Month: May 2025

first sip goes silent—
dopamine still whispering
but nothing lands right

---

It doesn’t announce itself.

Burnout. Overstimulation. The slow fuzz of too-muchness. It doesn’t come with sirens or red flags. It creeps.

It looks like productivity. Like research. Like staying connected. It dresses up as curiosity, ambition, even care.

You tell yourself you’re just catching up. Just one more scroll. Just one more article. Just one more message to reply to.

You’re good at it. Better than you realize. Gathering dopamine like berries in a forest. Every ping, every click, every tiny red bubble—a soft hit. A little reward. A hit of novelty. You become a collector of fragments.

Then one day the coffee doesn’t taste like anything.

Not bad. Not good. Just… flat.

That’s when I usually know. Not from my sleep, or my thoughts, or even my body. From that cup. The ritual that usually centers me. Suddenly unmoored.

---

A few years ago, I stayed in a rented room above a ceramic studio in rural Nara. The owner, a man in his seventies who had stopped glazing pottery because he said the silence became too loud, lived below.

Every morning, he would make coffee. One single cup. Always black. Always the same chipped mug.

One morning, I asked him how he knew when the seasons were changing. There had been no shift in weather, no announcement.

He didn’t look up.

“The ants walk differently,” he said. “Faster when the rain comes. Slower when it leaves.”

He paused.

“And the coffee loses its shape in the mouth. Like it wants to be tea.”

It didn’t make sense at the time. It does now.

The body knows. The ritual knows. Long before the mind catches up.

---

So much of modern living is frictionless. That’s the trap. It allows you to glide right past the red lights inside you. You become so used to being slightly overstimulated that silence feels like a glitch. You start chasing stimulation not for pleasure, but for regulation. You forget what baseline feels like.

And then the coffee goes quiet.

---

Wabi-Sabi Reminders for the Unplugging Kind:

• The signal to unplug rarely feels urgent. That’s why it matters.
• When simple joys dull, it’s not your fault. It’s your capacity.
• The most dangerous addiction is the one that feels productive.
• Your clarity returns when your input slows.
• Familiar things change shape first. Watch the coffee. Watch the ants.

---

So I unplug. Slowly. Not with a grand digital detox. But by washing the dishes without music. By walking without my phone. By making one good cup of coffee and doing nothing else until it’s gone.

Because when the taste returns— when the first sip lands again like sunlight through fog— that’s when I know I’m back.

And until then, I rest. I rinse the sponge. I let the noise dissolve.

Not because I’m done. But because I want to be ready when it’s time to begin again

honesty like wind—
it stings, it chills, it clears paths
and still I thank it

—

We were both nine.
That brutal age when you’re still mostly soft but starting to grow sharp edges.
He lived one street over, in a row of cracked socialist blocks that looked exactly like mine.
We weren’t best friends because of some cosmic connection.
We were best friends because we had no choice.
The world was too small to be picky.

His name was Andrej.
He had short hair that always grew out unevenly and ears too big for his head.
He was the first person who told me I smelled bad.

“You smell like onion,” he said one day after school, without looking at me.
Just tossed the words like he was pointing out the weather.
Not cruel.
Just true.

I froze.
Then laughed.
Then went home and asked my mother if it was true.
She sniffed and gave a guilty smile.

That day, I started wearing deodorant.
And I never forgot it.

—

Brutal Honesty is a Kindness in Disguise

We went through many versions of ourselves together—
skateboarders, video gamers, ghost-hunters, and for a brief but serious period, ninja apprentices.
Through all of it, he never stopped being painfully, beautifully direct.

“Your drawing’s off. The arms are weird.”
“She doesn’t like you, you know?”
“Stop copying me. Just do your own thing.”

Every time it hurt, I knew it came from a place that didn’t need to lie to be liked.
He wasn’t trying to impress.
He was trying to tell the truth.

—

A Rare and Underrated Trait: Clarity

In a world where most people dress up their words,
serve compliments laced with obligation,
or go silent when things get uncomfortable—
a friend who tells you the truth is sacred.

• They anchor you.
• They hold up a mirror, even when it’s cracked.
• They love you without needing you to perform.
• They risk your discomfort to protect your growth.

These are not small things.

