Month: Apr 2025

It started, I think, with the dishes. Not all at once—no dramatic avalanche of dirty plates, no sudden realization under fluorescent kitchen light—but with a single cup left in the sink longer than it should’ve been. Then another. Then a fork, a half-empty bowl, a pan with the quiet weight of old oil still clinging to it. I didn’t notice at first. That’s the strange thing. The unraveling was so slow, so quiet, it passed beneath my own attention.

I was still working. Still meeting deadlines, still replying to emails with just enough punctuation to appear human. Still showing up to things I said I’d show up to, laughing when it seemed appropriate, nodding when someone was making a point. But something inside me—some quieter part that usually tracked the edges of life—had gone completely silent. The rhythm had gone. That low, anchoring thrum of daily rituals that once made my life feel like it belonged to me and not some invisible, rushing thing I had to keep up with.

I began sleeping strange hours. Not out of rebellion, but erosion. I stayed up too late, scrolling past things I didn’t care about. I ate whatever was closest, rarely warm, often standing. I stopped sitting down to eat. I stopped cooking. I stopped noticing the taste of anything. My body moved, but my thoughts were static—like a radio left tuned to an empty frequency.

And then, one morning, without deciding anything, without some new plan to be better or start over or become the version of myself I had once sketched out in notebooks and never become—I boiled water. That was it. Just water. No music. No affirmation. No productivity attached to the act. I wasn’t trying to reset. I just wanted to hold something warm.

I poured the water into the old ceramic mug with the crack that looks like a river. I didn’t check my phone. I didn’t open my laptop. I didn’t even sit down. I just stood there, barefoot on the cold floor, watching the tea steam rise into the morning air like breath I hadn’t taken in weeks.

And in that stillness—where nothing had really changed, but everything suddenly felt different—I realized I had returned. Not completely, not all at once, but enough to feel the floor under me again.

—

The next day, I made tea again. The same mug, the same water, the same unremarkable brand of loose leaf I’d forgotten I still had in the cupboard. There was something reassuring in the repetition, something deeply human in the idea that you could build your life back from something as small as a daily cup of tea. It didn’t feel like a routine, not yet. It felt like a rhythm. A heartbeat returning beneath the static.

From there, things didn’t transform dramatically, but they softened. I found myself folding laundry instead of letting it live in baskets. I started putting away the dishes before bed, not for cleanliness but because the quiet sound of plates finding their place made me feel like I was also finding mine. I began washing my face with both hands. Not hurriedly, not for outcome—just to feel the water, to return to the skin I’d been ignoring.

None of these things made me impressive. They didn’t lead to a six-step morning routine or a glowing Instagram post about mindfulness. They were invisible things. Small things. But they reminded me who I was. And more importantly, how to be myself again.

—

Discipline, I learned, isn’t about control. It isn’t about force or productivity or some harsh version of self-mastery. Discipline, in its gentlest and most honest form, is remembering. It’s remembering that there is a version of you that doesn’t need to be fixed, only tended to. A version of you that doesn’t rise early or answer every message or make brilliant work every day, but who knows how to sit in a chair, drink tea, and feel the light on their face without needing to do anything about it.

The world didn’t slow down. The pace outside stayed loud, fast, demanding. But I stopped letting it dictate how I moved. And that shift, though nearly invisible to anyone else, changed everything for me. Not all at once, not with fireworks—but in the same way you notice that winter is ending: first by the sound of melting, then by the return of birds.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Return to the Ordinary

Wabi-sabi has always taught that the beauty of life is in the imperfect, the incomplete, the quietly enduring. It teaches that broken things can still hold water, that old routines—when returned to slowly and without pressure—can feel more sacred than the most elaborate rituals. It reminds us:

– You don’t need to overhaul your life to return to it. Start where your hands already are.
– Repetition isn’t failure. It’s healing in motion.
– Slowness is not laziness. It’s trust in time.
– You do not need to be whole to begin again. You only need to be here.

—

So if you find yourself far away from yourself—if your days have blurred, if your cup has been in the sink too long, if the thought of “starting over” feels like another task you’ll fail to complete—don’t chase something bigger. Don’t plan a transformation.

Boil water.
Breathe.
Stand in your kitchen and hold something warm.

Because sometimes, the most powerful way to come home
is not to rebuild everything from scratch,
but to notice that you never really left—
you just forgot the way back.

And maybe that way begins, always,
with something as small
as tea.

There was a time in my life when I tried to explain everything.
Pain.
Distance.
Why someone left without a proper goodbye.
Why something I worked hard for didn’t unfold the way it should’ve.

I needed a narrative. A clean arc. A cause and effect.
I needed the world to behave like a novel — with tension, turning points, and a final chapter where everything clicked into place.

But life, I’ve learned, doesn’t owe us that kind of symmetry.

One autumn, not long ago, I sat at a bus stop in a town I didn’t know well. It had just rained — the kind of fine rain that makes the leaves stick to the pavement like forgotten thoughts.
I had nowhere to be, really.
Something in me had just needed to move.
To not be in the same room with the same questions I’d been looping through for weeks.

A woman sat next to me.
Maybe in her seventies.
She didn’t speak. Just watched the sky, hands folded neatly in her lap like she had all the time in the world.

At some point, she turned and said,
“There’s no need to figure everything out. Some clouds just pass.”

That was it.
She didn’t explain what she meant.
Didn’t need to.

---

When Letting Go of the Story Is the Only Way Forward

I had been trying to label everything.
This was a failure.
This was a lesson.
This person was good.
This one hurt me.
This moment is supposed to mean something.

But that need — to name, to sort, to wrap things in understanding — was also the thing keeping me stuck.

Because some moments… are just moments.
Some endings don’t reveal why.
Some chapters remain incomplete.

And when I stopped trying to extract meaning from every detail, I found something better than answers:
Peace.

---

Seeing Things As They Are (Not As You Wish They’d Be)

When you stop needing everything to make sense, you begin to see what is.

• A pause isn’t necessarily failure.
• Someone’s silence isn’t always rejection.
• A door closing might not be about you at all.

You start noticing smaller things.
How light lands on a windowsill.
How your breath evens out when you’re not rushing toward clarity.
How sometimes, the absence of something leaves more space than the thing ever could.

---

If You’re Looking for Closure, Consider This

Closure isn’t always given.
Sometimes it’s created — not by getting answers, but by releasing the need for them.

Let go of the old emails you keep rereading.
Let go of the question that never got a reply.
Let go of the version of yourself who thought they needed that explanation to move on.

You don’t need to know why someone changed.
You don’t need a perfect ending.
You just need to come back to where your feet are.

Here.
Now.
Alive.

Still becoming.

---

Final Thoughts: Meaning Isn’t Always Immediate

There are seasons when life will feel like static.
Moments will arrive that don’t fit any pattern.
Some people will leave without a final word, and some wounds will close without a scar.

You don’t have to find meaning in all of it.
Sometimes, you just have to let it pass through you.
Without gripping. Without judging. Without forcing a name.

That, in itself, is a kind of wisdom.

Not everything has to be resolved.
Some things just need to be witnessed.

It started with something small.
A canceled plan.
Then another.
Then the slow collapse of what I thought was a solid routine — the kind that gave shape to my days and made me believe I had control.

I watched as things slipped through the cracks: income streams drying up, relationships shifting into silence, goals I’d worked toward suddenly becoming irrelevant.

There was no grand crisis.
No visible wreckage.
Just this subtle unraveling — like a thread pulled slowly through the hem of a well-worn jacket.

And I didn’t know how to fight it.
Because there was nothing to fight.

That’s the thing about certain seasons of life.
They don’t announce themselves with a bang.
They just shift beneath your feet until you’re no longer sure where the ground is.

At first, I tried to fix it.
To rebuild the structure, force clarity, outrun the fog.
I signed up for online courses, wrote aggressive to-do lists, planned future projects with a desperation that felt like drowning.

None of it worked.
The more I pushed, the more brittle I became.

Until one day, I stopped.
Not out of peace. Out of exhaustion.

I let the stillness swallow me whole.

---

Adapting When Everything Changes

What I learned in that strange quiet is this:
Sometimes, the way forward isn’t forward.
It’s deeper.
More fluid.
Less about conquering and more about softening into what is.

Life doesn’t pause because we’re overwhelmed.
It just keeps moving.
And the only way not to break is to move with it.

---

How I Rebuilt My Rhythm From Chaos

Slowly, I began to live differently.

• I stopped asking, “How do I get back to normal?” and started asking, “What wants to emerge from here?”
• I allowed myself to pivot — in work, in relationships, in identity — without needing it to make sense to anyone else.
• I let go of plans that no longer felt alive and gave myself permission to improvise.

And in that letting go, I didn’t find chaos.
I found capacity.

The ability to listen.
To bend.
To respond instead of react.
To shape-shift without losing the core of who I am.

---

If You’re Feeling Lost, Read This

We are not built for rigidity.
We are meant to respond.
To learn from what crumbles, to shift our weight when the ground changes, to know that flexibility is not weakness — it’s wisdom.

If you’re navigating change — the slow kind, the foggy kind, the kind that leaves no clear instructions — know this:

You don’t have to hold everything together.

Let some things fall.
Let some names fade.
Let some versions of yourself dissolve.

The self that rises from that silence might surprise you.
It might be softer.
Stronger.
More rooted in truth than anything you planned.

---

Final Thoughts: Resilience Isn’t Toughness — It’s Adaptability

I used to think strength meant standing tall through the storm.
But now I know: real strength is knowing when to kneel.
When to shift your shape.
When to change your rhythm without losing your beat.

There will always be seasons when nothing makes sense — when the maps stop working and the signs go blank.
But if you can stay open, stay moving, stay curious — you’ll find your way.

Not because you controlled the chaos.
But because you let it change you, without letting it harden you.

That, I think, is what it means to truly grow.

I was thirty, and tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Not exhausted. Not burnt out.
Just quietly worn from too many years of trying to be legible.

I lived alone then, in a top-floor apartment with slanted ceilings and a window that caught exactly one hour of afternoon sun. If I placed the chair just right, I could sit in that warm square of light like a plant, not thinking, not speaking—just existing, gently.

Most evenings I’d make dinner without ceremony. Miso soup. Cold rice. Maybe an egg. I’d eat slowly, not because I had the time, but because I no longer felt the need to rush through the parts of life that didn’t need to impress anyone.

That year, I stopped giving long answers.
When people asked how I was, I said, “I’m okay.”
And let it be true without needing to prove or explain it.
I stopped trying to be profound in conversations.
I said “I don’t know” when I didn’t.
I let pauses stretch a little longer than comfortable,
and found that they held more honesty than words ever did.

—

The Quiet Power of Not Performing

At thirty, I realized how much of my twenties were spent performing clarity.
Sounding certain when I was unsure.
Sounding fine when I was fractured.
Sounding busy, because being still made me feel disposable.

But turning thirty felt like a soft undoing.
Like gently unraveling a knot I didn’t know I was tied into.

It wasn’t a revelation.
It was a slow exhale.
A quiet return to the parts of myself I’d set aside to seem more useful, more likable, more productive.

And I understood—
you don’t need to prove your softness is sharp.
You don’t need to defend your peace.
You don’t need to be understood by everyone to feel whole.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Letting Go

Wabi-sabi teaches us that beauty isn’t in perfection.
It’s in what survives without shouting.
It’s in what lingers after you’ve stopped trying to make it stay.

It reminds us:

• Clarity doesn’t always come with answers. Sometimes it’s just the noise falling away.
• Not all growth is visible. Some happens in the way you no longer chase what used to hurt.
• Letting go of needing to be impressive is one of the most impressive things you can do.
• There’s strength in saying less—and meaning more.

—

Now, when I sit in that same chair, in that square of afternoon sun,
I don’t think about who I used to be.
I don’t try to write the perfect sentence.
I don’t check if the world is still paying attention.

I just sit.
Quietly.
Fully.
Here.

And in that moment—
I am not unfinished.
I am not behind.
I am not too late or too much or too uncertain.

I am simply thirty.
And finally,
I do not need to explain myself to feel real.

Excerpt from my Pokémon notebook, dated November 2, 2000:

“Today I walked home alone. Didn’t tell Mom. She thinks I went with Daniel but he left early. I was scared the whole time. There was a cat on the wall and it looked like it knew something. My hands were cold but I kept going. I think I’m different now.”

—

I was ten the first time I walked home alone, and even now I can still feel the weight of that decision—not as a memory exactly, but as something more physical, something stored in the way my hands sometimes clench in cold air, or the way I instinctively scan the pavement for cracks when the world feels uncertain.

Until that afternoon, I had never gone more than a few blocks without someone beside me—an older cousin, a friend from school, or most often Daniel, who lived two floors down and always walked like he had somewhere more important to be. He was the kind of boy who kicked stones out of his way just to watch them ricochet. I admired that, though I never said it out loud.

