Between Thought and Meaning

What Saghir Siddiqui called آوارگی was not mere restlessness; it was the consequence of a pause. A moment when the mind, exhausted by repeated meanings and borrowed destinations, stopped reacting. In that pause, thought had not yet assembled itself into certainty, and identity loosened its hold. Life continued to offer destinations at every step, yet the will to chase them faded. What remained was not emptiness, but awareness—directionless, silent, and alert. Saghir captured this condition through the language of loss and wandering, but beneath the pain lies a precise observation: when the mind pauses long enough to see its own patterns, even stillness becomes a journey. That pause, misunderstood by the world as aimlessness, becomes the most honest form of movement—movement away from compulsion, not toward a goal.

یہ جو دیوانگی ہے، اس کے پیچھے بھی عقل ہے

     بس فرق اتنا ہے کہ یہ دنیا نہیں سمجھتی

 The verse “This madness too has reason behind it; the only difference is that the world does not understand” is not a defense of chaos, but a critique of how society defines intelligence. What the world calls madness is often a state where the mind stops following automatic patterns. It is not the collapse of reason, but its transformation. In this state, the mind no longer rushes to label, react, or pursue borrowed meanings. Instead, it pauses. That pause is not emptiness; it is awareness watching the formation of thought itself.

This is the kind of reason Saghir Siddiqui points to—a silent, observational intelligence rather than a loud, goal-driven one. Because it does not announce itself through ambition, productivity, or conformity, society fails to recognize it. The person appears withdrawn, directionless, or unstable, while in reality they are no longer enslaved by compulsive thinking. What looks like madness from the outside is, from within, a heightened clarity—reason freed from the need to constantly explain itself.

In essence, the verse reveals a difficult truth: not all intelligence moves toward action; some intelligence moves toward understanding. And the world, trained to measure value through movement and noise, rarely knows how to see the intelligence that lives in silence.