I don’t remember when I first read it exactly—maybe I was eight, maybe nine.
But I remember the cover: thick font, bright blue, a sketch of Saturn’s rings drifting behind a white rocket. It was a children’s encyclopedia of science.
Not fantasy. Not fiction.
Just friction. Pressure. Electricity. Stars.
I read it in the hallway, sitting cross-legged beside the heating pipe in our tiny socialist flat in Slovenia. I liked how the hot air from the pipe curled into my sleeves as I flipped pages about magnetic fields and volcanoes. There was something comforting about reading facts. How certain they were.
No plot. No drama. Just: “this is how it works.”
At school, other kids were reading adventure stories or comics with talking animals and sword fights. I had a book that showed me why the sky is blue and how levers amplify force.
And somehow, it felt just as magical.
Years later, in Ljubljana, I carried that same sense of wonder in a different form.
The facts had changed, grown more complex—quantum tunneling, neuroplasticity, entropy—but the feeling was the same.
I still liked reading about how the world fit together.
Especially when mine didn’t.
Then came university.
And with it, Darwin.
I’d heard of evolution before, of course—basic schoolbook gloss—but it was there, in the quiet university library, with cheap instant coffee and that dry winter air soaked into every page of my notes, that I finally understood it.
Not as theory.
But as rhythm.
As the slow, almost imperceptible waltz of trial and error across millennia.
It hit me that this wasn’t just about animals and fossils.
It was about everything.
About survival and change. About letting go of what doesn’t serve you.
About the brutal, beautiful way that life reshapes itself again and again,
quietly, stubbornly, without asking permission.
And I remember staring out of the dusty window after reading that passage,
watching a crow hop between patches of melting snow.
It felt like something in me shifted.
Like I had been trying to force too many things to stay the same.
In Regensburg, it rained so much that year.
I’d sit by the window with tea gone cold, rereading a book on first principles thinking.
Stripping away complexity. Starting from zero.
Those were the books that helped me move forward—not by giving answers,
but by showing me how to ask better questions.
Then came London.
Birmingham, really.
The books I loved then were still non-fiction. Still science. But the titles changed:
- Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk
I didn’t finish all of them. Some were too heavy, too clinical.
But even when I read just a chapter, I’d find myself slowing down—
pausing at sentences that felt like someone had finally described something I’d never had words for.
How the brain protects us. How patterns loop. How everything, eventually, seeks balance.
It’s strange—when life falls apart, I don’t reach for comfort fiction.
I reach for diagrams.
For drawings of gears and tides and synapses.
Maybe it’s because when I feel lost, I need something grounded.
Something that doesn’t care how I feel.
Something that reminds me:
“This is how the world works. And you are part of it.”
Wabi-sabi in the Equation
I’ve come to believe there’s a kind of beauty in this, too.
In knowing the rules,
in relearning them when they change,
in letting science be your candle through fog.
There is no perfect book.
But there are books that return to you—
whispering familiar truths when you’ve forgotten your own.
And sometimes the best story isn’t one someone else imagined.
It’s the one that explains why your tea cools,
why your heart races,
why the sun still rises—
even when you didn’t ask it to.
Because maybe the most magical thing about the world
is that it continues
whether we understand it or not.
But when we do—
even just a little—
we get to feel less alone.
life 