The kitchen always gets unpacked first. It makes sense, right. I know I am not as organised as I could be, but once I know where the mugs, the ladles and the spices are, I can pretend the rest of it will fall into place.
Five cities. Eight homes. Three countries. I have set up a lot of kitchens.
And every single time, somewhere between unwrapping the plates and deciding where the crockery should go, there is that quiet feeling. A kind of interior inhale. Like this might actually be a beginning.
We call it a fresh start. A new chapter. Ground zero. We have built an entire vocabulary around the idea of the reset, which probably says something about how often we need it, and how rarely it works exactly the way we need it to. The belief arrives before the evidence, though. That is the part worth noticing.
You don’t move to a new city and then decide it feels like a beginning. You decide it feels like a beginning, and then you move. The story comes first. The boxes get packed afterward.
There’s a scene in Love Aaj Kal, the original, where Saif Ali Khan’s character arrives in a new city and for a while he is lighter than he was. He looks around like the place is a possibility he has been waiting for. He high-fives kids on the street on his way to work. And then, at some point you cannot precisely locate, that version of him quietly exits. He is himself again. The self that was always going to show up, that had made the trip along with everything else, that was simply waiting for the novelty to run its course.
I watched that and thought, mine will be different. I have thought that in every new city. I have also thought it in every new role, and I have had enough of those now to know how it goes.
I started in Engineering, where the problem sits in front of you and your job is to solve it. There is a particular satisfaction in correctness that I did not fully appreciate until I no longer had access to it. Then marketing, where the problem hides and the answer, when it comes, is not always provable. Then something like strategy, where the job is mostly deciding what the question even is, which sounds interesting and sometimes is. Then something harder to name, where I am often building the thing at the same time as I am supposed to be operating inside it. Honestly, this is completely fine, I am very comfortable with ambiguity now, this is growth.
The thing is, each shift felt like a reset.
What I brought with me every time: the same me. The same instinct to build structure before I have properly understood the environment. The same tendency to have an opinion before the meeting has settled. I have identified these. Named them. Discussed them with what I can only describe as impressive self-awareness, in enough conversations that you would think something would have shifted by now. And then I walked into the next thing and did them again.
There is another kind of beginning that is harder to recognise as one.
Nothing changes on the outside. The same house. The same routines. The same workdays, arranged in the same way. And somewhere inside that, you decide you are going to do this differently now.
I did this with health once. I changed what I was eating. Cut down sugar. Reduced wheat. Stopped most processed food. It worked, in the way these things do when you are paying attention. My energy improved. I lost weight. Things felt easier. And along with it, something else appeared. A small, quiet sense that I had figured something out. Somewhere in the background there was a feeling that I had solved a problem that had previously been mine to manage. I noticed what other people were eating. I noticed who skipped exercise. I noticed the small decisions that, a few months earlier, I would not have thought twice about.
For a while, I believed that this version would hold. That this was the new baseline. That I had reset something. And then, slowly, it stopped fitting into the rest of my life. The food I was avoiding became difficult to avoid in ordinary situations. Eating out required negotiation. Social plans came with adjustments. What had started as a change began to feel like a system that needed to be maintained.
So I loosened it. Gradually. Enough to make it liveable again. And that is the part I keep returning to. I had not reset anything. I had built a version of myself that worked for a while, and then adjusted it until it fit again.
I know I carry my patterns with me. I have known this for a while, and knowing it has not made a significant dent in the carrying. The instincts reinforced over years do not stay behind when you move. They are not location-dependent. They travel well, they adapt quickly, and they are usually fully operational before you have even found the good grocery store.
I know this. And I still believe in the fresh start.
Beginning with full clarity about exactly what you are bringing into the room is its own kind of impossible. If I had stood at the entrance to each new city and thought, accurately and honestly, you will replicate some of what you are trying to leave behind, and faster than you expect, I am not sure I would have walked in with the same energy. I am not sure I would have set up the kitchen at all.
The story is not there to deceive. It is there to get you through the door. It doesn’t have to be true. It has to be usable.
And so you tell yourself this is a beginning. You arrange the spices. You find where the mugs go. You make tea without thinking about it, and for a moment the place feels like yours, and the feeling is real even if the reset isn’t, and you begin anyway, carrying everything you always carry, into whatever comes next.
I knew it wouldn’t reset. I told myself it would. It would happen again. The kitchen would be the first room to get unpacked.
This post is a part of Blogchatter A2Z Challenge 2026 .
I’ve done A2ZChallenge in 2017, where I collected 26 quotes by people whose names started with the letter of the day. In 2015, the theme was professional life.
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