These are the foundations of real friendship.

—

We lost touch for a while—university, different countries, the slow drift that happens when nobody says anything for too long.
But once, when I was already living abroad, he messaged me.
Just five words:

“Still wearing onion deodorant?”

I laughed for five minutes straight.
Because nobody else could say that.
Nobody else would.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Gift of Unpolished Friendship

Wabi-sabi teaches us that real beauty is not flawless.
It is cracked, raw, honest.
It does not flatter.
It reflects.

And the same is true for friendship.

Give me the friend who tells me I’m wrong.
The friend who says “You’re better than this.”
The one who doesn’t care how it lands—only that it’s real.

Because that kind of love, even if it bruises,
always heals stronger.

—

So if you’re lucky enough to have someone like that—
the one who says what they see,
who speaks even when silence is safer—
hold on.

That’s not rudeness.
That’s devotion.
That’s the onion-scented kind of loyalty that sticks to you
and makes you better,
year after year.

And if you ever find yourself being that kind of friend,
don’t hold back.
Say it.
Kindly, clearly, cleanly.

Because someone’s waiting to hear it.
And one day, they’ll write about you too.

steam drifts in still air—
a silence sweetened slowly
by cream and small truths

—

It was the kind of coffee shop that didn’t need to try.
Nothing was overly curated. The chairs didn’t match. The menu was printed on paper slightly warped from steam and time. The walls smelled faintly of old wood and burnt toast. But people came. They always came.

I was just starting there. An apprentice, though nobody used that word. My job was simple: mop the floors, wash the cups, wipe the windows in slow circular motions until I could see myself less clearly in them.

The owner, a woman in her late fifties, had run the place for nearly thirty years. She didn’t speak much, but she saw everything. The smudges I missed. The way I tapped the filter too quickly when making pour-over. The exact moment I stopped paying attention. She let me fail without interruption. That, I would learn, was her teaching style.

One rainy Wednesday, an older man came in. He wore a jacket two sizes too big and walked with a limp that didn’t seem to bother him. He sat in the far corner, near the coat stand, and waited. When I came to take his order, he didn’t even look up.

“Coffee,” he said, “drip. With whipped cream. Lots.”

I blinked. “Whipped cream?”

He finally looked up. His face was a patchwork of deep lines, the kind you get from laughing and surviving. “Yes,” he said, “like in the old days. You know the kind?”

I didn’t. But I said yes anyway.

—

The Hesitation of the Young

In the kitchen, I paused. I’d never made that combination before. There was no button for it. No picture of it on the wall. No memory of someone else doing it to follow. I checked the notes. Nothing. Just black coffee, and a can of cream I’d assumed was for desserts we didn’t serve.

I made the coffee. Poured it slow. Perfect bloom. Solid extraction. Then I froze. The can in my hand felt like a weapon.

“You’ll ruin it,” I whispered.

“Then serve it ruined,” the owner said behind me. I hadn’t heard her approach. She didn’t look at me when she said it.

“Better ruined and done than perfect and never.”

—

The Cream on Top

So I did it. I added the cream. A soft spiral, a little clumsy. A dollop too much.

When I brought it out, the old man smiled like I’d just played him a song he hadn’t heard in decades.

“Ah,” he said, “like when I was young. You know, back then, we didn’t need latte art. Just warmth. And cream.”
He stirred once. Then drank, eyes closed.

He didn’t say it was good. He didn’t need to.

—

Wabi-Sabi Behind the Counter

Learning isn’t just watching.
It’s trying. Failing. Serving a thing that might not be right but is, at least, yours.
And seeing how it lands.

The lesson that day wasn’t about cream. Or coffee.
It was:

• You don’t learn to make a thing until you give it away.
• You don’t know what you understand until it leaves your hands.
• Mistakes become your teachers the moment they touch the world.
• The confidence you seek won’t come from knowing, but from doing.

—

I saw the old man again the next week. He ordered the same thing.

I made it faster this time. Less fear. More care.

He sipped and gave a tiny nod, as if to say: you’re starting to get it.

And I was.
Not the coffee.
The rhythm.
The willingness.
The release.

Because that’s what output is.
A letting go.
A permission to be real.
And the beginning of becoming more.

There was a time in my early twenties when I counted jobs like coins.

