When I first tried to read philosophy, I was a teenager—naively proud, impatient, and convinced that knowing a few big names meant I was clever. That wasn't the only reason I studied philosophy, but you can guess. There's an image that still comes to me sometimes: a dim bookshop (probably during my first solo travel outside my own town), the air damp from rain, dust rising off the floor when I moved. The bookshop owner looked at me with a hurried sense because he thought maybe I was lost and had mistakenly entered the wrong shop. But that wasn't a wrong turn into that bookstore. The bookstore was on the lower ground from street level, so I had to take a couple of stairs.

I remember finding The Republic in a Hindi edition—a translated cheap version (usually at that time we could hardly afford new books anyway), wedged between cracked paperbacks, its spine bowed, its pages soft from other hands. I didn't know who Plato was then. I had unknowingly picked up that book. Seeing me confused with that book in my hand, the bookseller said—"That's Plato. If you're interested in philosophy, then you should try." That's the first thing I heard about Plato—"I should read him if I am interested in reading philosophy." The cover had his marble bust; Plato stared from the cover as if he could already tell I was bluffing.

I opened the book, determined to be impressive—and within half a page, I was gone. Lost. Every word felt heavy, deliberate, pulsing with meaning I couldn't touch. Even many years later, when I dared to read him in English (at that time, Indian or Nepali translations were more readily available than English, so most Russian and Greek philosophy I first read in Nepali or Hindi), that heaviness was still there. "Justice." "Virtue." "Education." I never trusted his words at first. They drifted by like Greek coins I didn't know how to spend.

For weeks I carried that book everywhere in my side duffle bag (but it was a different kind of duffle bag—it had a shape like a guitar and had blue and black color on the bottom part. I still remember that bag because that was the bag every smart guy was carrying, and I told my father during our dinner. My mother said, "I will make that one for you." I said nothing at that time, but if I were to tell her that right now, I would say—"Sure, mother, make one for me."). It rested under my arm like proof that I was thinking about important things. I was thinking Plato. I would pull it out on the bus, read three confused sentences, and close it again, but I used to lay The Republic on my lap until my stop arrived to let everyone see what I was reading. I liked to hold it and feel like showing them, "See what I am reading."

Eventually, I stopped pretending. I set it down and admitted, quietly, that I didn't understand. Oddly, that moment—the letting go, the not knowing—was when philosophy started to mean something to me. It begins in confusion. It begins in pride. You don't start wise; you start curious. I must admit this now. For a few weeks I used to treat confusion as failure, the thing you hide. Now I think it's the most honest place to begin.

Reading philosophy is like walking through thick fog—every few steps the world shifts, edges blur, and you have to trust that moving slowly is still moving. When I read the cave allegory for the first time, I thought, "Okay, now I know what I am reading." The fog doesn't clear all at once; it thins, closes, thins again. Outside there might be light, but after climbing out of Plato's cave, would there be just one sun in the sky? That was my first reaction after reading the cave. After reading Plato (for this, my next book will be the answer—it's already on the editor's desk).

Somewhere inside that rhythm, you learn to live with uncertainty. You learn to ignore two suns. I studied Plato and learned something different from what other people learned. When I got to university, I signed up for an accounting course that sounded important at the time, like something adults did. Suddenly, I was surrounded by names that echoed through dusty halls—like people who were enthusiastic about destroying the economy as a whole. Out of boredom one day, I went to the ethics class, where I heard about Aristotle, Bentham, Kant. Each of them seemed to speak a different language: Aristotle chasing balance, Bentham counting happiness, Kant building whole metaphysical systems with a single sentence that ran for miles. I felt, this is what I need to study.

I remember staring at those words, tangled inside them, wondering if maybe I'd chosen the wrong path. Then one day it struck me—philosophy isn't about sounding wise; it's about wanting truth badly enough to wrestle with it. It's not arguing about things with people but letting them know. The arguing is not bad either. The greats weren't lecturing; they were struggling.