That day, Daniel had gone home early. I don’t remember why—maybe a dentist appointment or a fever or just something unspecific and adult-sounding—but he wasn’t there when the last bell rang and the gates swung open and children scattered like birds. I stood there for a few minutes longer than I needed to, backpack straps too tight against my shoulders, wondering if I should wait for someone else or ask to join a group heading the same way.

But then something strange and unfamiliar swelled in my chest—not boldness exactly, not defiance, just the quiet realization that I could. That no one would stop me if I left right now, if I followed the route I already knew by heart. Eleven and a half minutes. That’s all it was. A left at the bakery with the cracked window, across the intersection with the lopsided stoplight, then past the row of pale houses with flower pots that were always just a little too full.

So I went.

—

The world felt louder walking alone. Each step landed heavier. I noticed the crunch of leaves underfoot, the shifting of birds on wires above me, the sound of a distant door slamming that I was sure—just for a second—was meant for me.

And then I saw the cat.

It sat on the low wall just before the underpass, the one covered in ivy and chalk scribbles that never made sense. The cat didn’t move. It didn’t blink. It just stared with the kind of gaze that made you feel like a question had been asked, and you hadn’t yet answered. I wanted to walk faster, but my legs didn’t agree. They kept their pace, stubborn and steady, like they were afraid that to hurry would admit something was wrong.

I remember thinking, If I make it past the cat, I’ll be fine.
And I did.

And I was.

—

When I got home, my mother was washing carrots. I told her I had walked back with Daniel like always, even though I hadn’t seen him since lunch. She didn’t question it. Just nodded, flicked water off her fingers, and asked if I wanted a slice of pear.

I sat at the kitchen table in my damp socks and nodded, saying nothing, feeling everything.

I wasn’t proud. I wasn’t guilty. I was something else entirely—like I’d stepped just slightly out of the version of myself everyone expected and found, to my own quiet surprise, that the world hadn’t ended.

That it had kept turning.

And so had I.

—

The Risk You Can’t Brag About

I’ve taken bigger risks since. Risks with money. With work. With people.
But none of them carried the same clean weight as that walk home.

Because that wasn’t a risk you could explain to someone who hadn’t lived inside your ten-year-old chest.
It wasn’t loud.
It didn’t come with applause or fear of failure.
It came with silence.
With the kind of fear that whispers instead of shouts.
With the realization that no one would know what you did unless you told them.

And I didn’t.
Not for years.

Because some victories don’t need to be shared to change you.
Some aren’t even victories, exactly.
Just steps into your own skin.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Unfinished Courage

Wabi-sabi reminds us that the beauty of things lies in their imperfections, in their incompleteness, in their becoming.
That walk wasn’t perfect.
It wasn’t confident or smooth.
But it was mine.

And in that imperfect journey, something essential formed:

– You don’t need to be fearless to move forward. You just need to not stop.
– A risk doesn’t have to look brave to be brave.
– Not every lie is a betrayal—sometimes it’s a bridge you build toward who you’re becoming.
– Some truths arrive later, long after the moment has passed, shaped slowly by memory and meaning.

—

Excerpt from the same notebook, written weeks later, November 20:

“I told Daniel I walked alone that day. He said, ‘Cool.’ Then we threw rocks at a can and I hit it twice. It felt different. Like I was taller, even though I wasn’t.”

—

I don’t regret it.
Not the walk.
Not the lie.
Not the fear.

Because sometimes the risk that matters most
is not the one that changes your path,
but the one that changes your sense of self.

Even just a little.
Even for eleven and a half minutes.
Even if only a cat saw it happen.

One morning, without warning, I left.
Not a city. Not a person.
But a version of myself that no longer felt real.

There was no grand announcement. No lightning bolt of clarity. Just the slow, aching realization that I had stayed too long in a life that no longer fit — a job that drained me, routines that dulled me, a daily rhythm that ran on autopilot.
It wasn’t burnout. It was something quieter. Deeper. A soft kind of suffocation.

So I took a risk.
I walked away from security, from a stable job, from the path everyone said made sense.

And at first, everything unraveled.

I lost the structure I had clung to.
Woke up at odd hours. Ate cold leftovers. Wandered neighborhoods just to feel unfamiliar.
It was disorienting — this radical shift from doing to simply being.

There were no quick wins.
No five-step plan to reinvent myself.
Just the raw honesty of uncertainty.
And still, something in me whispered: keep going.

Because even when everything felt lost, a quiet part of me knew —
this was the beginning of something real.

---

Why Taking Risks Is Worth It (Even When You’re Scared)

If you’re standing on the edge of a major life change — considering quitting your job, starting over, or finally listening to that voice inside that’s been growing louder — this is for you.

We are conditioned to crave certainty.
To follow the blueprint: career progression, financial stability, predictable milestones.
But that blueprint isn’t one-size-fits-all. And sometimes, following it means abandoning yourself in the process.

Taking a personal risk doesn’t always mean making headlines.
Sometimes it looks like choosing silence over noise.
Stillness over speed.
Uncertainty over soul-numbing routine.

---

What I Learned From Letting Go

In the messy middle of not knowing, I found clarity.
I discovered that:

• Rest is not failure — it’s a necessary recalibration.
• Not all productivity is purposeful. Sometimes, doing less creates more room for what matters.
• Being lost is not a mistake — it’s often the first step toward authenticity.

I began to rebuild my life — not around productivity or external validation — but around peace.
Around curiosity.
Around values that felt like home.

---

If You’re Contemplating a Life Change, Read This

The decision to change your life, quit your job, or walk away from something “safe” might not make sense to anyone else.
That’s okay.
It doesn’t have to.

You don’t need a fully-formed plan to start.
You just need to listen to what’s true.

If you’re tired of burnout culture, feeling stuck in a job that no longer aligns, or craving a slower, more intentional life — the risk might be exactly what your soul is asking for.

---

Final Thoughts: The Real Meaning of Risk

Risk isn’t always jumping off cliffs.
Sometimes, it’s as quiet as refusing to betray yourself for one more day.

Looking back, I don’t regret the choice I made.
Because that risk — that uncertain, lonely, unglamorous decision — gave me my life back.

And in the end, that’s the only kind of success I’m interested in

When I was twenty, I spoke too carefully. I shaped my words like furniture in someone else’s house—useful, polite, easy to move if needed. I was living in a shared flat near the train station in Bern, where the walls were thin enough to hear someone brush their teeth but thick enough to keep their loneliness in.

I had just started university, and everything felt like a test I hadn’t studied for. Every conversation, every glance across a seminar room, every pause after saying something that maybe didn’t land quite right. I read too much philosophy back then, underlined too many things, tried too hard to sound like I knew what I was doing. But I didn’t.

One night, during a literature class, the professor asked us to speak about a passage—something about silence in a story by Dazai. I raised my hand, not because I had something meaningful to say, but because I was tired of listening to myself stay quiet.

When I spoke, my voice caught. Just a little. Like it had tripped on its own shoelace. The sentence didn’t flow. It felt jagged, too soft at the end.

No one said anything.
The room stayed still.
And I thought I’d failed.

But then the professor—he was older, calm in a way you can’t fake—nodded slowly and said,
“Yes. That’s it exactly.”

That was all. No praise. No spotlight.
Just a soft affirmation that I hadn’t ruined everything by speaking.
That maybe, even the words that come out uneven
still land where they’re meant to.

—

The Quiet Terror of Being Heard

At twenty, what made me nervous wasn’t rejection.
It was the possibility of being understood.
Of saying something so close to the truth that someone else would recognize it.
And what then?
What if they saw me?
What if I could never hide again?

But nervousness, I’ve learned, is not something to outgrow.
It’s something to walk beside.
A reminder that something inside you matters enough to risk.

It doesn’t mean you’re unready.
It means you’re awake.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Half-Spoken Thought

Wabi-sabi is not just about the cracked bowl or the faded fabric.
It’s about the moment your voice falters but doesn’t fall.
It’s about the sentence that ends strangely
but still means something to someone.

It reminds us:

• You don’t need to speak perfectly to be understood.
• A trembling truth still holds weight.
• Even soft words can leave deep impressions.
• Sometimes silence is the second half of a sentence.

—

Now, when I speak—when I write—there’s still that hesitation.
That small echo of twenty-year-old me,
sitting in a too-bright classroom,
wondering if the room would forgive me for being real.

But I’ve learned to love the pause.
The unevenness.
The way some thoughts only find their shape after they’ve been spoken aloud.

Because maybe it’s not about saying it right.
Maybe it’s about saying it anyway.
And trusting that someone, somewhere,
is waiting to nod slowly and say,
“Yes. That’s it exactly.”

When I was eight, I learned what it meant to be seen. Not the kind of seeing where someone waves at you in the hallway or calls your name for attendance. But the raw, irreversible seeing that happens when you step out from behind whatever has been keeping you safe and place something delicate in the open.

It was a Wednesday. I remember this because my shirt still smelled like Tuesday’s rain, and my socks had that damp stiffness they get when they’re not quite dry from the night before. I stood in front of the class gripping a sheet of paper that had grown soft in my palm—thinner by the second, like rice paper left too long in the rain.

I’d practiced the poem for days. Out by the stone wall behind our house, where the ants moved like they had somewhere quiet and important to be, and the trees listened without judgment. Out there, the words came easily. They poured. I whispered them like secrets to the wind. I believed them.

But in the classroom, everything changed.

Halfway through, I lost the line. Just—gone. Like it had never belonged to me at all. A pause opened up in the middle of the sentence. It didn’t feel like forgetting. It felt like falling through glass.

Nobody laughed.
Nobody saved me.
Time just… hovered.

And then I kept going.
Softer.
Careful.
As if I was afraid the silence might crack if I pushed too hard against it.

When it was over, no one clapped. There wasn’t applause. There wasn’t ridicule. There was just life, moving on. Except for one boy—one I never really spoke to—who walked past my desk and gently slid my pencil back beside me.

“Cool poem,” he said.
Just like that.
Like it was normal.
Like he hadn’t just witnessed me unravel and reassemble in front of twenty-four blinking faces.

—

What Makes Me Nervous

Still, to this day, it’s that moment. The stepping out. The exposure. The chance that the words won’t come, or worse, that they will—and no one will care. That I’ll say something true and be met with silence.

But nervousness, I’ve learned, isn’t weakness. It’s not failure waiting to happen.
It’s presence.
It’s proof that something inside you is real enough to risk.

We get nervous when we approach the edge of something important.
When the stakes, however small, feel connected to who we are.
And that’s not a flaw.
That’s a signal.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Voice That Quivers

Wabi-sabi reminds us to find beauty in what is not polished.
In the unedited draft.
In the trembling voice.
In the pauses we didn’t plan, but still survived.

It teaches us:

• Nervousness is a form of aliveness. A sign you’re paying attention.
• A poem remembered imperfectly can still be unforgettable.
• Cracks let the light in—but also let it out.
• What you risk sharing imperfectly might become someone else’s quiet bravery.

—

So now, when I feel that same flutter,
when the paper softens in my grip again,
when my voice shakes before it finds its footing,
I think back to that moment.

The falling.
The line forgotten.
The boy with the pencil.

And I remember:
Even the nervous stand tall for a while.
Even silence carries recognition.
And even the most imperfect offerings
can echo in someone else’s chest
long after they’re spoken.

In the quiet stretch after a demanding day, I never look for perfection.
I don’t have a five-step routine.
I don’t light scented candles or listen to curated playlists.
Most nights, I don’t even sit properly. I slump. I breathe. I let things unravel—gently, without shame.

There’s an old cushion on the floor that’s lost half its shape.
A chipped cup I keep reaching for without thinking.
A dim lamp that hums more than it glows.

This is where I unwind.
Not in the pursuit of stillness, but in the permission to stop trying so hard.

—

When Less Is Enough

In a world that pushes us to optimize every second, to monetize hobbies and biohack peace, there’s something quietly radical about doing nothing well.

Wabi-sabi, the Japanese philosophy of imperfect beauty, reminds us that the broken, the used, the simple—these are not flaws.
They are features.

And so I’ve stopped chasing the perfect end to a long day.
Instead, I find softness in the ordinary:

• A reheated bowl of soup eaten over the sink.
• A half-finished book I don’t mind reading slowly.
• A long pause in a message to a friend—not because I don’t care, but because I want to say it right.

And when I do write that message—sometimes days later—it’s honest.
Like this one:

“Just wanted to say—I always enjoy our coffees and conversations, even if they only happen once in a while. There’s something about the way we catch up that always feels easy and grounding. Looking forward to the next one, whenever it happens. Take care till then.”

That’s it.
No exclamation marks.
No performance.
Just presence.

—

What We Forget About Rest

Unwinding isn’t a reward.
It’s a return.
Not to efficiency.
But to yourself.

And the most meaningful ways to decompress often look like nothing at all:

• Sitting with someone who doesn’t need you to be interesting.
• Letting your mind wander without guilt.
• Drinking your tea before it’s the perfect temperature.
• Leaving the dishes for tomorrow.

There’s grace in the undone.
There’s healing in the half-finished.
There’s peace in not polishing the moment.

—

Wabi-Sabi Lessons in Everyday Rest

The end of the day doesn’t need to be aesthetic.
It just needs to be yours.