Not for their value, but for their noise. Each one made a different sound when it hit the table. Some dull, some sharp, a few so quiet I wondered if I’d made them up.

At last count, I’ve held twelve part time jobs.

Barista, temp librarian, pharmacy assistant, bartender, dishwasher, private tutor, hostel cleaner, translator, bike courier, data entry clerk, warehouse picker, and—for three unforgettable weeks—a man who handed out free energy drinks in a bear costume on a city square.

Each role shaped me, even when it scraped.

But I rarely mention the invisible jobs. The ones nobody pays you for, yet still require all of you.

---

When Work Isn’t a Title

Like the job of learning to sit still in an unfamiliar room.

Or the one where you try to carry your heartbreak quietly so it doesn’t leak into your emails.

Or the invisible shift where you hold space for a friend, even when your own heart is a threadbare futon on a cold apartment floor.

We don’t add those to our CVs.

No one asks how good you are at grieving gracefully between two meetings.
Or how you’ve mastered the art of pretending to be fine at birthdays.
Or how well you fold your loneliness into your coat pocket during the morning commute.

But those are jobs, too.

---

The Summer of Dead Ends

The worst job I ever had was in the warehouse district of Basel.

It was 2014. A brutally hot summer. One of those dry ones that makes concrete shimmer and bread go stale by noon.

The job was simple: pack pharmaceuticals into cold boxes, tape them, and label. But the room had no windows. Just industrial fans and fluorescent lighting that never blinked.

We worked in silence, mostly. Everyone wore hairnets and gloves. It felt like an assembly line of ghosts—moving, sweating, existing without consequence.

There was a woman who worked next to me, maybe fifty, with a face like a shuttered bookstore and the kind of hands that told stories about raising too many kids on too little sleep. She barely spoke. Except once.

She caught me staring at the clock too long.

“You waiting for your life to start?” she asked, still folding a box. “Maybe you’re in it already.”

I nodded. Or maybe I didn’t. I just remember the way the cardboard felt in my hands—thin, disposable, somehow too real.

---

Lessons You Don’t Get Paid To Learn

Some jobs teach you how to count.
Others teach you what not to count.

In one of those many jobs, I learned how to mop a floor so well it shone like memory.
In another, how to fake a smile in five different languages.

But in all of them, I learned to watch.
To observe the rhythm of people who had stopped asking what came next.

There was always someone who moved differently—like a man who sliced onions in silence as if praying to them. Or a woman who folded towels like each one was a piece of cloth from her childhood.

You start to notice that mastery isn’t always loud.

Sometimes it’s the quiet elegance of someone doing one thing very well, without needing to tell anyone.

---

The Sword You Cannot See

There’s a teaching I carry—sharpened over time—that says:

“Your enemy is not always outside you. Often, it’s your need to prove you exist.”

That hit hard at 3 a.m. shifts, when no one was watching.
That hit harder in good jobs that drained my soul and bad ones that forced me to feel alive again.

There is no perfect job.

There is only how you show up for the role you’ve been given.

Whether it’s sweeping floors or signing contracts, what matters is the form you bring into the form-less.
To approach the small with stillness.
To slice through ego like a blade through silence.

Not because someone’s watching.
But because you are.

---

Wabi-Sabi Reflections from a Broken Clock In a Break Room

• The most sacred work is often invisible.
• A job is not what you do. It’s how you do it.
• Mastery doesn’t announce itself. It just repeats, until the repetition becomes art.
• You’ll never find the perfect job—but you can become the person who makes any job meaningful.
• Let the cracks in your path show you where the light is coming from.

---

So no—I’m not good at climbing ladders.

But I’m good at waiting.

At listening for what doesn’t want to be said.
At cleaning bathrooms without resentment.
At making coffee for someone I’ll never see again and still hoping they had a better day because of it.

And sometimes I still think about that summer job.

How the light buzzed.
How the boxes stacked like silent regrets.
And how, one day, I stepped out into the sun, no different on the outside, but knowing, deep in my spine, that every job I had—paid or not—was slowly sharpening me for the ones that would never end.

The job of becoming.
The job of being.
The job of letting go.

And I’m still at it.

It began with an umbrella that wouldn’t close.

