The Width of Life

"I prefer a short life with width to a narrow one with length.” - Ibn Sina

I. THE EVENING COMMUTE

The platform smelled faintly of iron, dust, and warm electricity. He noticed it only because he was already irritated. Not the sharp irritation that bursts and disappears, but the slower kind. The kind that settles quietly behind the ribs and stays there long enough to learn your breathing pattern. The kind that follows you out of office elevators, waits with you at traffic signals, and then boards the metro beside you without buying a ticket.

The evening crowd pressed forward even before the train arrived.

People leaned toward the yellow line as if proximity could shorten waiting. Screens glowed in tired hands like small private sunsets no one else was allowed to see. Someone argued loudly on the phone about money. Someone else laughed too loudly at something that was not funny. The announcements echoed once, then again, then again—each repetition losing a little more meaning before it reached anyone.

He checked his watch.

Eleven minutes late.

Or maybe he was early.

Time had stopped behaving properly these days. It moved, but not in his direction.

The train slid into the station with its familiar metallic sigh, as if it had travelled a long distance simply to arrive tired.

The doors opened.

The crowd surged.

He entered—not because he wanted to, but because everyone else did.

Inside, there was nowhere to stand except where someone else already was.

Elbows touched ribs. Backpacks brushed shoulders. The blue overhead handles swayed gently above them like pendulums measuring a shared impatience no one admitted to having. A recorded voice asked passengers to offer seats to those in need.

No one moved.

No one looked long enough at anyone else to feel responsible.

He stood between a college student pretending to read and a man pretending not to be exhausted.

---

Outside the window, the city moved sideways.

Sunset had begun. It arrived first as colour on glass, a dull copper reflection sliding slowly across the carriage doors, then as a thinning brightness leaking through unfinished buildings and concrete pillars that passed like thoughts that had not completed themselves.

At the next station, six people got down.

At the next, ten.

By the third stop, the argument ended. The laughter disappeared. The student stopped pretending to read.

The carriage breathed.

He finally found a seat.

He had not realised how tired he was until he sat down, as if exhaustion had been waiting politely for permission. Outside, the city darkened in layers. Only a narrow strip of burning orange remained between two rows of buildings.

It looked less like sunset and more like something closing.

At the fourth station, only five passengers remained. He counted them without meaning to.

A woman holding her handbag with both hands, as if the evening might take something from her if she loosened her grip.

An old man watching nothing in particular, but with the patience of someone who had already watched most things.

Two boys whispering over a shared phone screen, their voices folded carefully inside the small space between them.

And him.

Four strangers sharing a thin corridor of motion through a city that held millions.

The train moved more quietly now.

Or perhaps the silence had finally caught up with him.

Outside the window, the last light stretched thin across flyovers and unfinished terraces. Satellite dishes leaned from rooftops like tired flowers turning away from the sun.

At the next station, the woman with the handbag stepped out.

Now there were four.

He noticed the number again.

Four strangers travelling together through a narrow corridor of motion inside a city that held millions who would never know they had shared this evening.

The old man shifted slightly.

Not looking at him directly—but enough to acknowledge that he was there.

It was the look of someone who had travelled long enough in life to stop expecting explanations from it.

The two boys were still whispering to each other.

He wondered what could still be important enough at their age to whisper about.

Probably everything.

The train entered a darker section now.

Concrete pillars passed faster.

Windows stopped reflecting the city and began reflecting only the inside of the carriage.

His phone vibrated once.

A missed call notification.

He did not open it.

There had been a time when a vibrating phone could change the entire direction of an evening.

Now it felt like background weather moving somewhere far away from where he was standing.

Another announcement echoed through the coach.

Next station.

As the train slowed, the sunset finally disappeared.

Not gradually.

Suddenly.

One moment there was colour.

The next there was only light from inside the carriage.

Artificial.

Complete.

Unavoidable.

The doors opened.

No one else stood to get down with him.

For a brief second he remained where he was, as if stepping out required agreement from a version of himself that had not yet arrived.

Then the train waited.