After that, I started writing in the margins of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: tiny counterarguments, scribbled questions, emotional bursts of "yes" and "no." My handwriting tilted differently depending on my mood. That's when the books changed—or maybe I did. Reading stopped being passive. The conversation had started. I could almost hear Aristotle sigh, Descartes mutter, Beauvoir push back gently, Nietzsche bellow in his own music, Sartre start to make me more rustic in his own way.

That's the secret of philosophy: you don't read it so much as you enter into it. But after a few months, a few years, a few decades, you would be like watching fog while being inside the fog, being fog instead. There's a kind of tenderness in that exchange—being alone, being one with the fog. That unity. Awake past midnight, tracing the thoughts of someone long gone who somehow still understands your confusion.

When you read philosophy honestly—let me be honest with you here—you're not learning a doctrine; you're meeting another mind halfway, stripped of both certainty and pretense, who might or might not be even a real person in our history. For a while (almost 14 years) I kept waiting for the big moment—an enlightenment, a perfect sentence that would unlock everything. That moment never came. Never will be. What did arrive was quieter: a slow warming, a gradual clarity. It shattered some hard shell of my beingness in the world.

Once, like Zarathustra, I was on top of the hill called Long Hill, having pots in hand. I spent days struggling through Meditations until one small line stopped me cold: you control your mind, not the world. I still remember the wind that flowed down from the river Manahara. I remember closing the book and sitting there, stunned and stoned, by how something so old could meet me exactly where I was. It made philosophy feel human—an act of survival more than scholarship. I don't have that Meditations copy anymore because the day while I was descending from that Long Hill (villagers called it Laame Dada), I slept and the book went somewhere I couldn't find. I lost it. I lost my meditation then.

Over time I realized that philosophy isn't a race to the end of a text. It's something slower—almost tender. You read a passage. You let it sit. You come back changed. Sometimes I read aloud, as if giving the words a body might help them breathe. Sometimes I put the book down for a week and watch how its ideas echo in ordinary life—in irritation at a stranger (mostly I do it with Bhagavad Gita), in the small pause before replying to someone I disagree with. Sometimes I used to ask myself, whom should I argue with? Arjuna? Krishna? Or Nietzsche? Or even Artaud? Like that. Bit by bit, the reading began to shape my seeing. I began to stop quacking and started to sound human.

One summer I took a torn copy of the Tao Te Ching on a long trip (we were going to Pokhara). The pages fluttered in the bus's wind. Somewhere outside the valley, in a small town on the highway, I came to that quiet line: do your work, then step back. I looked out at the vast stretch of nothing and felt something unclench—a rare peace born not from understanding but from acceptance. It was then I knew: philosophy isn't confined to classrooms. It travels wherever you're willing to listen.

If anyone asked me now how to begin, I'd say: start slow. Descend some damp old stairs. Don't chase conclusions. Follow the questions. Follow the sentences across the pages. Find a single line that stirs something in you and keep turning it over in your mind until it belongs to you. Keep that line immortal in your head. Repeat it. Squeeze it. Struggle with it. Philosophy won't hand you answers—it'll teach you how to live with the ache of their absence.

Years later, I still have those same worn books. When I open them, I see my old pencil notes—fragments of earlier, isolated selves. The handwriting is the same; the understanding isn't. That's how you know philosophy has done its work: the words stay still while you move.

So if you want to know how to read philosophy, do it patiently. Do it like you are participating in some yājna. Humbly. Willingly lost—nodding along with its mantra. Approach it not as mastery, but as conversation. If you think after closing Being and Nothingness you got nothing, then remember: philosophy doesn't end when you close the book; it begins. You have to ponder over and over its ideas. It's not easy. You have to become every word on its pages. It lingers in what you do after—the breath before a harsh word, the small courage to keep questioning, the grace of not knowing and letting that be enough.

Now I can tell you, that's the thing no one tells you. Reading philosophy is really learning how to read yourself—slowly, with kindness, always in progress. If you want to learn philosophy by knowing others, then you might get lost. You need to seek yourself before seeking philosophy.

Image: Photo by Calil Encarnación: https://www.pexels.com/photo/stack-of-philosophy-books-on-a-desk-34923529/