Let wabi-sabi guide your evening:

• Let stillness arrive when it wants. Don’t chase it.
• Not every ritual needs to look like a ritual. If it calms you, it counts.
• Messages from the heart take time. That’s a sign of care, not delay.
• Imperfection is not failure—it’s the shape of something real.

—

So if today wore you thin,
don’t pressure yourself to recover beautifully.

Sit somewhere soft—even if it’s the floor.
Drink something warm—even if it’s instant.
Message someone who makes you feel like yourself—even if it’s just to say you’re thinking of them.

And when the quiet finds you,
let it in.

You don’t need to fix this day.
Just let it end.
Softly.
Honestly.
Enough.

There’s something about the walk home after a long day that feels more honest than anything that came before it. Not the work itself. Not the conversations. Not the tasks crossed off or the mistakes quietly buried. Just the walk. The slow, in-between pace that happens when you no longer have to perform.

I don’t listen to music on those walks. I used to. But now I prefer the echo of my own footsteps. The way the streetlights flicker on one by one like tired guardians. The soft click of a stranger’s bicycle passing in the opposite direction. A cat blinking at me from a windowsill, as if to say, You again?

That’s usually when I start to exhale—genuinely, unconsciously. Not for effect. Just because the body remembers, even when I forget, that it’s okay to let go.

—

When I finally get home, I don’t chase comfort. I let it arrive on its own terms. Maybe it’s the hum of the kettle, the promise of warm tea. Maybe it’s the way I sit on the floor instead of the chair, back against the wall, feeling the coolness of the wood through my shirt.

Or maybe it’s the moment I think of you.

Not in a dramatic way.
Not like something cinematic.

Just a quiet thought, the kind that rises like steam.
I remember our last coffee.
The way the conversation didn’t need direction.
How the pauses felt full instead of empty.

We don’t meet often, but when we do, it feels like something inside me returns to the right frequency.
Like tuning a radio that had been just slightly off all week.
You say something simple, I laugh, and for a second the noise in my head dissolves.

—

That’s how I unwind.
Not with rituals.
Not with wine or yoga or scrolling until the thoughts are too tired to argue.

I unwind by remembering the soft places.
The safe ones.
The moments that didn’t demand anything of me.

I think of conversations that felt like standing in the sun just long enough to warm your bones.
Of coffee in small ceramic cups.
Of glances that didn’t look through you,
but to you.

And I look forward to the next one—whenever it happens.
No rush.
No pressure.
Just the knowledge that it will.

Somewhere down a familiar street.
In a café with too much ambient jazz.
Across a table with chipped corners.
Two voices,
easy and grounding.

The kind that reminds you you’re still human,
and somehow,
still okay.

It was a quiet evening in early spring, the kind where the wind hadn’t quite decided if it still belonged to winter. I’d come over to see a friend, but she was upstairs, still getting ready or maybe just lost in her own timing. I found myself sitting instead in the kitchen with her mother, a woman whose presence felt like a book you’d forgotten you already started—warm, familiar, just waiting for you to open to the next page. The kitchen was lit by a single amber bulb and smelled of something baking—yeasty and soft and hard to place, like memory before it fully forms. She offered me coffee in a chipped white mug, and I took it. No sugar. No milk. Just the two of us and the slow hush of the house around us.

She looked at me for a while, not in the way people usually look when they’re trying to think of something polite to say, but like she was measuring whether I was someone who could hold what she was about to share. Then she asked, out of nowhere, “Have you ever been to India?” I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said. She smiled gently and leaned back in her chair. “I went in ’65. It was different then. Not better. Just… slower. Quieter. But louder inside.”

I said nothing and just sipped the coffee, which had already gone lukewarm. And then, as if a door had creaked open somewhere deep inside her, she began to speak—not like someone performing a memory, but like someone revisiting a room she hadn’t stepped into for years. She told me about joining a Peace Choir when she was barely twenty. How they sang to raise money for the Red Cross, and how someone at some point asked if she’d be willing to go. Not for music, but for help. “They needed hands,” she said. “Not voices. Not opinions. Just hands.”

She flew to South Korea first, long before it looked anything like the place people post about now. There, she spent three months baking donuts for soldiers in a makeshift kitchen that always smelled like oil and flour and exhaustion. “We didn’t have measurements,” she said, almost laughing. “We made them by feel. You just knew when the dough was right. Like how you know when someone’s about to cry—you don’t need them to say anything.” She paused, then added, “Some of them cried anyway. The soldiers. Usually the younger ones. Said it reminded them of home. Not the donut. Just the fact that someone made something warm.”

When Korea ended, she went to India. Alone. She carried travel cheques in her bra and a notebook filled with half-written addresses of people she was supposed to meet. Delhi, Jaipur, Madurai. She learned to navigate chaos without Google Maps, to haggle in markets without words, to trust people because sometimes that’s the only way to keep moving. “Everything felt alive,” she said. “And everyone seemed to know something I didn’t—but they didn’t hold it over me. They just let me walk beside them.” She lost her shoes in a temple. Slept through a monsoon. Shared her last chocolate bar with a child who gave her a mango in return, sticky and warm and perfect.

I listened. I didn’t say much. Just nodded when it seemed like the right thing to do. Her voice was steady, but the story held weight, the kind that builds in your chest when someone shares something they almost forgot they were still carrying. She didn’t tell it like a triumph. She didn’t dress it up in nostalgia. There were no metaphors, no grand morals. Just the facts, and the feeling underneath them. A life lived, not documented. Held in muscle and memory, not in posts or pictures.

When she stopped talking, the silence between us felt full, not empty. She stared into her coffee for a moment, then said quietly, “I didn’t go to find myself. I just went because something needed doing. And I knew how to do it. That was enough.” I wanted to tell her how rare that felt. How good it was to hear something unpolished, something not built for display. But I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded again. Because some stories don’t ask for praise. They just ask to be heard.

Now, whenever I scroll through endless feeds—flashes of curated adventure, filtered meaning—I think of her. I think of the donuts made by hand. The crumpled travel cheques. The moment someone handed her a mango in exchange for kindness. I remember that not all journeys are for show. Some are for service. Some are for stillness. Some are for stepping into the unknown, not to be seen, but to bear witness. And I wonder how many stories like hers go untold—quiet, weighty things sitting in old kitchens, waiting for someone to listen long enough for them to unfold.

Because the stories that matter most don’t always shine.
They simmer.
They stay.
And if you’re lucky,
someone offers you coffee,
and they let you hold one for a while.

screen light on my face—
still, the ramen steam feels more
like being alive

—

I use social media the way you might sip from a too-sweet drink—
occasionally, cautiously,
wondering if you’re thirsty or just bored.

It’s there, in my pocket.
The little rectangle that hums with updates,
with curated lives,
with thoughts trimmed down to the size of attention spans.

And sometimes I scroll.
Not because I want to,
but because it’s late,
and the silence starts to echo too loudly through the room.
So I let someone else’s life fill the space.
A stranger’s vacation.
A recipe I won’t make.
A quote about peace,
surrounded by chaos.

But more and more, I find myself setting it down.

—

The Things That Don’t Fit in Frames

A bowl of soup on a cold morning.
The texture of worn-out denim against your skin.
The sound of someone breathing next to you,
not saying anything,
but saying everything.

These things don’t translate well.
You can post the picture,
but the smell doesn’t come with it.
The warmth.
The uneven chop of green onion floating in the broth.
The way someone laughed,
just once,
while you were chewing.

You can’t upload that.
And maybe that’s why it matters.

—

The Reluctance Is a Kind of Love

It’s not that I hate social media.
It has its uses.
It’s a way to touch,
when physical distance stretches too far.
It’s a way to say “I’m still here,”
without needing to speak.

But I don’t want to live there.
Not in the scroll.
Not in the loop of likes and reactions
and the feeling that everyone else is moving forward while you sit still.

Because stillness, when you choose it,
is not failure.
It’s a kind of presence.

And presence is what I want more of.
In the way the sun hits the floor at 3 p.m.
In the way a stranger’s voice curls around a word you’ve heard a thousand times,
but suddenly sounds new.
In the mess.
The mundane.
The parts that never get filtered.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Unposted Moment

Wabi-sabi teaches us to honor what’s incomplete,
unpolished,
quiet.
It reminds us:

• Not everything needs to be shared to be meaningful.
• What isn’t captured often stays longer.
• Attention is the truest form of intimacy.
• Life is not content. It’s contact.

—

So I use it gently.
A post now and then.
A message when I miss someone.
A story, if it feels more like a whisper than a performance.

But mostly,
I live in the smells.
In the textures.
In the long walks with no music playing.
In the taste of something I’ll never describe as well as I felt it.

And later,
if I remember it clearly enough,
I might write it down—
not to impress you,
but to remind myself
that I was there.

Fully.
Briefly.
Wonderfully
unrecorded.

Not sure why this came to mind. It is an old story. The kind buried in so much dust and memories you can only tell what it is by the shape.The house I stayed in that winter sat at the edge of a small village an hour outside Zürich—one of those places with winding roads too narrow for logic, where the fog clung low like a secret and the trees never lost their wetness. I hadn’t planned to go there. I had meant to be somewhere else. Basel, maybe. Or Lugano. But a train was delayed, and then another, and by the time I checked the time again, I was standing in front of a gray house with wooden shutters that had long forgotten how to close properly.

Ironically, just next to it—barely ten steps away—stood what used to be a psychiatric hospital. A tall, rectangular building with too many windows and a strange stillness that clung to its stone. It had been renovated into a hostel years ago, the sign said, in a font too cheerful for the history beneath it. Backpackers came and went. They laughed loudly and cooked pasta at midnight, unaware or uncaring that people used to scream inside those walls. That once, someone was probably locked away for seeing the same things I’d started seeing too.

I rented the attic apartment in the house beside it. It had a sloped ceiling, a single radiator that wheezed like it was haunted, and a window that framed the old asylum like a painting. Everything in the room was slightly off. The floorboards tilted to the left. The walls met each other at strange angles, so that no matter how I stood, I never felt entirely upright.

And I couldn’t stop thinking: There are no corners here.
Just soft bends.
As if the architecture itself had given up on sharpness.

—

I arrived with a heavy kind of silence inside me.
Not grief exactly.
More like fatigue from carrying around a shape I no longer fit into.

I was supposed to be writing.
Instead, I slept.
I walked the hills, fed birds pieces of bread that tasted like cardboard,
and stared into shop windows without seeing a thing.

The hostel kids came and went in waves. They brought guitars, dirty boots, languages I’d forgotten. Sometimes they waved. I always waved back. But I never spoke to them.

Except for one night.

—

The Girl with the Braided Hair

She was sitting on the hostel steps, her back against the wall, sketching on the back of an old receipt. Her hair was dark and braided tight, with loose strands curling like vines around her face.

She looked up and said, “You live in the house that leans, right?”

I nodded.

She grinned. “Bet the dreams are weird in there.”

I didn’t answer. But she kept talking, like we already knew each other in another version of this life. “Used to be, this place was for the ones who lost their way. People thought walls could keep the mind still.” She tapped her head. “Turns out, it’s not that simple.”

Then she handed me the drawing. It was of the house I was staying in—but twisted. Exaggerated. Melting into the hillside like it didn’t want to exist anymore.

“It’s more honest this way,” she said.

—

When the House Began to Speak

That night, something changed.
I stopped avoiding the mirror.
The one above the small writing desk, with its chipped edge and the faint outline of someone else’s fingerprint in the glass.

I looked into it longer than I meant to.
And slowly, the face staring back stopped looking tired.
It looked…
open.
Fractured, yes.
But not beyond recognition.

Something moved in my chest.
Not a thought.
Not a word.
More like a shift in gravity.
Like the darkness inside me had stretched its limbs and decided it was tired of being silent.

I sat at the desk, picked up a pen,
and wrote three pages without stopping.

Not because I had something profound to say.
But because something inside had been waiting for permission to speak.

—

The Demon Doesn’t Always Fight You

That’s when I understood.
This thing I’d been carrying—
the old ache, the brittle shame, the persistent hum of doubt—
it wasn’t trying to ruin me.

It was trying to help me lift.

It had been shadowing me not to drag me down,
but to keep me from floating away too soon.
To tether me to something real.
Something raw.
Something mine.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Tilted Room

I left that village two weeks later.
But the lean of that house stayed with me.

The softness of its crooked walls.
The mirror that stopped lying.
The girl with the receipt sketches.
The asylum-turned-hostel still echoing with a strange kind of forgiveness.

And I carry this with me now:

• Darkness is not always damage. Sometimes it’s depth.
• The places that make you feel crooked may be where your truth fits best.
• Healing doesn’t ask you to become new. It asks you to carry your old self with care.
• And sometimes, the most haunted places offer the most peace—because they’ve already held what you’re afraid to face.

—

So now, when the days feel heavy—
when the weight returns like an old song or a long train ride—
I don’t try to escape it.
I nod.
I sit at the desk.
I open the window.

