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.
life 
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