system. I have some liberty, yes — to move, to think, to choose — and I take it to the max. But the deeper machinery, I don’t have a say in it. Neither in body nor in mind.
Then I stretched my perception outward. With my eyes still closed, hearing became the only sense open to the world. The mornings have a peculiar silence to them — not emptiness, but a quiet hum of readiness. The city at sleep. A lazy anticipation of life about to errupt.
That too got me thinking — how much control do I really have in the world? When everything runs smoothly, it feels like control. The social system, the governance, the law, the plumbing of civic life — all ticking away beneath the surface. We take it all for granted. Yet, I have no real say in any of it.
Imagine Bombay losing power for a month. Forget power — imagine no Internet for a week. Or no water for even three days. Mayhem. So much of what we call “normal life” depends on invisible cooperation between countless systems — electrical grids, sewage lines, mobile networks, municipal workers. All that has to go right for us to live as though we run things. In the old days, we would have invented gods for these forces — the God of Electricity, the Goddess of Wi-Fi — and prayed to them. Because we knew we were dependent. Now we’ve replaced prayer with the illusion of control.
This illusion is comforting — and that’s exactly why it’s dangerous. It’s what lets us believe we can manage everything — our health, our careers, our relationships, the economy, even nature itself. We behave as if the world is a dashboard with knobs and buttons we can tweak to our liking. We think we understand our cars because we can drive them; we think we understand our bodies because we can jog or diet; we think we understand the stock market because we can read a few patterns. We convince ourselves we can “hack” sleep, “optimize” productivity, “master” emotions, and “manifest” outcomes — as if life were a project plan waiting for execution.
We do all this because we crave agency. Control is the mind’s way of feeling safe. It’s how we make peace with uncertainty — by pretending we’ve tamed it. Somewhere deep down, we know it’s not true. But we cling to the fantasy anyway, because the alternative — surrender — feels too much like free fall.
And so, we plan. We schedule. We diet. We track our sleep, our steps, our moods. We believe that if we measure enough variables, we can outrun chaos. It’s almost touching, this human effort — so earnest, so organized, so fragile.
Yet every once in a while — at 5:30 in the morning, perhaps — the illusion flickers. You wake before dawn, listen to the world holding its breath, and realize that your body, your mind, your city, your life — none of it is truly in your control. You are suspended in something vast, functioning through you, around you, despite you.
It’s a humbling revelation. More than that, not being in control is simply the reality—whether we acknowledge it or not. I’ve lived much of my life without acknowledging it, obviously. So have most of us. But when I was lying there with my eyes closed—alive, breathing normally, feeling reasonably healthy—the truth of it became clearer. The birds were chattering somewhere, anticipating another ordinary day. I could hear my mother yawning in the other room. She was alive, and more importantly, she was healthy. And Diwali, my favorite festival, was around the corner. I would eat a lot of sweets, I am still healthy enough for that.
All of this felt like some kind of miracle, though its exact nature remains unknown. To take it all as just another normal day suddenly felt like gaslighting the god of normalcy. It was grace. It was beautiful. I didn’t know who or what to be grateful to—but my head remains bowed anyway, in quiet thanks to all the forces that make life simply happen. And go without a hitch mostly.
And I made another plan. This habit of mine—saying, “Oh yeah, I know that,” or offering casual advice about someone’s Disney shares, or even about advertising or marketing—perhaps that needs revisiting. The next time I leap to conclusions, I hope I remember this morning. Everything in this world is far too complex, far too beyond my control, to be so easily understood. The least I can do is act accordingly—with humility.