And he stayed standing between leaving and continuing.

Not moving.

Not deciding.

Only listening to the faint hum of the carriage around him—as though something inside him had begun to change direction without telling him when it had started.

He reached slowly into his pocket.

And found his earphones.

The wire was tangled.

It was always tangled, as if it too had travelled through the day before finally reaching him.

For a moment he did not put them on.

The carriage continued around him. Announcements repeated themselves overhead. Someone nearby scrolled through short videos with the volume too high. The old man shifted again in his seat. The boys were still whispering.

The doors remained open longer than usual.

As if the train itself was waiting for something.

Then he placed the earphones in his ears.

The music began before he recognised the song.

Soft.

Old.

Familiar in the way certain evenings feel familiar before memory finds their name.

The first note did not arrive as sound.

It arrived as distance.

The announcements moved further away.

The carriage softened.

Even the light inside the coach seemed to step back slightly from where he was sitting.

The second note arrived as weather.

Warm.

Green.

Moving slowly across something that was no longer glass.

He looked at his reflection in the window again.

But the reflection did not remain where it should have.

It loosened.

Blurred.

Shifted.

And the window beside him stopped being a window.

Wet soil between his toes.

Frogs clicking near the edge of the fields.

Birds arguing somewhere above him where the trees were taller than his thoughts had been then.

He was running again.

Barefoot.

Across the narrow ridges between paddy fields that he believed were borders between countries only he knew how to cross.

Into the long quiet patience of coffee estates waiting beyond the last line of fields.

He was smaller there. Faster. Always slightly dirty.

Always slightly free. And then—her voice.

Calling his name.

Once.

Twice.

Then again.

Each time sweeter than the last.

Each time more certain he would lose the chase that followed.

II. The Fields

As he was still wandering somewhere between the fields and his own imagined borders, he heard his name being called.

Once.

Then again.

Then again.

Each time closer than the last.

He shouted back without turning,

“Coming!”

but did not move.

The frogs were louder near the water that evening. The dragonflies were slower. The ridge between the paddy plots felt narrower than usual, as if it wanted him to stay on it a little longer.

His name came again.

This time sharper.

And the dogs began barking too—not angrily,

but with the certainty of animals who already knew he had been found.

He ran then.

Across the wet edges of the field.

Up the narrow stone pathway.

Past the jackfruit tree that always dropped its leaves without warning.

Her voice came again.

Closer now.

Waiting for him at the house before he even reached it.

He entered through the back door that opened directly into the kitchen. And that was when he heard it.

The wooden door closing behind him.

Soft.

Decisive.

He stopped.

Turned slowly.

She was already standing there. Holding the steel tumbler of hot milk.

Victory had arrived before he had.

He tried to escape immediately.

Slipped past her once.

Almost reached the doorway again.

But she caught him the way she always did—not quickly,

not forcefully,

just inevitably.

“You will drink it,” she said.

Not loudly.

Not angrily.

As if it had already happened somewhere else and he was only catching up with it now.

He shook his head.

Turned away.

Tried again. She followed him across the kitchen. Into the small corridor. Around the wooden table. Past the window where evening was already collecting itself outside the trees.

The dogs watched from the doorway.

Not helping him.

Not helping her.

Only witnessing the ritual as if they had seen it many times before.

He laughed.

She laughed.

He ran again.

She caught him again.

Always the same ending.

Always the same chase.

Always the same glass of milk waiting patiently between them like something older than either of them.

When she finally caught him, she held his shoulder gently—not tightly, never tightly—and lifted the tumbler toward him.

“Hot,” she warned.

As if heat were the real danger.

As if she had not already decided he would finish it.

He drank reluctantly at first.

Slowly.

Looking away.

Waiting for distraction to rescue him.

But there was no distraction.

Only her hand resting lightly against his back.

Only the smell of woodsmoke from the stove.

Only the sound of evening settling into the house.

Only her standing there

until the last sip disappeared.

She took the tumbler from him when it was empty.

Looked inside it as if confirming something important had been completed.

Then she smiled.

Not proudly.

