World Philosophy Day used to be just a calendar entry.
Now it is a checkpoint.
A moment where I measure not how much I know, but how much my mind has changed.

I first met philosophy in 2020, because of a friend named Kapil.
We were both stuck in the same strange pause that the pandemic created.
Everything outside had slowed down. Everything inside sped up.
Kapil handed me a short PDF of Marcus Aurelius and said simply, read this for five minutes.
I thought it would be a distraction for a night.
Instead it opened a door.

Since then, philosophy has moved with me like an inner weather system.
It is not a hobby.
It is the way I test my reactions, my decisions, my fears.
Not every book made me calmer.
Not every idea comforted me.
But every text taught me a way to look at the world that I did not have before.

This is a long list, because the path was not straight.
I read widely to understand how thinkers confronted the same human problems across time and space.
From ancient Greeks to modern Europeans, from Indian sages to Chinese wisdom, from modern critics to spiritual teachers, each voice pushed me to think differently.

Here is how that reading shaped me, with depth and detail.

Western thinkers first grabbed my attention because they asked direct questions about meaning and life.
Marcus Aurelius and Seneca taught me that discipline and inward calm are practical tools, not moral showpieces.
Epictetus reminded me that control belongs to the self, and that everything else is noise.
Nietzsche shook my certainties and forced me to consider that values are created sometimes out of strength and sometimes out of weakness.
Camus and Sartre made the question of meaning unavoidable.
Reading The Myth of Sisyphus and Being and Nothingness, I had to face the fact that absurdity is not a problem to fix but a condition to accept and act within.

Kierkegaard taught me about faith and singular responsibility.
Kant made me appreciate the architecture of reason even when I disagreed with parts of it.
Schopenhauer showed that suffering was not a glitch in life but part of its fabric.
Foucault taught me to see power not only as top down but as embedded in knowledge, institutions and everyday practices.
Marx forced me to look at structures, not just individual choices.

But the western canon was only half the map I needed.
I turned to India and China and found different ways of asking the same questions.

The Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads taught me different kinds of freedom.
Not the freedom of will alone, but the freedom to act without being enslaved by results.
Adi Shankaracharya and the non dual teachings opened a perspective where identity itself can be questioned.
Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching offered a quiet alternative to the urgent Western ethos.
Taoism taught me that softness can be strength, that flow can be a form of power, and that the art of living sometimes means aligning with a process rather than forcing results.

Confucius showed me how ethics can be woven through daily acts, family ties and social rituals.
Buddhist teachings, in their various forms, taught me about the mechanics of suffering and the deliberate training of attention.

I also read modern spiritual voices like Osho.
Osho is polarizing.
He is paradoxical.
He mixes deep insights with provocation, and for a long time I resisted him because his style felt disruptive.
But Osho forced me to confront a question I had been avoiding: what if liberation is not only a set of behaviors but an existential refusal to live as a copy?
His emphasis on meditation as both discipline and wildness pushed me to experiment with practices that were not purely contemplative.
Osho encouraged me to hold contradiction without collapsing into fear.

Over the years my focus shifted through phases.
In 2021 existentialism consumed me.
I read Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard and Beauvoir until the idea of responsibility felt heavy in my bones.
In 2022 I explored darker thinkers like Schopenhauer and Cioran, not to become pessimistic but to know the limits of optimism and the necessity of facing pain honestly.
In 2023 I studied Marx, Arendt and Foucault to understand structures of power and the social scaffolding that shapes choices.
In 2024 I returned to Eastern texts and found the balance I needed.
Now, in 2025, I find myself drawn to Stoicism again, not as a platitude but as a training of the will.
I am practicing daily exercises of attention, examining judgments, rehearsing the inner posture of acceptance without resignation.

All of this reading did more than add facts to my head.
It changed how I live.

Before I read, I was quick to anger, fast to judge, and always certain of being right.
After reading, I became slower, more patient, and more interested in causes than in immediate outcomes.
I learned practices that were practical.
From Stoic journals where I rehearse worst case scenarios and then practice gratitude, to Taoist exercises that teach me to align with natural rhythms, to Osho inspired active meditations which asked my body to release tension, I formed a toolkit.

One practical change was my relationship with fear.
Existentialism taught me that anxiety can be the raw material of freedom.
Stoicism taught me to examine what is mine to control and what is not.
From the Gita I learned to act without attachment to outcomes.
These lessons combined into a habit: before reacting, I ask three simple questions.
What is happening now?
What is in my control?
What does wisdom ask of me here?
That tiny pause has saved me from many regrets.

Another change was in relationships.
Reading moral and social philosophers made me see that ethics is enacted, not declared.
Confucian emphasis on rituals translated into small practices: being punctual, showing up in small ways, keeping promises.
Arendt’s reflections on the publicness of action reminded me to be careful about how I perform morality in public life.
Osho’s insistence on authenticity taught me to be honest with myself in private before I tried to be honest in public.

My intellectual journey was also an emotional one.
There were times I swung from optimism to pessimism and back.
There were months when I wanted to dismantle every belief.
There were months when I wanted a quiet doctrine to hold.
Philosophy was not always consoling.
Sometimes it was deeply unsettling.
Yet those are the moments that taught me most.

On a technical level, I developed practices to absorb ideas rather than merely consume them.
I keep a notebook with three types of entries.
First, summaries where I distill an idea in one paragraph.
Second, reflections where I write how the idea touches my life.
Third, experiments where I put a practice into daily life for thirty days.
This method converted reading into habit and habit into change.

I also learned that the history of ideas is not a straight line but a conversation.
Nietzsche reacts to Kant and to Greek tragedy.
The Tao Te Ching speaks in a different grammar than Kant, but both address human limits.
Marx reads Hegel, just as modern critics read Marx.
Seeing ideas as conversation freed me from the pressure to hold only one truth.
Rather, I could sit with multiple truths and let them argue in me.

Osho and Taoism deserve a paragraph of their own because they influenced me in unexpected ways.
Taoism softened a tendency to fight every current.
It taught me to notice when resistance was useful and when it was simply wasted energy.
Osho forced me to accept contradiction.
He made room for joy as a philosophical stance, not merely as an escape.
That combination of softness and wildness gave me a practice that was both disciplined and alive.

Today I am learning to move without flinching.
Stoicism trains the muscle of endurance.
Taoism trains the muscle of response.
Osho trains the muscle of presence.
Existentialism trains the muscle of responsibility.
Together they form a gym where the mind becomes stronger and less brittle.

World Philosophy Day 2025 is not the end of this story.
It is a station on a route that will carry me forward.
Next year I may be reading more ethics, or deep phenomenology, or exploring Sufi poets, or going back to political thought with new eyes.
The point is not to finish a list.
The point is to let thinking change me.

If someone asks what philosophy gave me, I would say three things.
First, practices. Not slogans. Practices that change how I respond.
Second, perspective. The ability to see structures behind events and to identify what is mine to change.
Third, patience. The patience to sit with uncertainty until clarity arrives.

On a day like World Philosophy Day I am grateful to Kapil for a small nudge.
I am grateful to the authors who wrote across centuries and continents.
I am grateful to my younger self who, bored and anxious, opened a book and did not look away.

Philosophy did not make my life easier.
It made it truer.
It did not remove storms.
It changed how I hold the umbrella.
And for that I am still reading, still noting, still testing, still changing.

Where the path leads next is unknown.
That is part of the practice.
For now I keep walking, learning to hold contradictions, to act without clinging, to listen without rushing, and to be present in a world that never stops asking for answers.