And I let the darkness
not bury me,
but steady me
as I learn, again,
how to lift.

I once stayed in a house that didn’t cast shadows.
Not because the light was perfect,
but because something inside the walls refused to let them gather.

It was on the edge of a town that doesn’t appear on maps,
north of somewhere forgettable,
a place with crooked vending machines and a clock tower that didn’t tell time.
Nobody lived there permanently.
People arrived.
Stayed a while.
Left a note.
Then vanished.

I hadn’t planned to go.
But the train doors opened,
and I stepped out without asking why.

—

The room I rented was small.
Futōn on the floor.
A desk with uneven legs.
One cup, one spoon,
and a window that faced a forest that was always almost raining.

But it was the mirror I remember most.
Oval. Hanging by a wire that hummed when the wind blew.
Every morning I looked into it,
and every morning it showed me someone else—
a version of myself I’d buried quietly beneath achievement,
smiled away in polite conversation,
and buried under to-do lists that never questioned why.

The man in the mirror didn’t look sad.
Just tired.
Like he’d been waiting for me to say something honest for years.

—

The Stranger Who Knew the Weight

On my third night there,
I met a man in the hallway.
Or maybe he wasn’t a man.
He didn’t blink when I did.
Didn’t breathe when I did.
He simply stood there, hands behind his back,
watching me like I was an echo that had finally returned.

“You carry it wrong,” he said.
“Carry what?” I asked.
He tapped his chest.
Then his head.
Then his back.
“All of it,” he said. “You carry it like it’s against you.”

And just like that, he was gone.
The hallway remained.
But the shape of it shifted,
as if it had just remembered something I hadn’t.

—

How Darkness Can Push

The next morning, I wrote like my fingers belonged to someone else.
Pages poured out,
not from inspiration,
but from pressure—
like something inside had been holding back a flood
and finally cracked open under the strain.

It wasn’t beautiful writing.
It wasn’t even good.
But it was true.
And that made it holy.

I realized then:
the thing I’d been running from—
the grief, the rage, the strange fatigue that followed me like a second skin—
it wasn’t here to stop me.
It was here to fuel me.

Not to drown me,
but to deepen the water I was meant to swim in.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Bruised Vessel

I didn’t leave that house with answers.
But I left with strength.
Not the kind you show off.
The kind that hums quietly under the skin.

The kind that understands:

• Some weights aren’t meant to be dropped. They’re meant to be lifted differently.
• Demons don’t always destroy. Sometimes they steady your hand.
• Beauty lives not in the absence of pain, but in the motion it creates.
• Not everything that haunts you is here to harm you. Some things stay because they remember who you were before you forgot.

—

I still dream about that house sometimes.
The way the floorboards spoke in sighs.
The tea that tasted slightly of sleep.
The mirror that no longer lied.

And sometimes,
on days when the world feels too sharp,
and I wonder if I’ve made any progress at all,
I feel something press gently against my spine.

Not to push me down.
But to help me lift
what I could never carry alone.

And I remember—
not all darkness is empty.
Some of it
has hands.

In the winter of 2017, I stayed for a week in a small apartment above a used bookstore in Shimokitazawa. The kind of place where time collects in the corners, and the lampshades give off a light so soft it feels more like memory than electricity.

The owner of the shop was a man named Aki. Late fifties, maybe early sixties. He never said. Wore two watches but never checked either of them. I asked him once why.
“One’s for the time here,” he said. “The other’s for the time I wish it was.”
Then he smiled, like he knew how strange that sounded but had already made peace with it.

Each morning, he’d open the shop at ten, put on a jazz record no one else could name, and brew coffee that tasted slightly of regret—bitter, but warming in the right kind of way. I liked watching him from the mezzanine above, where I’d sit with a book I didn’t intend to finish and pretend I wasn’t listening to the music.

On the third morning, it happened.

He was sketching something in a thick notebook by the register—shapes that didn’t make sense, loops and half-written kanji, a pattern only he understood—when he accidentally knocked over his coffee. It fell with a soft clatter, the kind that doesn’t interrupt the jazz but suddenly becomes part of it.

The liquid spread quickly.
A dark, quiet ruin.
Over the counter, across the pages.
It soaked half the book before he even moved.

But here’s what struck me—
he didn’t flinch.
Didn’t curse or scramble for towels.
He just sat there, watching the stain grow.
And then, very slowly, he tore out the wet page, folded it once down the middle, and placed it to the side.

Then, with the same pen he’d been using, he turned to the next blank page and began again.

—

I asked him about it later.
If he was frustrated.
If the sketch had meant something.

He shrugged. “It did,” he said. “But maybe this one will mean more.”
Then he poured us both a new cup of coffee and added,
“Most people think the day is ruined when something spills.
But sometimes, that’s when it really begins.”

—

I think about that moment more than I care to admit.
How calm he was.
How certain.

It wasn’t about the mess.
It was about what he allowed it to become.

We’re so trained to brace for what might go wrong.
To predict the detour.
To armor ourselves with worst-case scenarios.

But Aki taught me that ruin isn’t always failure.
Sometimes it’s invitation.
A strange, sloshing kind of grace that breaks what was never quite working
so you can start the next page cleaner than you thought you could.

---

What I Learned from a Coffee-Stained Page

• The world doesn’t end when your plan dissolves. Sometimes it begins there.
• The things we try to salvage might not be worth saving. But the space they leave behind often is.
• Spilled coffee, a missed train, a closed door—they’re not just obstacles. They’re quiet directions.
• What goes wrong isn’t always wrong. It’s just different. And sometimes, that difference leads to something you wouldn’t have dared draw on your own.

—

I never saw what he sketched on the new page.
But I think that’s the point.

It wasn’t about the drawing.
It was about still drawing.

About not letting the spill stop the hand.
About trusting the next page
even when the last one drowned.

And I think, maybe,
that’s what Yhprum’s Law really is—
not a promise that everything will go right,
but a quiet faith that even when it doesn’t,
you still will.

moonlight through the can—
not much changed that night at all,
but something softened

—

It happened in Kyoto.
Late spring, just past midnight.
The city had gone quiet in the way only Japanese cities do—
still glowing, still humming,
but holding its breath like it didn’t want to wake anyone.

I had walked longer than I meant to.
That kind of wandering that doesn’t feel like getting lost,
just… drifting.
My head was heavy with the usual things—unfinished decisions,
half-formed regrets,
the kind of quiet inner commentary that sounds like worry disguised as thought.

I stopped at a vending machine,
lit up like a small shrine in the dark.
And that’s where I met him.
Older. White linen shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow.
He looked like he’d stepped out of a different time,
but he just nodded at me like we’d been passing each other on this street our whole lives.

We stood there for a moment in silence,
just the two of us and the low buzz of fluorescent light,
until he pointed at the can I’d just dropped into the tray.

“Good choice,” he said. “Not too sweet.”

I smiled. “Didn’t think much about it.”

He looked at me, really looked,
and then said something I didn’t expect.

“That’s the trick though, isn’t it?
We never think much about it—
until we do.”

—

A Stranger’s Kindness You Don’t Forget

He didn’t stay long.
Just got his coffee, bowed, and disappeared down the street,
like he’d only stepped into my life to drop off a single sentence.

But it landed.
Something about that moment…
stuck.
It wasn’t what he said, really—
but the way he said it.
Casual.
Unforced.
Like he wasn’t trying to teach me something,
but just happened to know what I needed to hear.

And I’ve thought about that sentence often since.

The choices we think are small.
The paths we don’t realize we’re already walking.
The thoughts that drift in quietly when we think no one is watching.

Most of the time, we are on autopilot.
And then, suddenly, something cracks open—
a stranger, a sentence, a silence.
And we realize:
we’re already in the middle of something important.
We just weren’t paying attention yet.

—

Floating Is Not Falling

That night, I walked home feeling different.
Not lighter, exactly—
but softer.

The world didn’t shift,
but something in me had.
A loosened grip.
A breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

It reminded me that I didn’t need to “have it all figured out.”
That I wasn’t late.
That being human isn’t about having answers—
but about carrying questions with a little more grace.

We’re all just ghosts in borrowed bodies,
drifting through constellations of memory and meaning,
trying to choose the right drink from a glowing machine at midnight.

And somehow,
that’s enough.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Unexpected Exchange

There was no profound outcome that night.
No revelation.
No life plan redrawn.
Just a soft, strange connection in the dark.

Wabi-sabi lives in these moments:

• In the crack where two strangers meet without expectation.
• In the words that weren’t planned but landed like a gift.
• In the kindness that doesn’t ask to be remembered, but is.
• In the silence that follows something real.

—

So if you’re wondering whether you’re floating or falling—
if you’re unsure whether this moment matters,
or whether you’re still “on the right path”—
stop for a second.
Take a breath.

You’re here.
The vending machine is humming.
The night is listening.
And someone—maybe a stranger, maybe you—
just said the right thing at the right time.

Let that be enough.

You’re already floating.
Just don’t forget to notice how light you’ve become.

cloudless morning sky—
still, the shutters creak closed,
someone knows what’s coming

—

In the spring of 2018, I spent a few weeks living just outside Beppu, in a borrowed room above a bakery where the walls smelled faintly of yeast and rain.
It was a quiet time, uneventful in the way that’s easy to forget but hard to recreate.
Each day followed the same rhythm:
wake, walk, write, eat, repeat.

The man who owned the bakery was in his sixties and moved with the kind of calm that made you feel like nothing urgent could ever happen in his presence.
One morning, I asked why he always closed the storm shutters on the west-facing windows even when the sky was clear.
He shrugged and said,
“Because when it rains here, it doesn’t warn you.”

That sentence stayed with me.
It felt like it wasn’t about weather at all.

—

Most Problems Don’t Arrive Loud

The truth is, most of the things that unravel us don’t come crashing through the door.
They arrive slowly, in whispers.
In small compromises.
In the email we don’t reply to.
In the conversation we avoid because “it’s not the right time.”
In the gut feeling we silence with distraction.

By the time the problem is undeniable,
it’s already grown roots.

We act surprised,
but somewhere deep down,
we saw it forming.

We just didn’t deal with it—
because we thought we had time.

—

The Wisdom of Early Attention

There is a quiet kind of strength in tending to something before it becomes a fire.
It doesn’t look heroic.
No one claps.
No one sees you close the shutter while the sky is still blue.

But that’s the point.
Real care happens before it’s convenient to call it care.

It looks like:

• Clarifying feelings before they become resentments.
• Adjusting the routine before burnout sets in.
• Reaching out to someone before the distance hardens into disconnection.
• Resting before you’re forced to.
• Listening to the small discomfort before it becomes a deep ache.

Prevention isn’t dramatic.
It’s subtle.
And that’s why it’s so easy to skip.

—

What Living Proactively Actually Means

Dealing with things before they arise doesn’t mean becoming paranoid,
or controlling every outcome,
or trying to predict every twist of the road.

It means learning to notice.
To stay present enough to sense the shift in air pressure before the storm.
To trust that small discomfort is a signal, not a nuisance.
To believe that something handled gently now won’t need to be torn out later.

Proactivity is care.
It’s presence.
It’s self-respect disguised as preparedness.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Unseen Crack

Wabi-sabi reminds us that beauty lives in the incomplete,
in the nearly broken,
in the places where decay has quietly begun.

To honor those imperfections is not weakness.
It’s wisdom.

• A crack, acknowledged early, can be mended with gold.
• A strain in the thread can be rewoven before it snaps.
• A room, aired out before mold appears, stays alive.
• What we attend to early, we rarely lose.

—

Now, when the sky is clear and everything feels still,
I ask myself—what am I pretending not to see?
What needs attention while it’s still small enough to hold in one hand?

Because when the rain comes,
it doesn’t ask if you’re ready.
And the shutters don’t close on their own.

So I close them now.
Not because I’m afraid.
But because I’ve learned
that peace is something you tend to
before the storm arrives.

old shoes by the door—
no one told them where to go,
still, they wore the road

—

In late autumn, I found myself standing in my kitchen in Bern long after midnight, surrounded by the hum of a refrigerator that had seen better years and the faint echo of rain tapping gently on the windowpane like an old friend too polite to knock. I had boiled water for tea I wasn’t going to drink and stared at the same chipped mug I’d used for years, its handle barely holding on—like me, I suppose.

It wasn’t a crisis.
It wasn’t dramatic.
There was no grand falling out, no tragic catalyst, no external force pushing me out the door.

It was something quieter, deeper, and more personal.

It was the slow realization that the life I had built—though safe, though structured, though passable in the eyes of others—no longer fit the shape of who I was becoming.
And when that truth finally landed, not like a crash but like a feather falling steadily to the floor, I knew:
I had to leave.

—

Why the First Step Is the Hardest—But the Most Transformative

We like to believe that big change begins with fireworks.
With packed bags and goodbye letters and Instagram captions that say “onto new beginnings.”
But more often, growth begins with discomfort you can no longer explain away.

It begins with a sentence you whisper to yourself in the dark:
“I can’t do this anymore.”
Not with resentment, not with anger—
just with a quiet kind of honesty that no longer asks permission.