Not playfully.

Just quietly.

As if the world had remained in its correct place for one more day.

He did not understand then what she was giving him.

He thought it was milk.

He thought it was discipline.

He thought it was one more small battle he had lost.

Years later he would understand

she had never been chasing him.

She had been keeping him inside the circle of her care.

That evening she made him sit beside her while she prepared dinner.

She moved through the kitchen the way she moved through everything else—

without hurry,

without hesitation,

without ever appearing tired even though she had already worked longer than anyone else in the house that day.

She had spoken to the labourers in the morning.

Walked the estate paths before sunrise.

Supervised the drying yard.

Counted sacks.

Answered questions no one else knew how to answer.

Cooked for everyone.

Remembered everything.

And still she had time

to chase one small boy across a field for a glass of milk.

He sat beside her on the wooden floor.

Watching her hands.

Always her hands.

They moved quickly but never nervously.

They knew where everything was before they reached for it.

Sometimes she told him stories while she worked.

Kings who lost their way in forests.

Rivers that spoke only after sunset.

Spirits that waited near bridges but never crossed them.

He does not remember the endings now.

Only her voice moving through the house like evening light.

Only the way the kitchen felt warmer when she spoke.

Only the certainty that she would still be there when he woke up the next morning.

---

Inside the metro carriage years later,

between one station and the next,

he realised something he had not understood then.

She had never once asked him to thank her.

Not for the milk.

Not for the stories.

Not for the fields she walked before he woke.

Not for the evenings she held together without anyone noticing she was holding them.

She had simply called his name.

And expected him to come home.

---

III. The Day Before

He stood before the train stopped.

Out of habit more than intention.

The movement made him aware of his body again—its weight, its tiredness, the quiet stiffness in his shoulders he had stopped noticing months ago but had been carrying longer than he realised.

The train doors opened.

For a moment he expected the kitchen again.

The wooden doorway.

The dogs watching.

Her voice somewhere behind him calling him back before it got dark.

Instead—

the metro carriage returned.

Empty.

Too empty.

The fields disappeared first.

Then the trees.

Then the smell of woodsmoke.

Only the reflection in the window remained.

Waiting where it had always been.

Before the headphones.

Before the sunset.

Before the silence inside the nearly empty carriage—

there had been the morning.

It had begun the way most of his mornings began now.

With resistance.

The alarm rang once.

Then again.

Then again.

Each time sounding less like a reminder

and more like an accusation that already knew the answer.

He opened his eyes but did not move.

The ceiling above him felt too familiar.

Not comforting.

Familiar in the way repetition becomes a shape you begin to live inside.

Morning no longer felt like a beginning.

It felt like continuation of unfinished thoughts, unfinished fatigue, unfinished versions of himself that had followed him quietly from one day into the next.

He sat up eventually. Because that is what people do.

He brushed his teeth without tasting the toothpaste.

Showered without feeling the water.

Dressed without choosing what he wore.

Outside, the city had already begun without him.

Traffic lights changed faster than decisions.

People spoke into phones before sunrise had fully arrived.

Tea stalls released steam into the air like small temporary temples to urgency.

By the time he reached work,

he was already tired.

His boss called him in before he had opened his laptop.

Again.

The door remained half open.

It always remained half open.

As if even criticism did not deserve privacy anymore.

His boss did not look up immediately.

Only pointed at the screen.

Numbers waited there.

Orderly.

Precise.

Accusing.

“You should be doing better.”

Others are managing.

Why are you always behind?

The sentences were never identical.

Only the meaning was.

He nodded.

Not because he agreed.

Because disagreement required energy.

Neutrality required less.

When he returned to his desk, his girlfriend got over to console him.

At first it sounded like concern.

Then advice.

Then comparison.

Always comparison.

Someone earning more. Someone progressing faster. Someone clearer about where life was going.

Someone else.

He just sat there, being neutral.

Neutral had become his safest language.

Neutral asked the least from him.

Neutral expected the least back.

---

"Sometimes we don't want to heal because the pain is the last connection to what we have lost." - Ibn Sina

---

By afternoon the phone began ringing.

