In a world defined by constant distractions, rapid change and an endless stream of information, the quality of our inner life can often get overlooked. Yet, how we experience our circumstances is deeply shaped by the state of our mind. In this conversation, Navnit Bhalla, Author of Quality of Life: Untangling the Mind and Founder, Full Distance Press, explores the relationship between the mind and quality of life, drawing from his experiences of travelling across more than 155 countries and his reflections on happiness, suffering, relationships, mindfulness and fulfilment. He also discusses how small, everyday moments of awareness, kindness and restraint can gradually change the way we experience life.
1. Your book explores the idea that the quality of life depends on the quality of the mind. What does this mean in practical terms, especially for people navigating today’s fast-paced and distraction-heavy world?
When I say that the quality of life depends upon the quality of the mind, I am not suggesting that our circumstances do not matter. They certainly do. But every circumstance, pleasant or unpleasant, is finally experienced through the mind.
Today our attention is constantly being pulled somewhere else. A message arrives, a headline appears, somebody says something that irritates us, and before we quite know it the mind has reacted. It has already experienced the episode as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral, and everything that follows is built on that.
The practical work begins with noticing that movement. Before answering an irritating message, for example, pause for a moment. Take one or two natural breaths and ask: What is happening in my mind just now? Anger? Anxiety? The need to prove something?
Noticing is not quite the whole of it. Once you can see the state, one further question is useful: will what I am about to say add to the agitation or settle it? And most of the time you will remember to pause only after you have already answered.
In that small space between what happens and how we respond, a great deal is decided.
The events around us will continue as they are. What can change is our response to them. A little restraint, a moment or two of observation inserted as a buffer before we respond — over time this practice takes hold, and the quality of the mind improves with it.
2. The book uses a train journey and conversations between three strangers to explore subjects such as happiness, suffering, wealth and relationships. Why did you choose this narrative format to discuss deeply personal and philosophical questions?
I did not want the reader sitting in front of a teacher. I wanted the reader sitting beside other people.
A train compartment gave me that. In Quality of Life: Untangling the Mind, three strangers share a space for a while, and the conversation is allowed to find its own way. A question is asked. Someone sees it differently. A story comes to mind. Sometimes a person says something and later has reason to reconsider it. When one of them is wrong, he is wrong in the way most of us have been wrong.
There is a great deal of silence in the book as well. The train sways. Somebody looks out at the dry earth going past. Nobody feels obliged to fill the gap, which is what allows the next thing to be said at all.
I hope the reader gradually occupies the fourth seat. You may agree with one traveller, disagree with another, or find that you have already asked the question that comes next.
The train matters too, but I would not make too much of the metaphor. It simply keeps moving. Stations come and go, the landscape changes, and so does the conversation. That seemed a natural setting for questions about life that most of us keep returning to.
3. After travelling across more than 155 countries and experiencing different cultures and ways of living, what have those experiences taught you about what truly contributes to a meaningful and fulfilling life?
Before answering, I would want to look at the question itself. Life does not appear to arrive with a purpose attached. At the biological level, much of life is concerned with survival and continuation. But we also have the ability to ask: What shall I do with this life?
We give it purposes. To be a good parent. To do our work honestly. To build something. To serve. To be kind to the people around us. These may sound like modest ambitions. They are the ground on which something higher can stand.
You can achieve all of them and still have a mind consumed by wanting, comparison, fear or resentment.
For me, that is where the question of fulfilment begins. What is the condition of the mind living this life? Is there some ease in it? Some peace? Is it becoming less driven by wanting and avoiding, or simply finding more sophisticated ways to satisfy them?
Travelling has not given me a formula. If anything, it turned the mirror around. What mind was I carrying into each of those places? What biases? What stereotypes? What fears and expectations? Was I allowing the people and the place to show themselves to me, or had I already arrived with my own picture of them?
You can cross the entire world and still carry the same mind everywhere. That, more than anything I encountered, is what travel taught me.
4. Mindfulness and emotional awareness are increasingly becoming part of conversations around modern well-being. How can individuals incorporate these practices into everyday life without turning them into another source of pressure or performance?
Let me answer from a slightly different angle. Before asking how to practise, it is worth asking what we are practising against.
In the book I describe two enemies. Jealousy — not being happy to see others prosper. And tight-fistedness. Between them they can produce a great deal of the resentment and unrest that now gets called stress. In working life they are easy to spot. A promotion is announced, a bonus, the office with the window, and something moves in the mind before you have decided anything about it. Nobody says it aloud. Everybody recognises it.
Ten minutes of breathing may quiet that mind for a while, but it does not necessarily address what is feeding the agitation.
So I do not begin with technique. I begin by looking for friends. If envy and miserliness are the two enemies, then we invite in the friends who weaken them. Loving-kindness is one. Mudita — being genuinely pleased when things go well for someone else — is another. Generosity is a third.
These are practised in ordinary places, which is the whole point. A waitress across the restaurant looks distressed. You call her over and ask how she is. She tells you she is being blamed for a mistake she did not make. You offer a few kind words. That is all of it. It takes a minute and nobody is watching.
Do that often enough and something begins to change. The mind grows quieter, and a quieter mind notices more.
Awareness is not a state to be achieved. It is only the ability to see what the mind is doing while it does it, and that comes more easily to a mind that has less to defend.
Which is also why it need not become a performance. Awareness itself has no audience. There is nothing to be good at, and no one to be good at it for.
Navnit Bhalla is the author of Quality of Life: Untangling the Mind and founder of Full Distance Press. His second book, The Daily Dhamma: Finding Your Calm in a Noisy World, is forthcoming in October 2026. https://fulldistancepress.com