For me, that moment of clarity didn’t arrive on a mountaintop or during a life-coaching retreat.
It arrived in the pause between boiling water and pouring it.
In that stillness, I heard my truth.

That was my first step.
The one no one saw.
The one that changed everything.

—

A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with One Honest Moment

There’s a famous saying: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
But what it doesn’t say—what it never says—is that the step doesn’t have to be physical.
It can be internal.
Invisible.
Unremarkable to anyone but you.

The journey I started wasn’t toward a specific destination.
It was toward alignment.
Toward living a life that didn’t require me to explain or defend my softness.
Toward choosing a rhythm that suited my breath, not someone else’s expectations.

And that first step—small as it was, silent as it felt—was the moment I chose not to abandon myself anymore.
And I believe that’s where all meaningful transformation begins.

—

What I’ve Learned Since Taking That Step

What followed wasn’t glamorous.
It was messy.
It was lonely, beautiful, uncertain, filled with long walks in unfamiliar cities and conversations that changed shape as I grew.
But it was mine.

And along the way, I learned a few things I return to often—especially when doubt tries to sneak back in:

• You don’t need a full map to move forward. The next right step is enough.
• Growth feels, at first, like loss. But it’s really just space being made for something more honest.
• Clarity is often the result of movement, not a prerequisite for it.
• You are allowed to outgrow a life that once fit. That’s not betrayal—it’s becoming.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Decision to Begin

There is something deeply wabi-sabi in choosing to begin again—especially when nothing is forcing you to.
In seeing the cracks in your routine not as failures, but as invitations.
In recognizing the beauty of an imperfect life trying, still, to unfold into something real.

This quiet philosophy teaches us:

• The first step doesn’t have to be confident. It just has to be real.
• There is elegance in the incomplete, the uncertain, the becoming.
• You don’t need to fix yourself to start. You need to listen. Then move.
• Peace is not in staying where you are. It’s in honoring where you’re being pulled.

—

I never finished that tea.
But I did start something else—
something that felt like coming home to a version of myself I hadn’t met yet.

Now, when someone asks me what decision changed everything,
I don’t say “quitting my job” or “moving cities” or “starting over.”
I say: The night I stood in the kitchen and told myself the truth.
The night I left a life that no longer held me with care.
The night I took the first step—quiet, honest, mine.

And if you’re standing on that edge,
wondering whether it counts if no one sees it,
let me tell you:

It counts.
It always counts.

Because the journey begins there—
not when you arrive,
but when you decide
you’re no longer willing to stay behind.

late train passing through—
windows full of other lives,
mine stays in its seat

—

In the autumn of 2011, I rented a short-term flat in a narrow building by the Limmat, just east of the city center in Zürich. It was the kind of apartment that came already furnished—mostly in muted wood, with a mattress too thin and a single cup in the cupboard that looked like it had outlived something important.

There was a clock in the hallway outside my door that ticked a little too loud. And at night, when the rest of the world had gone quiet, that ticking became its own kind of rhythm. A sound that didn’t ask anything of me. Just kept moving. Forward, always.

I had come back to the city for reasons I couldn’t fully explain. I told people it was to rest. To write. To pause between things. But the truth sat somewhere underneath that. I was circling around a place I didn’t want to enter again. A place I’d once called home. Not physically—though the apartment wasn’t far from it—but emotionally, internally. That version of home. The one where I had learned how to keep myself small and silent, like a plant growing in a dark cupboard.

And though I walked through many familiar streets that season—through Langstrasse in the early morning, where the clubs still echoed with music nobody remembered; through the stillness of Lindenhof, where pigeons always seemed to gather in odd numbers—I never walked back to that home. I never rang the bell.

—

I think we talk too casually about going back.
“Go home.”
“Reconnect.”
“Make peace with your past.”
But some places aren’t meant to be revisited.
Not because they’re evil.
But because returning to them requires you to become small again. To shapeshift.

And when you’ve worked this hard to become whole,
you learn not to volunteer for that kind of shrinking.

—

There’s a version of me that still lives in that house.
Quiet. Agreeable. Careful not to take up too much room.
The version that said yes too easily, that swallowed her own voice before it made a sound.
She knew how to keep the peace.
She knew how to explain away her discomfort until it looked like gratitude.

And some days, I can still feel her pressing at the edge of my chest—
when I’m too polite in a meeting,
when I downplay my joy,
when I write something true and almost delete it.

But I don’t let her drive anymore.
I don’t let her pick the routes.
Because I remember what she forgot:
that survival isn’t the same as living.
That not being hurt is not the same as being loved.

—

One night, while the rain turned the windows silver and the city took on that quiet, heavy stillness it gets when everyone’s inside waiting for the storm to pass, I made tea in the kitchen and sat on the floor, because I didn’t trust the chair not to collapse.

I remember looking at the steam rising from the cup and thinking:
Maybe this is it. Maybe this moment—this silence, this tea, this rented room—is more home than anywhere I’ve ever lived.

Not because it was perfect.
But because nothing in it asked me to be anything but myself.

That’s when I realized:
I don’t need to go back to forgive.
I don’t need to revisit the rooms that taught me to disappear.
I don’t need to knock on doors I once closed to prove I’m healed.

Sometimes growth looks like leaving.
Sometimes healing is the absence of the thing that once held you tight.
And sometimes the kindest thing you can do for the person you used to be is to let them stay behind—safe in memory, untouched by the present.

—

I haven’t returned to that home.
Not in all the years since.
Not even by accident.

And when people ask me what place I never want to visit,
I think of that apartment.
That old kettle.
That ticking clock.

I think of the version of me who lived in a house where her joy was too loud, where her no was negotiable, where her fear had its own room.

And I say—
Not there.

Not because I’m bitter.
Not because I hate it.
But because I don’t belong there anymore.

And maybe that’s what growing means.
Not becoming someone new,
but gently, finally,
refusing to become someone you’re not.

rain on the glass pane—
inside, the past brewing slow,
still, the kettle hums

—

There’s no country I refuse to visit.
No city I’ve blacklisted, no border I’m unwilling to cross.
I’ll sleep in stations.
Eat soup from plastic.
Get lost on roads with no names.

But there is one place I avoid—
and it’s closer than any of that.
More familiar.
More dangerous.

It’s home.
Not the one with a mailing address,
but the version of home that lives in memory.
The one where I felt like a shadow of myself
long before I had a name for what that meant.

—

The Room You Outgrow But Still Remember

I don’t want to go back to the person I was in that version of home.
Where everything was quiet, but nothing was peaceful.
Where the light never quite reached the corners.
Where I learned how to fold myself small to fit into the shape someone else expected of me.

That place taught me how to endure.
How to disappear politely.
How to smile with my hands clenched behind my back.

But endurance is not identity.
And disappearing is not love.

I left that place not with a suitcase,
but with a slow kind of grief—
the grief that comes from realizing
the walls you leaned on were never meant to support you.
They were meant to keep you in.

—

The Ghosts You Still Carry

Sometimes, even now,
a smell or a sentence will pull me back.
A train station at dusk.
The sound of slippers on tile.
A certain kind of silence in someone’s voice.

And suddenly, I’m there again—
in the house I no longer live in,
wearing a version of myself I thought I’d thrown away.
The self that apologized for wanting softness.
The self that mistook control for care.

But I don’t stay.
Not anymore.
I nod to the memory,
thank it for what it taught me,
and step forward.

Because I’ve learned that not all homes are places you’re meant to return to.
Some are just rooms you survive long enough to leave.

—

The Murmur of Growth

People talk about healing like it’s a destination.
But I think it’s more like becoming fluent in a new language
while still dreaming in the old one.

You don’t unfeel what shaped you.
You just learn to feel it with softer hands.
You learn to build something that doesn’t resemble what broke you.

And maybe that’s the real kind of home—
not a return to safety,
but a slow, deliberate creation of peace
in the shape of your own voice.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Unvisited Room

Wabi-sabi teaches us that beauty is not in the unbroken,
but in what continues despite the break.
It reminds us:

• There is no shame in leaving a place that loved you badly.
• Some things must end so that you can begin.
• Growth is not loud. Sometimes it looks like walking away.
• Even cracked foundations can become art, if you build with intention.

—

So when people ask what place I never want to visit,
I don’t name a country or a war zone or a forgotten town.
I name that version of home—
the one where I was not allowed to be whole.
The one where I learned to disappear.

And I say,
I will not go back there.

Because I have made something better.
Not perfect.
Not always steady.
But mine.

And that, I think,
is the only return that matters.

cicadas scream still—
but somewhere behind the noise,
one soft bell ringing

—

In the summer of 2015, I was staying in Zürich. Not the glittering postcard version—the lake shimmering under clean light, the banks full of pressed suits—but the quieter edges. Near the tram lines where the paint peeled from the benches, and Turkish grocers stayed open just a little later than they were supposed to.

I rented a short-term studio above a bakery that smelled like burnt sugar and sleep. The walls were thin, and every morning I’d wake to the sound of dough being kneaded below me.
I wasn’t there for work. Not exactly. I had told people I needed to “get away to focus,” which was partly true.
But the deeper truth was this: I needed to learn what happened when I stopped reaching for people who had already let go.

And in that strange quiet, I started to notice things.
What absence feels like.
What attention actually means.
And what a message left unsent can still teach you.

—

When You Don’t Hear From Someone

There’s a specific ache that arrives when someone you care about stops responding.
A slow burn.
We fill the silence with meaning—
usually the worst kind.

If a man ignores you, we say he’s on his mission. Focused.
If a woman does, we whisper she’s already gone. Entertaining someone else.

But sometimes, people are just inward.
And the silence? It’s not about you.

I learned that lesson the hard way—by assuming too much.
But also,
by receiving something I didn’t expect.

—

What My Sister Did

That summer, when I’d stopped texting, stopped replying,
when my world had narrowed to long walks by the Limmat and cheap coffee at the Coop across the street—
my sister started mailing postcards.

Not long letters.
Not confrontational “where are you”s.
Just small, quiet things.

A photo of our old cat.
A drawing she made of a vending machine she thought I’d like.
One card that just said,
“Hope Zürich is treating you gently.”

She didn’t try to fix me.
She didn’t demand I explain the silence.
She just reminded me,
in her way,
that I still belonged somewhere.

—

Presence Doesn’t Have to Be Loud

What she taught me, without meaning to, was this:
When someone you love is quiet,
you don’t need to fill the space.
You just need to stay nearby.
Leave the door unlocked.
Let your care be known in the softest, least demanding ways.

That’s what I remember most about that summer—
not the silence,
but the way her postcards turned it into something else.
Not pressure.
But presence.
Not rescue.
Just recognition.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Waiting

Wabi-sabi teaches us to accept the incomplete.
To find beauty not in resolution,
but in attention.

That summer, my sister’s small gestures reminded me:

• You don’t need to say everything. You just need to stay connected.
• Sometimes love is a rhythm, not a response.
• What looks like distance might actually be devotion—with better boundaries.
• Let people come back in their own time. Just be there when they do.

—

Now, when someone I care about goes quiet,
I don’t panic the way I used to.
I don’t assume the worst.

Instead, I write a sentence and don’t send it.
Or I send a photo of something that made me laugh.
Or I leave a voice note that says nothing important,
except, “I was thinking of you.”

Because I remember Zürich.
I remember how much that meant.

And I remember my sister—
waiting without asking,
loving without noise.

Showing up
even when I couldn’t.

faded doorway light—
she still waits with the tea poured,
same place, different silence

—

In the early winter of 2014, I stayed in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Kumamoto, tucked between a shuttered udon shop and a shrine where no one seemed to pray anymore.
It was the kind of place you end up in by accident, or maybe by ache. I told people I was traveling, but I wasn’t really going anywhere. I just needed space.
Space to pause.
To forget how to explain myself.
To remember what still mattered.

Each morning, I passed the same shrine on the way to nowhere in particular.
And every morning, an old woman swept the stone steps with slow, circular strokes.
She nodded when I passed. I nodded back.
We never spoke.
But it felt like something important was happening anyway.

—

The Kind of Help You Don’t Ask For

It was around that time that my sister started messaging me again.
Not long messages.
Not questions or advice.
Just a photo of the cat sitting in a sunbeam.
A picture of the coffee she’d made that morning.
Once, a voice note where she said nothing for five seconds and then added,
“I hope wherever you are, it feels less heavy today.”

She didn’t ask what I was doing.
She didn’t push me to come home.
She just showed up—
softly, consistently—
like a porch light left on in case I wanted to find my way back.

And that, somehow, was exactly what I needed.
Not a solution.
Not a plan.
Just the presence of someone who had already decided not to leave.

—

The Maintenance of Small Love

We think grand gestures hold the most weight.
But they rarely do.
It’s the small, steady efforts that keep something alive.

A relationship doesn’t last because it avoids difficulty.
It lasts because someone sends the text even when they’re tired.
Because someone makes space.
Because someone doesn’t flinch when the other person pulls away.
Because someone says, “I’m still here.”
Even without words.

