What We Really Need

The rain had softened by the time I reached the edge of Anbo village.
The road was slick, shining like a polished stone under the early evening mist, and the mountains behind it stood heavy and blue, wrapped in layers of cloud that looked too thick to breathe but somehow didn’t seem to bother anyone.

I passed a woman who was hanging fish to dry under a crooked awning, the smoke from her little fire twisting up into the damp air like it was trying to write something.
Further down, two old men in rubber boots were kneeling in a muddy field, laughing at something I couldn’t hear, their bodies moving with that slow, worn rhythm that only comes from years of doing the same work, the same way, without apology.

There was a boy sitting on a low wall, peeling a mikan with quiet precision, the orange scent breaking through the smell of wet earth and moss.
He wasn’t looking at his phone.
Wasn’t fidgeting.
He was just peeling, piece by piece, like he had all the time in the world.

I stopped for a long time on that road.
Not because I needed to.
Because something in me didn’t want to rush past what felt too rare to disturb.

—

I thought about the city I had left behind.
The dozens of rooms filled with blinking screens, the elevators that moved faster than thinking, the endless hollow negotiations of what was important, what was worth chasing.
None of it felt real here.
None of it felt necessary.

Watching the woman with the fish, the men in the fields, the boy and his mikan,
it struck me so sharply I almost said it out loud—
Happiness wasn’t complicated.
It wasn’t curated or performed.
It wasn’t stitched together from long wishlists or career checkmarks or carefully constructed versions of ourselves.

It was something else entirely.
Something smaller.
Something softer.

—

Essentials, Nothing More

In The Book of Five Rings, Musashi wrote that a warrior must know the essentials of his craft, and throw away anything that isn’t truly needed.
“Do not collect weapons you will not use,” he said.
“Do not burden yourself with armor too heavy to move freely.”

Maybe it isn’t only about fighting.
Maybe it’s about living, too.

Maybe happiness comes down to the same idea:
Know what you really need.
And let the rest go.

The woman needed fire.
The men needed good soil and strong hands.
The boy needed the simple pleasure of pulling something sweet from a peel with his own fingers.

Nothing was missing.
Nothing was wasted.
Nothing was pretending.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Ordinary

There was wabi-sabi everywhere on that street.
In the sagging lines of the awning.
In the lopsided way the drying racks leaned.
In the muddy boots left at the field’s edge like silent sentries.

Everything was worn.
Everything was imperfect.
Everything was enough.

Maybe that’s the secret we forget when we move too fast, when we chase too many things we don’t really love:

• That contentment isn’t a mountain you climb. It’s a garden you tend quietly, every day.
• That joy doesn’t come from accumulating, but from shedding what isn’t needed.
• That small satisfactions — clean air, honest work, good food, warm light — are not stepping stones. They’re the whole road.
• That no one is coming to hand us meaning. We make it ourselves, in the way we hang fish to dry, or share a fruit, or kneel in wet earth without hurry.

—

I stayed until the last light pulled itself out of the sky.
Then I kept walking, slower than before, the way you walk when you know there’s nothing to catch up to,
nothing to race toward.

Yakushima breathed all around me — thick, alive, indifferent — and I let it carry me the way water carries a leaf: not quickly, not forcefully, but naturally, inevitably, enough.

I didn’t take a picture.
I didn’t write a list.
I didn’t wonder if I was doing enough.

I just breathed.
I just watched.
I just lived.

And somewhere far beneath all the noise I usually carried with me,
I felt something shift, something small but irreversible—

like an old sword finally being put down,
because the fight was never outside.

It was always the weight of unnecessary things,
the burden of forgetting
how little we really need
to be free.