Every Monday morning since January 2025, I have published a single question on the internet. Sometimes long. More often short. Always honest. Always written first thing on a Monday, before the week claims me.
Over time the questions have grown — from gentle prompts to small meditations, from coffee-table curiosities to the kind of question that follows you home. The shape of the room has stayed the same: one question, asked once, sat with for a week. But the writing has settled into something quieter. I notice this only because the readers tell me so. Apparently a Monday Musing now arrives in the inbox the way a friend’s letter does — once a week, gently, refusing to compete with everything else demanding your attention.
Monday Musings began as the digital extension of Koffee with Karania — a small ritual I have kept across years and continents, where friends and colleagues gather over coffee and ask each other the questions that matter. Not the questions you ask in meetings. Not the questions you ask on calls. The questions that, once asked, sit with you for a week.
Many of these musings are part of a slower body of thinking I call The Sunshine Life — a quiet attempt to design a life that is wide, warm, and worth waking up to. Some questions arrive from the season we are in — the year-end ones, the new-year ones, the Q1-done ones. Others arrive from a conversation, a book, a film, a face I saw on a train.
There are no answers here. The whole point is that the answer lives in you, and the asking only loosens it. If a particular Monday’s question moves you, write back. The conversations that have grown out of these questions have become some of the most treasured moments of my year.
— Ash
Pull up a chair. The koffee is on me.