What my sister did wasn’t complicated.
But it was love.
And it reminded me that love doesn’t always arrive with fanfare.
Sometimes it arrives with a photo of a sleeping cat and no expectations.

—

What the Woman at the Shrine Knew

I once asked the old woman why she swept every day,
even when the wind would just undo it by morning.

She said, “Because the shrine is still here. So I am too.”

I think about that now,
when life feels heavy,
when people drift,
when words are hard to find.

She wasn’t sweeping for results.
She was sweeping for rhythm.
For presence.
For proof that care still existed, even if no one noticed.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Love That Stays

There is wabi-sabi in a sibling’s quiet kindness.
In a relationship that doesn’t ask to be noticed to be meaningful.
In the things that remain not because they must,
but because someone chooses them,
again and again.

It teaches us:

• Love doesn’t need to be loud to be heard.
• Presence is often the most powerful form of support.
• Not fixing someone can sometimes be the greatest kindness.
• The smallest gestures, repeated with care, become a lifeline.

—

Now, when someone asks me to describe something kind a family member has done,
I don’t mention birthday gifts or big favors.
I think of my sister’s photo of a sleeping cat.
Of her messages with no pressure.
Of her way of saying, “You don’t need to explain. I’m here.”

I think of the old woman at the shrine,
sweeping steps no one asked her to sweep.
Just because the shrine was still standing.
And some things are worth tending
even when no one claps.

Because in the end,
what keeps love alive
isn’t the big moment—
it’s the decision to keep showing up
in the small,
unremarkable,
life-saving ways.

cracked teacup waits—
same table, same quiet hum,
new thoughts in old air

---

In the spring of 2019, I was living in a small guesthouse in Kurume, a town most people pass through without noticing. The owner was a retired teacher who brewed barley tea like it was a kind of slow ceremony. My room faced a narrow alley where cats lived like landlords and the laundry above me swayed like flags that had forgotten which country they belonged to.

I was working on a project then—a strange one. Half fiction, half tool, all built from vague conviction and late-night second guesses. I’d spend most mornings alone at my laptop, buried in drafts and diagrams, surrounded by silence so heavy it felt like a material. I didn’t mind. That was the point. I’d come to Kurume to get lost in my own work.

But every afternoon, around 2:15, I would close the lid, stretch my legs, and walk ten minutes down the street to a restaurant with no sign.

---

The Place That Didn’t Need To Be New

It was the kind of place you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t already know it.
Three tables.
One cook.
One old woman with hands like carved wood who took orders without writing them down.

The restaurant served only one dish, really—
a simple soba set with warm broth, crisp tempura, and pickles that always tasted slightly different depending on who had prepared them that week.
And I loved it.
Not because it was extraordinary, but because it was unchanged.

Every day, I’d sit at the same table near the window.
Every day, the tea was poured before I asked.
Every day, the food arrived exactly as it did the day before.
And yet, every day, it tasted new—because I was different.

---

Where the Work Lived

Back at the guesthouse, I worked in total isolation.
No meetings. No feedback. No feedback loops.
Just me and the quiet rhythm of thought.

And it was in that quiet that the real work formed.
Not the reactive kind—built from calls and shared docs and status updates—
but the deep kind.
The kind that comes from letting your own thoughts ferment for hours
before you say them out loud.

Solitude taught me things feedback never could:
how to listen longer,
how to follow a thread past the obvious,
how to sit with confusion without killing it too early.

---

But Then—Every Thursday

Every Thursday evening, I’d take the train to Fukuoka to meet my collaborator.
We didn’t call it that—“collaborator.”
We just said we were meeting for coffee,
but both of us knew we were there to test ideas.

We’d sit in a noisy kissaten near Tenjin Station, where the lights were too warm and the chairs too low.
And suddenly, the thing I had been shaping alone in silence
had to make sense out loud.

I’d say something I thought was fully formed,
and he’d tilt his head,
ask a question I hadn’t considered,
and suddenly the whole shape of the idea changed—
not broken,
just sharpened.
Softened at the edges where I hadn’t known I was bluffing.

Those conversations were rarely long.
But they did something the solitude never could:
they tested my honesty.
They made sure I wasn’t just building a perfect world in my own head.

---

The Soba Was Always the Same—But I Wasn’t

I returned to the restaurant every day after those meetings.
Sometimes to celebrate.
Sometimes to sulk.
Sometimes to just not think for an hour.

And the food?
It never changed.
But it always felt different.
Like the dish was reflecting something in me—
my progress,
my doubt,
my tiredness,
my small victories.

That’s the strange thing about routines.
The world doesn’t need to shift for us to move forward.
Sometimes it’s us who change against the stillness.

---

Work Alone, Share Together

There’s a reason the best work often begins in silence.
Because it’s there you ask the hard questions:
Do I actually believe in this?
Does this idea hold, even when no one is clapping?

But the work can’t end there.
It has to be spoken.
Held up to someone else’s eyes.
Let out into air that doesn’t belong to you.

Solitude is for digging deep.
Collaboration is for seeing clearly.
Both are required.
But never at the same time.

---

Wabi-Sabi, in a Bowl of Soba

There is wabi-sabi in that little restaurant.
In the unchanged menu.
In the chipped bowls.
In the way the woman never asked for praise,
only nodded when I said ごちそうさまでした.

It taught me:

• Routines don’t kill creativity. They protect it.
• Solitude deepens ideas. Collaboration gives them air.
• The same experience, repeated with awareness, becomes a form of practice.
• Your surroundings don’t need to change for you to grow. You change anyway.

---

Now, whenever I start something new—
a story, a tool, a risk—
I return to that rhythm.

I begin in silence.
I build without noise.
And then, when I’m ready—
I find someone I trust.
We meet in person.
We talk.
We tilt our heads.

And if I’m lucky,
I find a little restaurant afterward.
Something small.
Something unchanged.
Where the tea is poured before I ask.
And where the quiet, again, begins to do its work.

temple bell at dusk—
you hear it better alone,
but you echo it with others

---

The Two Rooms We Live In

In the winter of 2017, I spent two weeks in a cabin near Takachiho Gorge.
It wasn’t a plan—it just happened.
Someone knew someone who knew someone with a key.
No Wi-Fi, no clock, no voices except the ones that came from inside my own head.

I was supposed to be working on a project with a friend back in Tokyo—something digital, fast, meant to scale.
But every time we tried to collaborate over screens, something got lost.
We misunderstood tone.
We mistimed energy.
The momentum died somewhere between the message and the reply.

So we stopped.
Agreed to meet in person later.
And in the meantime, we’d each work alone.

Something shifted.
Not just in the project—
in me.

---

Why You Need Solitude for Real Work

There’s a kind of clarity that only shows up when you’re alone.
Not lonely.
Just alone—undistracted, unsignaled, unreachable by default.

It’s in that space that real ideas take form.
Not the shallow kind that rise up during meetings or brainstorms,
but the deep, slow ones.
The ones that need silence.
The ones that need to wander before they arrive.

Working in isolation means:

• No performance. Just presence.
• No consensus. Just curiosity.
• No noise. Just rhythm.

You get to ask yourself, without interruption:
What do I actually think?
What am I trying to say?
Is this even worth making?

And when no one is watching,
you’re finally free to answer honestly.

---

Why You Should Never Build a Life Entirely Alone

But then—
the second half of the truth:
you can’t finish the work alone.

We’re not designed to stay in isolation forever.
We shape the work in silence,
but we sharpen it in conversation.

Real collaboration doesn’t happen on shared documents.
It happens in rooms with shared air.
In kitchens and cafés and quiet corners of bookstores.
In the way someone tilts their head while you speak—
and you realize your idea isn’t quite right,
or maybe it’s better than you thought.

Collaboration in person means:

• Energy becomes real-time. You catch sparks. You adjust.
• Trust builds naturally. Through gestures. Through pauses.
• Misunderstandings dissolve faster. No lag between feeling and correction.

When you finally meet, you’re not just exchanging words—
you’re aligning frequencies.

---

How to Structure Your Life Like This

If you’re building something—anything—
try this rhythm:

• Retreat to create. Block off real, uninterrupted time to work alone.
  Leave the house. Leave the inbox. Leave the illusion of multitasking.
• Return to refine. Meet in person. Share drafts. Talk in circles. Let someone challenge what you thought was solid.
• Repeat. The process isn’t linear. It loops. It listens. It hums.

This model works for writing, designing, planning, thinking, even healing.
It honors both parts of you:
the monk and the musician.
The silent observer and the one who needs to be seen.

---

Wabi-Sabi Lessons for Modern Work

There’s deep wabi-sabi wisdom in this rhythm.
It’s about understanding what’s missing,
and choosing when to fill it.

• In isolation, you learn to accept imperfection. You sit with your flaws. You grow comfortable in the raw.
• In collaboration, you let others trace the cracks. Not to erase them—but to understand where the light gets in.
• The quiet phase gives the work soul. The shared phase gives it shape.

Perfection doesn’t come from polish.
It comes from balance—
between the time you listen to yourself,
and the time you let someone else listen too.

---

Final Thought

So now, when I start something new,
I begin in stillness.
I wander the forest paths of my own mind until something takes root.
Then, only when it’s ready—
I bring it to a table.
With someone I trust.
In a room that smells like coffee and old wood.
And we begin again.

Because that’s the secret, really:
Work in isolation.
Collaborate in person.
And let the space between the two
be where the real magic lives.

evening ferry hums—
no one on the upper deck,
only the wind speaks

---

In the autumn of 2014, I found myself somewhere between Kagoshima and Nagasaki, sitting on the upper deck of a rust-stained ferry as it drifted quietly across the inland sea. I had no real destination—just a pocketful of yen, a notebook with too many empty pages, and the kind of ache that follows you when you’ve left something behind but haven’t yet found anything to walk toward.

There were only three other passengers on board: a salaryman snoring softly under a newspaper, a girl with red headphones staring into nothing, and an old man who kept feeding crackers to invisible birds. The wind smelled faintly of engine oil and salt. I liked it.

I didn’t have a plan. I told myself I was traveling. But really, I was waiting for my life to catch up to me. Or to pass me by completely, I wasn’t sure which.

---

That evening, a boy on the ferry staff asked me in broken English,
“Where you see yourself… ten years from now?”

I laughed—more out of reflex than amusement.
It’s the kind of question that’s asked with good intentions but almost never met with a true answer.
Ten years?
Ten years ago, I still believed in things like clarity, strategy, permanent addresses.

Now, I was somewhere off the coast of Kyushu with a half-dead phone and no one expecting me.

I didn’t answer the boy.
Not then.
But I’ve thought about that question more times than I care to admit.

---

The Quiet Rule

If you want to go far in life—really far, not fast, not famous—you have to follow one rule:
Never lie to yourself.
Neverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

That’s what I’ve come to believe.
And I say it like that—with too many r’s—because it’s easy to forget how serious it is.
You can lie to others.
You can play roles, adjust to rooms, bend for moments.
But the minute you lie to yourself,
something starts to rot inside.
Not loudly.
Not suddenly.
But slowly, like fruit left in a drawer you never open.

---

On that trip, I told myself I was free.
I told myself I didn’t need connection.
I told myself I was above regret.

But late at night, in ryokan rooms with thin futons and paper walls,
I heard the truth knocking.
I wasn’t free.
I was floating.
I wasn’t detached.
I was afraid.
I wasn’t thriving.
I was hiding in motion.

And no amount of train transfers or convenience store onigiri would change that.

---

What Ten Years Actually Means

When people ask where you see yourself in ten years,
they’re really asking if you believe your future self will be more honest than your current one.

They’re asking if the person you’ll become is someone who knows when to stop,
when to leave,
when to love without pretending.

I don’t know what city I’ll live in.
I don’t know if I’ll be partnered or alone,
teaching, writing, or stacking chairs in a late-night jazz bar.
But I do know this:
I want to be the kind of man who can look himself in the mirror at 2 a.m. and say,
“Yes. This is still you.”

---

What Travel Taught Me

In Kyushu, I learned that the path isn’t always forward.
Sometimes it loops.
Sometimes it sits still.
Sometimes it climbs a forested slope that offers no view.
But if you’re honest—truly honest—it becomes enough.

I met a woman in a café near Aso who told me she used to be an architect in Tokyo.
Now she made ceramic cups with uneven rims.
She said,
“I like when the clay wobbles. It shows where my hand slipped. I want my work to remember me.”

That stayed with me.
Still does.

---

Wabi-Sabi: The Truth We Avoid

Wabi-sabi teaches us that the crack isn’t the problem—it’s the evidence.
Of time.
Of touch.
Of effort.

When we lie to ourselves, we polish over the cracks.
We pretend the structure is still sound.
We say things like “I’m fine,” “This is normal,” “It’s not that bad.”
But when we stop lying, we begin to live.

Wabi-sabi reminds us:

• Truth doesn’t need to be pretty. It needs to be real.
• A life with uneven lines has character. Depth. Soul.
• It’s better to be a cracked bowl that holds warmth than a perfect one left on a shelf.

---

So, Where Do I See Myself?

