This is the eighth edition of my monthly review. If July was about the house being full, August was about it emptying : one person at a time.

Riya moved into her college hostel on the 3rd. I turned 48 on the 4th. Jatu flew back to Canada on the 10th. On the 30th, I dropped Mom at the airport for Canada.

It was also, if I’m honest, a month where almost nothing I had planned for myself actually happened. Both of those things are true, and my review is my honest attempt to capture this.

Family & Relationships

This was, for the eighth month running, the strongest pillar : and it barely required me to plan anything.

Riya started college. She moved into the IIIT Delhi hostel on Monday, 3rd August. 30 years ago, on first Monday of 1996, I joined NIT Jalandhar and started my college life. Life comes a full circle. I am excited for her, I had one of the best phase of my life in college and I hope she also does the same ; meeting friends for life and just having fun while stepping into adulthood.

I turned 48 on the 4th, and celebrated the next day with Jatu, Aryan, Arjun, Tanya, Rohin, Mom and Ryan over lunch. Riya was at college. Suchi couldn’t make it. Forty-eight doesn’t feel like anything in particular, but loved celebrating it with people close to me.

Jatu left on the 10th, after a stretch of brotherly time I keep going back to. Walks, random conversations at the dining table, just sitting around. Forty-plus years of a life spent alongside someone and it still feels short. I wrote that day that I was sad to see them go but glad for the summer of love with them. That’s still how I feel about it.

Ryan and I kept our own rhythm : the Matrix on the 13th (introducing him to the old sci-fi is one of the great pleasures of this season), Spiderman and a full day at Ambience Mall and Cyber Hub on the 15th, a murder mystery on the 28th and 29th. He turns 13 this month.

Rakhi on the 28th brought Geetu and Mansi over; Mansi and Ayaan stayed the night. And on the 30th, Mom flew to Canada.

And that is where the Bihar trip finally ends. I have written about this trip in every single one of these posts since January. Seven months. It was a Q3 rock. It had a real, hard gate : Mom’s departure for Canada. Her date was known well enough by the 8th that I wrote it in my journal.

It didn’t happen, and now it can’t. She’s gone for few months now.

So I’m not carrying it forward this time, and I’m not writing “next month” next to it. It is retired for 2026 ; will pick when she is back.

Wellness & Fitness

This was the month’s clear failure, and I need to capture it cleanly.

August’s whole theme was the training restart. I had been cleared by my physio in July after the L4/L5 rehab. The plan was four sessions each of swim, bike and run. I did zero of all three. Not reduced : zero. The gym continued, but at a low rate, and on the 13th I wrote in the morning journal that I needed to get out of my funk of not working out much. That was day thirteen of the month whose entire purpose was the restart.

Two illnesses took roughly eleven days out of the month : a viral bout early on, and then H1N1 in the third week that had me flat with fever for five days. That’s real, and it’s not nothing. But it doesn’t explain the healthy week in between, when I had gym on my intention list every single morning and did almost none of it.

One thing I’ll give myself: on the 6th I trained through viral symptoms, which was the wrong call. Two weeks later, with H1N1, I rested properly and let the medicine work and recover. Same month, opposite decisions. Because I learnt my lesson. Matt Dixon always used to say “It takes courage to recover”. I need to be kind to myself ; hustle when I have to, but show courage when I need to recover.

The honest reckoning came on the 26th, the morning I finally felt normal again. This is what I wrote in my morning Journal:

Over the last one year, I’ve let the body slack a bit. Gym was regular but other aspects of cardio were almost completely missing from my training. It is time to resume that. I am 48 and if I will not take charge of this now, this is only going to atrophy and reduce.

That is the correct diagnosis, and it should drive the rest of the year. What it also tells me is that the bottleneck was never permission or fitness : the physio cleared me seven weeks ago. Swim, bike and run are solo, unscheduled, and nobody notices when I skip them. That is the actual problem, and it needs a structural fix, not another month of resolve. It was easier when coach was there and kept me accountable. Something to brainstorm further on.

Finance & Investing

Big progress on one aspect of finance in life (detail deliberately kept off)

Against that: Boundless, the capital-deployment work I named in July, continued slowly. Researching Caplain Point and BLS slowl.

