Back to Writing .. So That I Can Breathe
For thirty-three years I have called it writing. It was always closer to breathing.
- Dedicated to Professor Kiyoshi Hirao , who sent me a gentle reminder of what it means to share ideas and thoughts. It was a wakeup call, and it came when I was searching for a clue!
For forty-five days, I wrote nothing.
No article. No post. No video. Not a single line for the twenty-three thousand people who follow what I think across the world, and the eleven thousand, who chose to subscribe to one of my four newsletters. I did not announce it. I simply went quiet, the way a room goes quiet after someone has left it. I do apologize for that. I am sorry.
This happens to me once every few years. A door closes somewhere inside, and for a while I have a lot to send out, but I publish nothing. I tell myself it is rest. I tell myself the well is refilling. But somewhere in the middle of those weeks, I always notice the same uncomfortable thing. I am not resting. I am holding my breath.
The Silence Was Not Peace
I started to write in 1992. Since then I have made books, some of them well known, some read by almost no one. I have written reports that went straight into drawers. I have posted thoughts that traveled across continents and tweets that nobody noticed at all. I have stood on stages and delivered keynotes. I have recorded thousands of videos. I have made abstract art with my own two hands and with digital tools.
For years I believed these were different acts, each with its own ambition. Now I know they were one act wearing different clothes.
“Every form I have ever used was the same form. A thought in the soul, looking for a door.”
In one of my earliest books, I wrote a sentence I did not fully understand at the time. I wrote that “I write so that I can breathe.”
I thought it was a nice line. A young man’s flourish. It took me three decades to learn it was not a metaphor at all. It was a diagnosis.
It Was Never Only Writing
Breathing is not a performance. No one inhales to be admired for the elegance of their inhaling. You breathe because the alternative is to suffocate, and the body does not stop to ask permission. That is what expression has always been for me. Not a craft I chose one day. A function I cannot switch off without paying for it.
So when people ask why I write, the honest answer embarrasses me a little. I do not write to be read. I do not speak to be quoted (Nevertheless, I appreciate both). I make essays and videos and paintings for the same reason my chest rises and falls while I sleep. Something comes in. Something has to go out. The shape it takes on the way out, a book, a sentence, an image, a talk, is almost incidental.
“I do not express myself to be heard. I express myself so that I do not drown in what I am carrying.”
This is why those forty-five days were not peace. They were a slow tightening. The thoughts did not stop arriving. They only stopped leaving. And a man who keeps drawing in air without ever letting it go is not calm. He is in quiet danger.
I Am Not Trying To Be Anyone
Let me be clear about what does not move me, because the confusion is common and I would rather explain here.
I am not trying to be a famous author, as I know I am not. I am not chasing a bestseller, a verified badge, a television seat, the label of public intellectual, the reach of an influencer. None of these could pull a single sentence out of me. If recognition were the engine, I would have stopped a long time ago, because most of what I have made was never recognized at all.
What moves me is smaller and far more stubborn. It is a voice that says, “you are going to have to say this.” And right behind it, a second voice, older and quieter, that says, and “someone, somewhere, will be a little better for it.”
“Ambition asks who is watching. The thing that actually moves me do not look up to check.”
The Exhale Has To Land Somewhere
That second voice has a source. The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that the best of people are those most beneficial to people. خير الناس أنفعهم للناس. I took that sentence early and tried to make it the spine of a whole life.
It does not have to be grand. The benefit can be nearly invisible. A single line that reaches one tired reader at exactly the right hour. A small relief. A thought that spares someone an afternoon of confusion. A piece of art that makes a stranger pause and feel, for one moment, less alone. I have never needed the benefit to be large. I have only ever needed it to be real.
This is the part that completes the breath. Inhaling is the thought arriving. Exhaling is letting it out. But an exhale that lands on no one is just noise in an empty room. The benefit is what makes the breathing matter. It is the whole difference between a sigh and a gift.
“A thought kept inside curdles. A thought given away becomes someone else’s air.”
Maybe every human is built this way. Maybe each of us carries something that wants out and something that wants to help. I am not making a claim about anyone else today. I am only telling you about myself, plainly, for once.
Why I Came Back
I keep four ongoing conversations with the world now; four newsletters, with 11,000 subscribers. One follows the climate and the road through COP31, in Antalya, Turkiye. One mourns the wisdom that universities have quietly forgotten. One tries to reimagine what a university could still become. And this one, a pause in the noise. They look like four separate subjects. They are not. They are four windows into the same room, the same search, the same refusal to keep it all sealed inside.
So this is why the silence finally ended. Not because I stumbled onto a clever topic. Not because some algorithm rewards a return. I came back because I could feel myself running out of air. I come back because of the respect I have for each one of you. I may not be the useful, but I try.
I write, and speak, and film, and make, so that I can breathe. And I send all of it to you, whoever you are, wherever you happen to be reading this, because somewhere in the sending, the breath stops being only mine and becomes useful to someone else, I hope.
That is the entire story. After thirty-three years, it has not changed once.
Prof. Bassem Khafagy 18 June 2026
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Prof. Bassem Khafagy: An academic leader, best-seller author, award winning researcher, and strategic thinker whose work spans the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. He is currently dedicating his time to rethinking the “University” as a transformative force in society. Prof. Khafagy is the founding force behind several global academic initiatives, most notably the World Universities Foundation, WUF, World Summit on Universities, WSU, and the Re-Imagine University Newsletter & book series.
The visual compositions throughout this newsletter and the series are original copyrighted works by Prof. Bassem K. Khafagy. They are crafted using advanced technological tools, including artificial intelligence, guided entirely by the writer’s artistic vision and design sensibility. In a series about being you, it felt only right that the art itself reflects that spirit of creative possibility. © All rights reserved, 2026.