If I’m honest?
In ten years, I hope I’m still telling the truth.
Still building quietly.
Still leaving room for silence.
Still chasing meaning, not metrics.

Maybe I’ll own a small shop—books, tea, repaired things.
Maybe I’ll live near the sea again.
Maybe I’ll still walk each morning without headphones,
just listening to my own feet on the road.

But more than anything,
I want to be a man who never lied to himself—
not about what he wanted,
not about who he loved,
not about what he feared.

That would be enough.
That would be everything.

Someone asked me recently,
“Where do you see yourself in ten years?”
And like every time before, I hesitated.

Not because I didn’t care.
But because the shape of my life has never come from sharp plans,
only from soft persistence—
like water finding its own path through stone.

Ten years is a long time.
Ten years ago, I thought different things mattered.
I said yes to people I should’ve let go.
I said no to risks I still think about.
I thought life moved like a straight line.
It doesn’t.

It bends, folds, loses pages, finds new ones.
Sometimes it moves like jazz.
Sometimes it just sits in the corner and waits.

So I don’t answer the question anymore.
Not directly.
Instead, I ask better ones.

---

What If the Path Isn’t a Ladder, But a Circle?

The truth is, I don’t want to be climbing anymore.
Not if the ladder leads to rooms full of fluorescent lights and performance reviews.
I want to build things that feel like me—quiet, honest, strange in just the right way.

And I want to sell—not in the loud, shiny way.
But in the true way.
Selling, after all, is just communication.
It’s the art of saying, this is what I made, and this is why it matters.
It’s giving your work a way to walk out into the world without you.

In ten years, maybe I’m still writing.
Still restoring broken things.
Still learning how to build—systems, stories, maybe small businesses with soft edges.

Not because I want to be unstoppable.
But because I want to keep going,
gently, sustainably, with purpose.

---

What Building Has Taught Me

I’ve spent time creating things people never saw.
Websites that never launched.
Projects that quietly failed.
Handwritten notes that sat in drawers for years.

But every act of building—even the invisible ones—teaches you something:

• How to turn thought into form.
• How to take an idea and give it texture, structure, consequence.
• How to sit with something long enough that it starts to breathe back.

Building teaches you patience.
It teaches you how to stay with the uncomfortable middle,
when nothing makes sense
and no one claps.

If you want to shape your own life,
learn to build.
Not just products, but paths.

---

Why Selling Matters (Even If You Hate Selling)

Selling isn’t manipulation.
It’s clarity.
It’s empathy.
It’s standing inside your work and saying,
“I see you. I made this for someone like you. Here’s how it helps.”

If you learn to build and you learn to sell—
even softly,
even imperfectly—
you’re free.
Not immediately.
But eventually.
Free to shape your time.
Free to walk away from things that steal your soul one checkbox at a time.
Free to spend an afternoon writing, or fixing, or just staring at the rain—
without asking permission.

---

The Wabi-Sabi Path to Becoming Unstoppable

You won’t look unstoppable.
You’ll look quiet.
Inconsistent.
Maybe even a little lost.

But you’ll know what you’re doing.
Because the people who last aren’t the loudest—
they’re the ones who learn how to return to the work.

Wabi-sabi reminds us:

• It doesn’t need to be perfect to be valuable.
• A small, handmade life is still a life well-lived.
• Cracks in the path don’t mean you’re off-track—they are the track.
• Simplicity doesn’t mean easy. It means clear.

---

A Better Question

So no, I don’t know where I’ll be in ten years.
But I know I want to keep building things that matter.
I want to get better at showing them to the right people,
without apology,
without armor.

I want to live a life where each year deepens the truth,
rather than decorating it.

I want to be the kind of unstoppable
that feels like water—
quiet,
patient,
and always finding a way through.

a hill in the rain—
every day the same incline,
every day, new legs

---

The Hill I Never Chose

In the spring of 2004, I was living in a borrowed apartment near a late train line and a convenience store that sold nothing I ever needed but everything I always bought.
My room was spare—
a mattress on the floor,
a chipped mug,
and a secondhand fan that whirred like it was dreaming of flight.

Each morning, I followed the same path to a shop that sold broken things—record players that stuttered, cameras with jammed shutters, machines that remembered how the world used to sound.
The world, for me, was a loop of quiet routines.

And at the center of that loop—was a hill.

---

The Gentle Weight of Repetition

It wasn’t a steep hill.
Not dramatic.
Not something that earns you admiration or sweat-soaked pride.

But it asked something of me every day.
It made me notice my breath.
The tension in my calves.
The way the light shifted across pavement cracks that had no intention of being repaired.

I hated it at first.
Then I missed it when I was away.

Because it gave me something I couldn’t name until much later:
the joy of a struggle I already knew.

---

Why Predictable Challenges Make Us Happy

We often seek novelty—new goals, new highs, new identities.
But there is a quiet, reliable kind of happiness hidden inside predictable struggle:

• It grounds us – A known challenge brings rhythm, and rhythm gives shape to time.
• It builds trust – You know you can face it. You’ve done it before. You’ll do it again.
• It reflects us – Each time you return to it, you’re slightly different. And it shows you who you are.
• It offers mastery – Not perfection, but familiarity. You grow into it, rather than past it.

This kind of struggle doesn’t ask for reinvention.
It asks for return.
For presence.
For gentle effort.

---

What the Hill Taught Me

I didn’t climb that hill to prove anything.
No one was watching.
There was no finish line.
Just the soft repetition of trying.
Again.
And again.
And again.

Over time, I began to understand that I wasn’t trying to beat the hill.
I was walking with it.
In rhythm.
In quiet agreement.
And that made all the difference.

---

Wabi-Sabi Teachings from a Daily Challenge

Wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of imperfection and impermanence, lives in that hill—
and in every quiet challenge we keep returning to.

Here’s what it whispers:

• Beauty lives in the worn
  → The cracked pavement, the leaning tree, the tired breath—these are part of the story, not flaws in it.
• Repetition is not failure
  → The path doesn’t need to be new to be meaningful. The act of returning is the growth.
• Effort without recognition is enough
  → No audience is needed. No reward required. Showing up is the reward.
• Flaws are part of the form
  → The chipped mug still holds warmth. The imperfect day still holds peace. The hill that never changes still carries you forward.

---

A Final Step

I no longer live near that hill.
But I carry it with me—
in every quiet routine,
every imperfect ritual,
every choice to show up without the promise of applause.

Because happiness doesn’t always live in comfort or novelty.
Sometimes it lives in the soft, repetitive climb toward nothing new.
Just something real.
And real is enough.

sunlight on old wood—
no one sees it but the dust,
still, it glows like gold

---

Morning Rituals That Anchor Me

Most mornings unfold the same way. The light slips through the blinds at an angle I’ve memorized, landing silently on the floorboards. I rise without urgency, make my way into the kitchen, and start the coffee machine. It gurgles and breathes like an old friend. The scent of dark roast fills the room—not fancy beans, just the kind that reminds me I’m still here. That first cup of coffee isn’t about caffeine; it’s about rhythm. It’s about grounding. It’s a simple morning ritual that stabilizes the chaos and brings a small kind of joy to daily life. For a moment, the world is still, and that stillness feels like peace.

---

The Unexpected Power of Sunshine

There are days when the sun appears suddenly, casting light through the window like a surprise. It lands on the table, hits the corner of a glass, or warms the side of my face just enough to make me pause. Sunshine, even in brief flashes, brings a natural, effortless happiness. It’s not the dramatic kind of joy. It’s subtle. Healing. The kind of light that doesn’t demand anything from you, only that you notice it. On cold mornings or long afternoons, it reminds me of warmth, of softness, of beauty in silence. Sunshine is a free, daily source of joy—always there, even when it hides.

---

The Simple Happiness of Physical Touch

We underestimate how powerful physical touch can be. A hand on my shoulder. A long hug from someone I trust. Fingers brushing lightly during a shared story. These small moments of connection have the power to reset something inside me. Touch doesn’t need to be loud or dramatic to bring comfort. It reminds me that I’m not alone. That I exist in a body, and that body can be held, supported, grounded. In a world driven by digital noise and constant distraction, a warm, unspoken connection—a moment of honest human contact—can feel like coming home.

---

Real Conversations That Go Nowhere

I’ve come to appreciate the value of wandering conversations. The kind where no one is trying to impress anyone. The kind of small talk that unexpectedly turns into something real. Where we talk not to fix things, but just to be heard. Sometimes, nothing gets resolved. And still, something shifts. There’s a deep happiness in talking freely, without pressure, without expectations, just the sound of a voice you trust moving through the room. These everyday moments of connection create a sense of emotional intimacy that no productivity tool can replicate.

---

Walking Without a Destination

There is quiet magic in taking a walk for no reason at all. No goal. No destination. Just a slow movement through neighborhoods I’ve seen a hundred times and somehow still don’t know. The rhythm of walking—one step, then the next—becomes a kind of moving meditation. It clears my head. It slows time. I see things I miss when I’m rushing: a cat sleeping on a windowsill, a tree blooming earlier than expected, a crack in the pavement shaped like a question mark. Walking reconnects me to myself and the world. It’s a natural, low-effort way to improve mental health and spark joy.

---

Embracing the Unknown

Every so often, I do something that I know I might fail at. I try a new project. Say something I’ve been avoiding. Take a small risk. Not for glory or success—but because I need to remember what it feels like to not know. That flutter of uncertainty? That’s aliveness. There’s a strange kind of joy in doing something where the outcome isn’t guaranteed. It makes the air taste different. It resets the heartbeat. Uncertainty, when embraced gently, becomes one of the purest ways to grow.

---

Wabi-Sabi Joy in Imperfection

There’s a quiet, powerful happiness in accepting things exactly as they are. A chipped mug that still holds warmth. A messy day that ends better than expected. A plan that falls apart, revealing something better in its place. Wabi-sabi teaches me that nothing needs to be perfect to be meaningful. Joy doesn’t come from polished surfaces or flawless execution. It comes from the beauty of the unfinished, the broken, the gently worn. It’s in the texture of daily life, where nothing is quite right, and everything is somehow enough.

---

Everyday Things That Make Life Beautiful

Coffee that warms my hands. Sunshine on a quiet street. The comfort of a hug. A late-night talk that goes nowhere. A walk that leads to nothing. A challenge I might not finish. These are the everyday things that make life beautiful.

They’re not loud.
They’re not trending.
They’re not even shared.

But they are mine.

And every time I notice them, I return to something essential.
Something human.
Something soft.
Something real.

I used to think happiness was a goal. Now I know it’s a practice. A noticing.
A willingness to see beauty in what’s already here.

And in that, I find peace.

a coin in the dirt—
half-buried, never quite lost,
glinting when you move

---

In the summer of 2006, I lived for a while in a bland apartment near the harbor.
It wasn’t scenic.
There were no postcards of that part of town.
Cargo crates stacked like children’s blocks, gulls arguing in circles, and the thick, stubborn smell of diesel and old water.
The building itself had peeling green paint, and the elevator made a sound like it was considering not working that day.
But the rent was cheap, and from the tiny balcony, you could see the cranes move at sunrise like mechanical insects waking from dreams.

I was doing freelance translation work back then—manuals, mostly.
Microwaves. Fax machines. One memorable project on the proper maintenance of industrial ice makers.
I could finish my work by noon and then wander the rest of the day,
which is exactly what I did.

---

I got into the habit of walking along the edge of the dockyards.
There was a vending machine there that only accepted coins and only sold barley tea, no matter how many buttons it had.
I liked that.
Something about its refusal to change.

One afternoon, I noticed a rusted sign outside a closed-down hardware store.
It said, “If something doesn’t make sense, keep looking.”
The letters were faded, like the sign was embarrassed by its own insistence.
But it stuck with me.
It felt like a message left for anyone who needed it.
And I needed it more than I thought.

---

When I was a kid, I used to think adults knew things.
Big things.
Definite, unshakeable truths.
But then I got older and realized most people just pick a version of the truth that makes them comfortable,
then stop looking.

---

There was a girl I met during that time—
she worked at a laundromat three blocks away.
Always reading thick novels behind the counter, always barefoot.
She told me once,
“People only ask questions they already have answers to. It’s the questions with no answers that scare them.”

I didn’t understand it fully at the time.
But she said it so plainly, I wrote it down in the margin of a notebook meant for invoices.

---

The thing is—
the surface explanation is always easier.
It’s comforting to accept the first answer that sounds right.
But real understanding—the kind that changes you—lives deeper down.
And to reach it, you have to keep moving.
You have to stay curious, even when the answers stop being simple.
Even when you wish they were.

---

I’ve learned that the world is full of half-truths dressed up as facts.
We build entire lives around them—
about what love is supposed to feel like,
what success should look like,
what kind of person we’re meant to be.
But sometimes the explanation doesn’t fit.
It rubs at the edges.
It leaves too much unsaid.

And in those moments,
you can choose to settle.
Or you can choose to go further.