He already knew who it was.

Mom.

She called every day at almost the same time.

Always the same questions.

Did you eat?

How was work today?

Nothing dramatic.

Nothing complicated.

Just the small invisible threads that keep a day from tearing apart completely.

The phone kept ringing.

He watched it.

Let it stop.

It rang again. He cut the call.

Not angrily.

Not impatiently.

Just quickly, as if closing a window before rain entered the house.

He told himself he would call her later.

He always told himself that.

By evening the office lights had become too bright.

The computer screen too loud.

The conversations around him too continuous to join

and too meaningless to escape.

When he stepped outside,

the air already carried the colour of sunset.

That strange copper light the city sometimes wears before night takes over everything it does not explain.

He began walking toward the metro station

without deciding to. Past the same shops. Past the same tea stall. Past the same fruit seller who had probably been pushing the same wooden cart longer than he had been alive.

Up the stairs.

Into the platform.

Into the smell of iron and electricity.

Into the noise. Into the waiting.

IV. The Floating Man

He reached home without remembering the walk back.

Keys on the table.

Shoes near the door.

Lights on.

The room was waiting exactly where he had left it in the morning.

Nothing had moved. Not even the silence. He sat down. Unlocked his phone. Scrolled.

News he did not read.

Videos he did not finish.

Messages he did not answer.

People living loudly inside rectangles of light while his own evening unfolded quietly around him. Time passed without announcing itself.

He did not remember deciding to cook dinner.

He only realised the plate was empty when he stood up to carry it to the sink.

He tried to remember tasting anything. He couldn’t.

The evening had continued without asking him whether he was inside it.

He washed the plate slowly.

Set it upside down to dry.

Turned off the kitchen light.

And lay down on his bed with his phone still in his hand.

He began doomscrolling.

News he did not read.

Videos he did not finish.

Messages he did not answer.

People living loudly inside rectangles of light while his own evening unfolded quietly around him. Time passed without announcing itself.

Then his thumb stopped.

Not because he was searching.

Because something had been waiting. An article.

The Floating Man By Ibn Sina.

He opened it without knowing why.

Ibn Sina — The Philosopher Who Asked What Remains

Long before modern psychology, neuroscience, or existential philosophy began asking questions about consciousness, there lived a Persian philosopher named Ibn Sina — known in the West as Avicenna. Born near Bukhara in 980 CE during the Islamic Golden Age, Ibn Sina was not merely a philosopher, but a physician, astronomer, scientist, mathematician, theologian, and mystic whose influence shaped both the Islamic world and medieval Europe for centuries.

By the age at which most people are still trying to understand the world, Ibn Sina had already memorized the Qur’an, studied medicine, mastered logic, and begun writing books that would later become foundational texts in universities across continents. His most famous medical work, The Canon of Medicine, remained one of the most important medical references in Europe for nearly six hundred years. Yet medicine alone did not satisfy him.

He was searching for something deeper.

Not simply how the body survives.

But what it means to exist at all.

At the heart of Ibn Sina’s philosophy lies one of the most haunting and timeless thought experiments ever imagined: The Floating Man.

He asked his readers to imagine a person created fully formed — not born, not raised, not shaped by memory or experience — but suddenly brought into existence suspended in empty space. The person cannot see. Cannot hear. Cannot touch anything. There is no ground beneath them, no sky above them, no sensation, no language, no world.

And then Ibn Sina asks the question:

Would this person still know they exist?

His answer was yes.

Even without the world, without memory, without the body, there would still remain a fundamental awareness of being. A pure knowing. A silent certainty that says: I am.

For Ibn Sina, this experiment was not merely philosophical curiosity. It was an attempt to understand the nature of consciousness itself. He believed that self-awareness is more fundamental than perception — that before we know the world, we know existence. In many ways, this idea arrived centuries before modern discussions about consciousness, identity, and the self.

But what makes Ibn Sina remarkable is not only his intellect.

It is the scale at which he thought.