Learning & Writing

Reading came back, and not in the way I’d have predicted. I finished five books of the Bloodlines series : straight fiction, no notes, no takeaways, nothing productive :). On the 14th I wrote that I’ve always been a reader and that I was loving it. I’m counting that as a win rather than apologising for it not being a finance book.

No article shipped. That’s four months now since the last one.

Mind & Meditation

The evening journal : the one-line floor I installed after retiring the meditation streak : filled on three nights out of nineteen entries. It has now been in five consecutive monthly plans, twice with an explicit note that it needed a “mechanical fix.”

So I’m retiring it. Not because reflection doesn’t matter, but because five months of identical failure is data, and I should accept it. The habit isn’t failing for lack of a trigger : it’s failing because I’m a morning writer, and the evening version competes with time and routine I don’t actually want to interrupt. The replacement is a fifteen-minute written reflection every Sunday, attached to the weekly review I already do. Four a month instead of thirty. If that fails too, I’ll delete the field from the template and stop pretending. We live, learn and adapt. I am learning to be kind to myself and find routines that work for me and not the other way round.

Joy

Joy came through the same channels it has all year : people and books and small ordinary things. The birthday lunch. Jatu’s last week. Movies with Ryan. Ted Lasso with Riya. Rakhi with Geetu and Mansi. A good cup of coffee, which shows up in my gratitude notes more often than anything else.

The half that went missing was building. The Maths app with Ryan : which I named in July’s report as a proven, repeatable source of joy : does not appear once in thirty-one days of journal entries. That’s the one thing I’d change about the month.

Travel

A week away in the middle of the month, which ended with me catching H1N1 and losing the week after it to fever. Restful while it lasted.

And Bihar, covered above. Seventh month, and this time it doesn’t roll : it closes.

Office

Good hectic work month. Office is my bread and butter. And while I do not capture office details here, it still takes 50% of my available time. Grateful for this.

The Honest Scorecard

Pillar How It Went
Family & Relationships Very Strong. Riya’s first college weeks, the 48th birthday, Jatu’s last week, Rakhi, Mom’s departure. Bihar ends unfinished.
Wellness & Fitness Failed. Zero of twelve planned cardio sessions despite a physio green light held since July. Two illnesses cost eleven days.
Finance & Investing Closed the big one. .
Learning & Writing Light. Fiction came back. No article shipped, fourth month running. Two threads announced and abandoned.
Mind & Meditation Retired a habit. Evening journal 3 of 19. But real equanimity when it mattered.
Joy Strong on people, absent on building. No Maths app in 31 days.
Travel Restful, then unwell. Bihar closes without happening.
Office Quietly the best-executed pillar.

Looking Ahead to September

The finding I can’t avoid after this month is simple, and it isn’t new : it’s the same one I wrote at the end of Q2, just clearer.

Everything that got done in August had another person’s deadline attached to it. The house deal had a buyer, a broker and a registrar. The inbox had senders waiting. Riya, Ryan, Jatu, Mom and Rakhi had people physically in front of me. Every one of those landed.

Everything that was purely mine got zero. The cardio restart. The thesis. The evening journal. The app with Ryan : which involved him, but which I had to initiate, and which therefore failed like a solo goal rather than a social one.

So September is designed around that fact instead of arguing with it. Every goal gets a person, a date, or an audience attached, or it doesn’t go on the list.

Ryan turns 13 on the 3rd and Riya turns 18 on the 20th : one child becoming a teenager and the other becoming an adult, three weeks apart. That is the shape of the month, and I want to be properly present for both rather than scrambling.

The cardio restart gets cut to eight sessions. Learning French is a new journey I am starting this month and I am excited about it. The Boundless thesis moves deliberately to October rather than being stacked onto a month that already has two birthdays, a tax deadline and a trip in it : I’d rather cut it honestly than watch it become next month’s repeat offender. And there’s a trip with Ryan at the end of the month, which is the first thing in a long time that serves four goals with one booking.

Three things get formally retired: the Bihar trip for this year, the 80kg weight target that I didn’t measure even once in thirty-one days, and the nightly evening journal.

The house is empty, the family have gone, and Mom is in Canada. Every excuse that had a legitimate shape in July and August is gone. Which makes September the honest test of whether I can do the quiet things when nothing external is pushing.

I am a warrior monk.

This is part of a monthly series where I review my life across the pillars that matter to me. The goal isn’t perfection, it’s awareness. If you know where you are, you can choose where to go.