---

The truth doesn’t always arrive dressed in clarity.
Sometimes it’s a feeling you get when a stranger says something that shouldn’t matter but does.
Sometimes it’s a contradiction that refuses to untangle.
Sometimes it’s just a question that won’t go quiet.

But if you follow it—
if you keep asking,
keep walking,
keep noticing what doesn’t sit right—
the world unfolds in strange and beautiful ways.

---

Now, years later, I don’t work with microwaves anymore.
I live in a different city, where the cranes don’t move at sunrise and the vending machines take credit cards.
But I still don’t trust simple answers.
I still write questions in the margins.
And I still remember that rusted sign by the dock.

If something doesn’t make sense, keep looking.

It probably means you’re close.

spring fog drifts slowly—
what was a mountain yesterday,
today is just mist

---

In the spring of 2002, I was renting a small second-floor apartment above an internet café that stayed open 24 hours.
You could hear the soft hum of computers and the occasional thud of someone losing at Counter-Strike.
Downstairs smelled like instant ramen, sweat, and pixelated ambition.
My place was nothing special—a futon on the floor, a chipped desk I found on the street, a cheap lamp that flickered when the fridge turned on.
But it was mine, and back then, that seemed like enough.

At the time, I believed I understood life.
I had routines: instant coffee in the morning, scrambled eggs if I remembered to buy them, radio turned low while I checked my email on a chunky silver laptop that wheezed like an old man.
I worked part-time at a CD rental shop—back when people still rented music.
You could browse for hours, picking albums based on cover art alone.
I liked that.
There was something democratic about it.
Everyone was just guessing.

---

One day, I stepped onto the balcony with damp laundry clinging to my arms, and I froze.
It wasn’t dramatic.
No thunderclap.
Just this flat, persistent realization sliding into my head like a pop-up ad I couldn’t close:
I don’t actually know anything.

---

In high school, I once had a philosophy teacher who wore the same beige windbreaker every day.
He told us on the first day of class that the only useful thing he could teach us was to doubt what we think we know.
Most of us ignored him—too busy memorizing Nietzsche quotes to sound profound at parties.
But one day, he drew a triangle on the blackboard and said, “You can call this a triangle. That’s a label. But what if, in your next life, this exact shape means something else—like hunger or love or god?”
We laughed at him.
But I’ve never forgotten it.

And that morning on the balcony, two decades later, the triangle came back.
Everything we think we know rests on labels.
And labels shift.
They evolve.
Sometimes overnight.

---

I had called myself independent.
But maybe I was just afraid of needing anyone.
I called my quiet “peace,”
but maybe it was just loneliness I’d dressed in better words.
I thought I was disciplined,
but I was just afraid of what would happen if I stopped moving.

---

At night, I’d take long walks with no destination.
Just the sound of vending machines whirring beside me,
the flicker of CRT monitors in dark windows,
and the distant bass of a club that only played R&B from five years ago.
Everything felt like it was in-between—
like the city itself hadn’t decided what it was yet.
And I liked it that way.

Once, I passed a girl sitting alone at a bus stop at 1 a.m.,
holding a Walkman and nodding along to a song no one else could hear.
She looked up, saw me watching her, and smiled.
Not the kind of smile that invites conversation.
The kind that says, I know you don’t know me, but we’re both real right now.

---

Years have passed.
The CD shop is gone.
The internet café is now a vape store.
That silver laptop gave up sometime during the Obama administration.

But every so often—folding laundry, burning rice, staring at the wall while the kettle hums—I remember how little I know.
And how freeing that actually is.

Because once you stop pretending everything means something fixed,
you get to ask better questions.
Not what is this supposed to be?
but what is this, right now?

And that’s enough.
Maybe more than enough.

autumn wind again—
leaves don’t ask where they’re falling,
they just let it go

---

The morning I missed the train, the sky was the color of lukewarm dishwater.
A color you wouldn’t bother to name.
I’d slept badly again—woke up three times for no good reason, just the usual low-humming worry pulling at the edges of sleep like a loose thread in an old sweater. I got out of bed late, made instant coffee I didn’t even want, and wandered into the station like someone rehearsing being awake.

When I saw the train doors close, I didn’t run.
I just stood there, hands in my pockets, watching it pull away like it was taking something with it I didn’t quite need anymore.
There wasn’t much left to do after that. So I sat on the cold metal bench, drank the coffee that had already gone bitter, and stared at the empty track like it might open up and tell me a secret.

That’s when it hit me—
not like an epiphany, more like someone whispering from the next room:
you’ll be dead soon.

It wasn’t dark.
It wasn’t heavy.
It was strangely clean.
Almost peaceful, like wind threading through tall grass, bending everything just slightly.

---

Most people hear that and flinch.
But I’ve been carrying it around lately,
not like a warning—more like a pocket stone.
A reminder. A little weight that keeps things honest.

Because knowing I’ll be gone has done something weird to time.
It’s slowed things down and pulled everything closer.
The way strangers’ voices blend in cafés.
The exact moment sunlight hits the water glass on my table at 3:14 p.m.
The fact that pigeons never seem to be in a hurry, and yet they always get where they’re going.

---

Before, I used to worry about what I was doing with my life.
Whether I was late.
Falling behind.
Wasting potential.
Now, I mostly just want to feel the water when I wash the dishes.
To answer messages when I want to, not out of some twitching sense of obligation.
To go to bed when I’m tired,
not when I’ve finally earned it.

It sounds simple. It is simple.
That’s the scary part.
We build entire lives around complexity to avoid that truth.

---

Someone once wrote that death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.
I didn’t understand that the first time I read it.
I was too young. Too busy chasing things.

But now I see it in everything.
In my plants, slowly dying and coming back in new shapes.
In relationships that change form but don’t entirely vanish.
In the way even silence carries something—
a memory, maybe, or a faint echo of laughter from another room.

---

Sometimes I walk through the city and look at people and think,
you’ll be gone too.
And for a second, it makes me ache in that soft, stupid way you ache
when you realize everything you love is temporary.
But then it lifts.

Because the flip side of knowing we’ll all vanish
is knowing this—this tiny, forgettable now—
is all we ever really get.

---

And suddenly, I’m not in such a rush.
Suddenly, it’s okay if I don’t write the book.
If I never fix whatever it is people think needs fixing.
If I don’t reply right away.
If I forget the names of stars.
If I burn the rice.
If I miss the train.

Because I’ll be dead soon.
And so will everything that ever felt like it mattered too much.
And somehow,
that makes this lukewarm coffee,
this quiet bench,
this hour where nothing is happening—
feel like everything.

cracked bowl on the shelf
once held storms, now gathers dust—
still, it has its place

---

One night I found myself in the kitchen at 2:37 a.m., barefoot, eating cereal straight from the box.
No bowl. No milk. Just the dim fridge light and the sound of my own chewing,
like static in the silence.

It wasn’t hunger.
It was something else.
Something softer, harder to name.
Like loneliness wearing socks.

For years, I called this a bad habit.
Evidence of failure, of being undisciplined, of living wrong.

But now I wonder—
what if the habits we hate aren’t flaws,
but signals?
Morse code from the parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten how to hear.

---

Mindless snacking?
Maybe it was never about food.
Maybe it was my body asking for rest,
a pause I didn’t think I deserved.

Scrolling at 2 a.m.?
Not procrastination—
a quiet rebellion,
my attempt to reclaim time that didn’t feel like mine.

Overplanning?
Not a love of structure,
but a way to build fences around chaos
so I didn’t drown in it.

---

I started tracing my bad habits like constellations.

Procrastination wasn’t laziness.
It was fear in slow motion.
People-pleasing wasn’t kindness.
It was safety in disguise.
Perfectionism wasn’t ambition.
It was a shield I built as a kid and forgot how to put down.

These weren’t character flaws.
They were survival tools.
Crude. Unrefined.
But brilliant in their own time.

They got me through the noise.
They carried me here.

---

There’s a wabi-sabi truth in that—
a quiet kind of reverence for things imperfect,
worn, misfitted, and still somehow whole.

Like a cracked teacup that still holds warmth.
Like an old habit that once held your fear
so you wouldn’t have to.

Wabi-sabi doesn’t ask for perfection.
It asks for intimacy with the broken.
It teaches that beauty and usefulness
can still live in things that no longer serve their original purpose.

---

So now, instead of fighting my habits,
I study them.

What are you trying to protect me from?
What wound are you still guarding?
What need did you once meet so well, and why haven’t I said thank you?

Because maybe healing doesn’t come through discipline.
Maybe it comes through curiosity.
Through compassion.

Maybe our so-called bad habits
are just love letters
from who we used to be—
written in smoke and repetition,
asking not to be erased,
but understood.

There was a time I envied people I didn’t know.
Not in a loud, bitter way—more like a quiet leaning,
like standing at the edge of someone else’s window
just long enough to see their coffee cup steaming in the light
and imagine what it would be like
to be them, just for a moment,
just for the part where the light hits right.

I envied the man on the train with his sleeves perfectly rolled,
reading a book in Italian like it was written just for him.
I envied the woman at the intersection who crossed the street
like she had always known where she was going.
I envied friends who never paused before speaking,
who laughed without checking the room,
who always knew what to do with their hands
at parties where the music was too loud and the lighting too low.

But then one night, around 2:30 a.m.,
I found myself sitting alone at the kitchen table,
listening to the refrigerator hum like an old monk meditating,
and I asked myself,
not out loud, but in that strange, deep-down voice that only shows up when you’re too tired to pretend—
Would you really trade all of you for all of them?

Not just the way they carry themselves through sunlight,
but the way they crumble when the door closes.
Not just their laughter,
but the shape of their silence.
Not just their grace,
but the grief that lives in their bones,
the fears that dress like logic,
the moments they can’t forgive themselves for,
even if no one else remembers.

Because the truth is,
you don’t get to take someone’s beauty
without carrying their weight.
You don’t get their confidence
without the father they never reconciled with,
or the night they almost gave up but didn’t tell a soul.

Every life comes as one piece.
Seams, scars, stitched-up dreams and all.
No swaps.
No samples.
No trying things on just to see how they feel.

And maybe that’s the point.
Maybe envy is just the echo of our own shape,
calling us back home.

For years I thought exercise had to be punishment. Something loud. Something measured. Something that looked like effort and sweat and soreness in all the right places. I tried the gyms. The routines. The classes with names that sounded like they came from action movies.

But none of it stayed.

What did stay were the long walks after dinner, music in my ears and no destination. The bike rides that turned into races with the wind. The hikes that ended in silence and sun on my shoulders. The dancing in the kitchen when no one was watching.

That was movement too.

No reps. No rules. Just joy.

The most sustainable exercise is the one that feels like play. The kind that reminds you you’re alive, not being tested.

So if it makes you laugh, if it helps you breathe easier, if it makes time disappear—

That counts.

Call it training. Call it therapy. Call it coming home to your body.

Whatever it is—if it moves you and you love it, keep doing it.

Because the best kind of strong is the kind that stays.

A misted mirror—
Not to reflect, but to dissolve into.

---

There are days I imagine being a character from a novel, someone written with enough space between the words to let the wind pass through. Not someone heroic. Not someone tragic. Just someone real in a way most people forget to be.

And if I had to choose, I wouldn’t reach for fiction.

I’d choose the narrator of the Tao Te Ching.
The man who says nothing, but says everything.
The one who walks away from the crowd, not in bitterness but in quiet understanding.

He is not a character in the way novels usually need them to be.
He has no arc.
No rising tension.
No grand lesson that fits neatly in a Hollywood ending.

But he sees the world.
And somehow, it’s enough.

---

To Be the Stream, Not the Stone

When I first read the Tao, I didn’t understand it.
I was too busy defining myself—ambitious, intense, full of fire.
I needed to be someone.

But the Tao doesn’t care about names.
It says: “He who defines himself can’t know who he really is.”
And that hit me like a whisper in a crowded room.

There is no reward for being loud in the silence.
There is no prize for outrunning your own shadow.
There is just the way.
And the way cannot be forced.

---

Wabi-Sabi and the Tao

The Tao does not promise success.
It does not encourage hustle.
It doesn’t ask you to be anything more than you already are.

And that is what makes it radical.
You are allowed to just be.

You are the chipped bowl that still holds water.
The crooked pine on the mountain slope.
The tea that tastes better on the third sip.

Wabi-sabi says: Imperfection is not a flaw.
The Tao says: Stop clinging, and everything will fall into place.

Together, they offer an answer to a question most people never ask:
What if becoming more meant doing less?

---

Lessons from a Character Without a Name

• Let the river choose the path. You only need to float.
• A full cup cannot receive. Stay empty. Stay open.
• Don’t try to be extraordinary. Be like water—soft, slow, and undefeated.
• Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. So breathe. Listen. Watch.
• You don’t need to change the world. Just stop trying to own it.

---

If I could be anyone, I’d be the unnamed wanderer from the Tao Te Ching.
Not a sage. Not a master. Just someone who stopped asking where the path leads, and simply walked.

Not to become something.
But to return to what I never left.

---

If you’ve ever read a line that made you stop and exhale, share this.
Maybe the Way is closer than you think.