He lived during a time when civilizations were expanding, knowledge was travelling across deserts and seas, and scholars believed the universe itself was understandable through reason, observation, and contemplation. Ibn Sina stood at the intersection of science and spirituality, refusing to separate the two completely. To him, understanding existence was not only an intellectual exercise — it was also a sacred one.

His writings explored medicine, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, astronomy, logic, and the soul. Yet beneath all these subjects was a single continuous pursuit:

What remains when everything else disappears?

That question still survives today.

It survives in moments of loneliness. In cities filled with noise. In sleepless nights after difficult days. In memories that return unexpectedly. In the strange realization that beneath all our roles, achievements, fears, relationships, and distractions, there exists something quieter that continues to observe.

A self that remains.

Nearly a thousand years after his death, Ibn Sina’s ideas continue to echo across philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, spirituality, and literature because he was not merely studying the world outside him.

He was studying the experience of being alive itself.

And perhaps that is why his words still feel modern.

Because every generation eventually finds itself asking the same question he asked centuries ago:

If everything else were taken away —

what would remain of me?

Imagine a man created fully formed. Not as a child. Not growing. Not remembering. Created suddenly.

Suspended in empty space.

No ground beneath him.

No sky above him.

No sound.

No light.

No body touching anything.

No language.

No history.

No world.

Would he still know he exists?

Yes.

That was Ibn Sina’s answer.

Even if everything else disappeared—

something would remain.

The knowing.

Not sight.

Not touch.

Not memory.

Just the certainty:

I am.

He read the experiment again.

Then once more.

And slowly, without deciding to, he began following it.

Inside himself.

First the office disappeared.

The half-open door.

The numbers waiting on the screen.

The voice that spoke without looking at him.

Gone.

Then the comparisons disappeared.

Then the unfinished conversations.

Then the city.

Then the metro.

Then the platform.

Then the narrow strip of sunset closing between buildings.

Then the fields.

He stopped there.

Tried again.

Removed the frogs.

Removed the dogs.

Removed the kitchen doorway.

Removed her voice.

That was the hardest part.

But still—

something remained.

Not his room.

Not his body.

Not even the feeling of lying down.

Only the knowing.

A quiet centre that did not depend on anything else being there.

No ceiling.

No floor.

No sound.

No weight.

No distance.

Still—

it remained.

---

Then something unexpected happened.

The knowing did not stay still.

It shrank.

Not smaller.

Denser.

As if everything that had ever existed were folding itself inward toward a single point that could not be divided further.

A silence before time.

A stillness before direction.

And then, expansion.

---

Light before language.

Heat before memory.

Matter before shape.

The beginning that had no witness except the space it created for itself.

The Big Bang unfolded not somewhere else—

but toward him.

Stars ignited.

Burned.

Collapsed.

Exploded.

Learning how to die into heavier elements.

Carbon.

Iron.

Calcium.

The quiet architecture of bones waiting billions of years to become possible.

Planets formed.

Oceans gathered.

Cells divided.

Failed.

Tried again.

Creatures moved.

Remembered.

Forgot.

Walked upright.

Looked at the sky and asked questions before they had words for asking.

---

Civilisations rose.

Languages formed.

Rivers changed direction.

Empires believed they would last forever.

Wars corrected them.

Revolutions rearranged them.

Inventions shortened distance.

Stories lengthened memory.

Festivals filled streets with borrowed light.

Songs travelled across generations without passports.

Movies flickered briefly in dark theatres and taught strangers how to feel together.

Ancestors walked through forests without knowing who they were walking toward.

Grandparents crossed seasons without knowing whose future they were protecting.

His grandmother walked the estate paths before sunrise without knowing she was shaping the memory of a boy who would one day lie awake in a city apartment remembering the warmth of a glass of milk he once tried to escape.

His parents made decisions without knowing they were arranging the precise sequence of events that would become his face,

his voice,

his hesitation,

his patience,

his fatigue,

his restlessness.

School arrived.

Friends arrived.

Love arrived.

Comparison arrived.

News arrived.

Work arrived.

The half-open office door arrived.

