The fog and the mountain - how insight reveals itself

Through the fog of distractions you must go,

The Mountain's wisdom awaits at the far edge

 

Clarity and insight come mostly from dwelling on things over long periods of time.

It might feel like they appear in a moment, like in a flash of brilliance, but they actually come when the mind has been quietly marinating in certain ideas.

For me, insight emerges from looping through a familiar mix: writing, reading, thinking while walking, connecting thoughts, listening, consuming ideas, and then putting pen to paper again.

A busy, distracted mind has no energy to create. Distraction is perhaps the single biggest barrier to creativity. Writing helps anchor the mind.

But beyond writing, there is also a need for clear frameworks that help simplify and clarify thinking. It is only after one understands—by linking one idea to another—that it becomes possible to express what something really means, and make it simple and profound.

To show what this looks like in practice, consider the following example.

I was reading a book about early 20th-century expeditions to the South Pole. One striking detail was how explorers described the grand Antarctic mountains—massive, majestic—and yet often completely hidden behind fog and snow.

That sparked a thought. It is easy to become accustomed to seeing grand vistas like the Grand Canyon or the Himalayas—accessible places with seasons that allow for clear views. But in remote places like Antarctica and the Arctic, some of the most spectacular sights may remain unseen—not just because of their remoteness, but because they’re perpetually obscured by the elements.

There was a compelling fact—fog covers monumental mountains in Earth’s remotest places. And a wishful thought: that maybe some of the most beautiful vistas on Earth will never be seen or felt by humans.

At this point, it’s not yet insight. Just a curious observation. To make something of it, one has to write it down. Then review it. Then revisit it, using a framework like the one below.

This is where the earlier point about inhabiting a thought becomes real. The framework that follows is what allows a fleeting idea to evolve into something meaningful. It is a way of staying with the thought long enough for it to reveal something new—something that moves from noticing to insight.

This framework helps move from absorbing to seeing. From gathering to generating. From skimming past something to inhabiting it.

Here’s how it works.

First, to inhabit a thought, one needs to stay longer with it. Add more stillness between inputs. This is where reflection starts to deepen. Helpful questions include:

What is the emotional core of this?
Which part of me is responding to it?
What does it evoke in me?

Second, one has to make it strange again. Be childlike and indulge in some divergent thinking. Ask:

What would a child or a weird philosopher say about this?
What is this a metaphor for?
Where else does this pattern show up?

Third, one must zoom out and give attention more weight. Let the subconscious do its quiet work. Questions that help here:

What’s the larger truth being hinted at?
How can this be said more simply?

This is how uncommon connections form. And that’s where insight begins to surface.

Returning to the Antarctica example: the emotional core of the thought was longing—for beauty, for inspiration. The part that responded was the curious inner explorer. What it evoked was a kind of FOMO—not of missing out on trends, but missing out on inspiration.

Then, making it weirder—imagining that a philosopher might say that there is beauty out there, but it’s hidden—not because it doesn’t exist, but because it cannot be seen through the fog.

From a note about unseen Antarctic mountains, it became a metaphor about inspiration hidden by the fog of distraction.

That’s when the ideas clicked. There are things that remain out of reach not because they’re distant, but because attention is clouded. This is what people experience when they have writer’s block. Or creative plateaus. Because writing requires us to go to remote places - internally. Insight is often found in the places that are off the map.

What is the larger truth? To see the sublime, one must clear space. Remove the fog.

The mountains are there for the seeing—but only when one clears the fog of noise, haste, mental clutter and dares to venture to the edges where true insight lurks, can they finally come into view.

That is the power of inhabiting a thought—not grazing past it. Insight doesn't come from more inputs. It comes from deeper attention. And writing, more than anything, helps engage the whole of one’s consciousness.

The only caution: this should not become a mechanical exercise. One must not confuse deep thinking with sounding clever. Inhabiting thoughts for longer quietly dissolves that urge. 

BOOK NOTE - Table for Two - Amor Towles

Mark of great writing is when you can imagine a scene so vividly that after a while, you start doubting whether it was from a book or a movie—or even a real-life experience. Especially when you are reading another book, and a scene from that earlier book plays in your mind like a movie and then shapes how you imagine the current book’s scene.

For example, in one of James Hadley Chase’s books, a couple of crooks rob a casino. I read that about a year ago. Now, as I am reading Amor Towles’ Table for Two, there is a novella where a character robs a casino, and I imagined it in Chase’s prose. It is also because of the vivid nature of stories set in Los Angeles.

Chase’s books are pulp fiction. But iconic pulp fiction. Towles’ writing is good literature. And I am sure that sometime later, I will experience Towles’ prose like a movie too, when I am reading another heist story.

Table for Two is a wonderful collection of short stories and a novella. They are characterized by Towles’ evocative prose, rich in history and culture, and written with subtle humour. Towles evokes the sense of the cities his stories are set in beautifully. Reading the ones set in New York in the 90s evokes a deep sense of nostalgia.

For someone who has not visited New York at the time of reading, the nostalgia I am referring to is the one shaped by consuming great New York stories—like The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and from movies like The Godfather and TV shows like Mad Men.

I loved the evocation of the old bookseller who inhabits the literary world in The Ballad of Timothy Touchett, and the simple optimism of Pushkin in The Line. Both are amazing and touching stories. But my favourite was The DiDomenico Fragment, which is brilliant in its description of old money in New York and the art world.