The metro arrived.

The platform arrived.

The sunset arrived.

The missed call arrived.

And finally—

he arrived.

Here.

In this room.

On this bed.

He had a sudden deep sense of gratitude, and he realised that he was no accident and he was exactly where he needed to be. 

He was here, now.

Somewhere between one breath and the next

sleep found him.

Not heavily.

Not suddenly.

Just naturally. As if something inside him had finished travelling.

V. Did you eat ?

Morning arrived quietly.

Before the alarm.

Before the noise.

Before the day began asking anything from him.

His eyes opened.

And for the first time in a long time, he wanted to be awake. 

He lay there for a few seconds without moving.

Not because he was tired. Because the morning felt different.

The ceiling above him was the same ceiling he had looked at the day before. The same faint crack near the fan. The same patch of light arriving slowly through the window and settling along the wall as if it had always known where to go.

But something inside him had shifted position during the night.

Yesterday, waking had felt like continuation.

Today it felt like arrival.

He sat up before the alarm rang.

Turned it off before it had the chance to accuse him.

For a moment he remained sitting at the edge of the bed, listening.

The room sounded ordinary.

A vehicle passing somewhere outside.

A pressure cooker in a neighbouring apartment releasing steam.

Footsteps in the corridor.

Morning beginning for everyone else at exactly the same time.

He reached for his phone.

Paused.

Then instead of opening messages, he opened music.

The first song filled the room slowly—not loudly, not urgently, just enough to reach the corners that had stayed silent the previous night.

He stood up.

Walked into the kitchen.

Opened the window.

The air was cooler than usual.

Or maybe he was noticing it for the first time.

He began cooking breakfast.

Not mechanically.

Carefully.

The way he used to eat when he was younger, before meals had become something that happened between other things.

Oil warmed in the pan.

Mustard seeds cracked softly.

Steam rose.

The kitchen filled with a smell that felt older than the city outside his window.

He realised, halfway through cooking, that he was smiling.

Not because anything had changed.

Because something had stopped resisting.

He washed the dishes immediately after eating.

Folded the blanket.

Straightened the chair near the window.

Opened the curtains fully this time.

Sunlight entered without hesitation.

He stood there for a moment longer than necessary.

As if allowing the morning to recognise him properly.

Then he left.

---

The platform smelled the same.

Iron.

Dust.

Warm electricity.

The same announcements repeated themselves overhead.

People leaned forward before the train arrived as if proximity could shorten waiting.

Nothing had changed.

The city had not reorganised itself overnight just because he had understood something.

The train arrived.

The doors opened.

The crowd entered.

So did he.

This time he found a seat.

Sat down.

Reached for his earphones.

Paused.

Then slowly placed them back into his pocket.

He wanted to hear the world today.

Not soften it.

Not filter it.

Just hear it.

Voices layered themselves around him inside the carriage.

Someone discussing work.

Someone complaining about traffic.

Someone laughing quietly into their phone.

Someone explaining directions to someone else who would still get lost anyway.

Ordinary life moving in every direction at once.

He opened his call log.

Her name was still there.

Waiting exactly where he had left it.

He pressed call.

For a moment there was only the sound of the tracks beneath the train.

Then—

her voice.

“Hello?”

Simple.

Unchanged.

As if yesterday had not happened.

As if yesterday always happens and mornings exist exactly for this reason.

He smiled without meaning to.

“I just wanted to ask,” he said, almost laughing at how small the sentence sounded after everything that had moved inside him the night before, “did you eat?”

There was a pause.

Then her laughter.

Soft.

Surprised.

Relieved.

Around him the metro continued moving.

Stations arrived.

Stations disappeared.

Announcements interrupted conversations. His words dissolved into the noise of the carriage and hers returned through it. But this time he did not mind losing the conversation inside the crowd. Because this time he was not trying to escape the world. 

He was travelling inside it.

“It is in the nature of water ... to become transformed into earth through a predominating earthy virtue; ... it is in the nature of earth to become transformed into water through a predominating aqueous virtue.” – Ibn Sina