BOOK NOTE - Sharing a house with the Never-Ending Man - Steve Alpert

I recently saw a YouTube short about how the 90s and 2000s in Japan were a kind of nostalgic golden age. Japan then was still the second-largest economy in the world and a major cultural influence—both on its own and through its ties with the US and the rest of the world. Japanese consumer tech was ahead of its time – think Walkman and Nintendo. Japanese cars were state of the art – Toyotas and Hondas were top-notch. Japanese management ideas – kaizen, just-in-time, etc. – were all the rage in business schools. Tokyo, especially, was the world’s biggest city and had this mix of high-tech modernity and ancient, arcane traditions. Tokyo, in particular, was the biggest city in the world and was a unique blend of cosmopolitan, techno-West, embedded in an old-world society.

It’s in this setting that Steve Alpert’s book about his time at Studio Ghibli takes place. It’s an easy read, and Alpert writes with a casual pace, recounting his time as a Gaijin inside the world of Japanese office culture. He captures the eccentricity of people like Hayao Miyazaki and Toshio Suzuki, while also drawing an insightful contrast with their interactions with large American establishments like Disney and Hollywood. Alpert doesn’t take sides, but it’s clear he has a soft spot for his Japanese colleagues. He often points out how brutal and crass the American style of business could be compared to the more refined, if rigid and dogmatic, Japanese way.

I picked up this book while researching something I was writing – whether the AI threat to art is real – and wanted to understand more about Miyazaki and his potential views on the Ghiblification trend. While the book doesn’t go deep into Miyazaki’s biography, it gave me a good sense of the people, the culture, and a feel for the Ushinawareta Jūnen—the Lost Decade. That period of economic stagnation in Japan, post-bubble, which ironically turned out to be rich in culture.

Alpert talks about the evocative scenes of central Tokyo that were visible out the offices of Tokuma Shoten, the publishing company behind Studio Ghibli. It is very well described and evokes the metropolitan madness that is Tokyo very well – almost like out of a scene from a Stuido Ghibli movie.

Our tenth-floor office also had large corner windows with views that extended all the way out to Tokyo Bay. From my desk I could see all of Japan's various modes of transportation at a single glance. There was the shinkansen Bullet Train just slowing on its final glide toward Tokyo Station. The various color-coded JR local and long-distance lines came and went every few minutes. The newly built and driverless Yurikamome train zipped along on rubber wheels toward the Odaiba entertainment area and the Big Site convention center.

The aging but still graceful Monorail, a leftover from the 1964 Olympics, leaned precariously leftward as it rounded a curve on its way to Haneda Airport. There were the gracefully arching branches of the Shuto, the overhead highways. These were clogged with traffic that barely moved all day. Once or twice a day I could spot a ferry just easing into its berth at the Takeshiba piers after completing its twenty-four-hour trip from one of the far-away Izu-Ogasawara Islands, incongruously an official part of metropolitan Tokyo. There was the newly built Rainbow Bridge standing astride the harbor and linking it to the island of Odaiba. The bridge was silvery white in the morning sunshine or bathed in colored lights against a hazy pink and purple sky at dusk.

All day, passenger jet aircraft banked low over Tokyo Bay on their final approach to Haneda Airport. Immediately below, bustling Shinbashi's wide main streets were packed with cars and buses mired in the heavy traffic. The warren of narrow pedestrian-only alleys in the Mizu Shobai (bar) district were mostly empty in the morning and crammed with wandering pedestrians once the evening rush began. At the beginning and end of the lunch hour, which everyone took at exactly the same time, the sidewalks were full of people.

The more humorous and interesting parts are his observations of Japanese office quirks. One example that stood out was nemawashi (“securing the roots”), where everything is decided before the meeting even happens. I see this a lot in management in 2025 too. It’s just called stakeholder management now, but doesn’t sound half as cool as nemawashi. 

The process of visiting and obtaining the approval of all required persons in advance is called nemawashi (securing the roots). In this way the arguments for or against any proposal or new idea and the decision makers' positions on the proposal have all been fixed long before any formal meeting takes place. Once the nemawashi has occurred, a meeting is called to pretend to discuss the matter in question, and the attendees vote on the outcome in accordance with the positions they have previously (and privately) confirmed they would take. By the time the meeting has been called, everyone attending already knows what's been decided.

Alpert also gives a strong picture of Miyazaki’s temperament and what drives him. Miyazaki is a genius, and like most geniuses, has his own unique quirks. Working with him was tough:

Hayao Miyazaki's way of making a film was particularly stressful, and that was exactly how he thought it should be. He would often say that a person only does his best work when faced with the real possibility of failure and its real consequences.

But Alpert also shows how Miyazaki’s ideas took shape. Miyazaki was always drawing, and out of those loose sketches, something would take hold. It was a long process of trial and error, where many ideas were percolated, thrown away, resurfaced and slowly the one that stuck would emerge. Then, after more iterations and more stress, about two years later, a finished film, a work of art, would emerge.

This reminded me of the classification I had read about how creative people think and create. Some are experimental innovators, who iterate and let ideas and trials percolate before it is finalized. Others are conceptual innovators, whose ideas burst forth like a sudden fount. Miyazaki was clearly the first kind.

Alpert also notes how Miyazaki treated a film once it was done:

When Miyazaki signed off on one of his and it was officially done, he preferred to never think about that film again. It was done. There was nothing more he could do to improve or change it. He always wanted to be moving forward and thinking about the next film.

There’s also what I think is a glorious moment from the book when Miyazaki visits the US for Princess Mononoke’s release. Hollywood royalty, including Martin Scorsese, sends an invite to meet him for after-dinner drinks. To the horror of the American studio executives, who think this is a great honour, Miyazaki and Suzuki decline politely and go hang out with a Japanese architect friend instead This prioritization of personal interests and artistic integrity over commercial networking is a recurring theme in the book.

The book gives a window into a world that feels lost now. Before the digital age flattened everything, and creative edges got smoothed out.

Alpert sees this too:

In a world where more and more of the little things that make one place different from the next are disappearing, it's somehow comforting to hold on to a few bits of the past.

This book was one of those bits. A reminder.