A cheap, black one I’d bought at Ichinoseki Station because the snow had turned to rain, and my coat—already too thin for February—was losing the battle. When I arrived at the entrance of the forest path to Haguro Shrine and tried to fold the umbrella—nothing. The spokes were caught in some invisible resistance. I shook it. Spoke to it. Nothing.

A man walking past, in a navy work jacket and mismatched gloves, glanced at me, then at the umbrella, then back at me.

“Mujō desu ne,” he said with a dry smile. Impermanence.

Then he kept walking.

I eventually forced the umbrella shut and left it under a pine tree like an offering. That was when I noticed the sound.

Not wind. Not birdsong.

A hum. Low and electrical, like an old vending machine just out of sight.

—

It was my last evening in Tōhoku.

I hadn’t meant to visit the shrine at all.

The plan had been to catch the train back to Tokyo that night. Bags packed, room cleaned, goodbyes quietly muttered. But at check-out, the hostel owner—an older woman with a black apron and the voice of someone who used to sing—told me about a place locals rarely spoke of unless asked.

“Most people only go when they’re lost,” she said.

“Lost how?” I asked.

She only smiled and handed me a hand-drawn map. “You’ll know.”

And so, with no luggage and the faintest sense of deadline, I walked through slush and back roads to the trailhead.

It was nearly dusk. Not golden-hour-beautiful, but blue-hour-honest. The trees—sugi, tall and stoic—stood like monks who had long since stopped speaking. My breath made fog in the air. There were no other hikers, no tourists, just the occasional rustle of some small animal staying out of sight. It felt like a place I wasn’t meant to be. Or maybe a place meant only for people like me.

—

At the top, the shrine waited. Not grand, not imposing—just quiet. A structure older than anything I’d touched in years. I stood at the base of the steps for a long time, staring up.

That’s when I heard the voice.

“You don’t look like the praying type,” it said.

I turned. No one.

“You look like the waiting type.”

There, just beyond the temizuya water basin, was a vending machine. Coke, Pocari Sweat, green tea. And leaning against it: a boy, maybe twelve years old, barefoot, holding a rice ball.

“Did you say something?” I asked.

He nodded toward the shrine. “It doesn’t care if you believe. Just cares if you bow.”

—

“Do you live here?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“And you hang around vending machines?”

“Only the working ones.” He bit into his onigiri.

The moment passed. I bowed. Not for anyone. Not for anything. Just because it felt right. The snow had started again, lightly, as if it were unsure. I could smell cedar and rusted coins.

When I turned around, the boy was gone. The vending machine, too.

Just a water basin. And steam from my breath.

—

Back in town that night, I ducked into a kissaten. It had the kind of yellowed menu with handwritten prices that hadn’t changed in years. The old man running it poured my coffee without asking what I wanted. No cream. No sugar. Just the cup and his silence.

I thought about the shrine. The boy. The voice. Maybe he was a spirit. Maybe just someone who’d wandered too long.

Or maybe he was just me, ten years ago. Saying things I wish I’d heard sooner.

—

A Quiet Religion

I never prayed growing up.
But I’ve always noticed things.

The way light pools on cracked tile.
The softness of tatami in an empty room.
The hush in a forest too old to name.

That’s my faith, I guess.

Not godly. But real.
A belief in small reverent acts.
The bow of a head,
the hush of trees,
a barefoot boy reminding you that life doesn’t need to be believed in to still be sacred.

—

Wabi-Sabi, and the Things You Can’t Force Closed

• Sometimes, broken things don’t need fixing. They need noticing.
• Not every strange moment needs explanation. Some just need to be lived.
• Reverence isn’t about rules—it’s about rhythm.
• You don’t need to know why you bow. Only that you chose to.

—

When I returned to the station the next morning, my umbrella was still where I’d left it. It folded easily, without a sound.

The vending machine was back, humming faintly.
But the boy was gone.
Or maybe he never left.

Sometimes, it feels right to look up from the path,
brush the dust from your sleeves,
and say thank you.

Not in capital letters.
Not with banners or blinking lights.
But like you would to a friend who walks beside you —
not speaking all the time,
but still there.

If you’ve been reading this blog —
whether for one post or many —
I just want to say:
thank you.

For making time.
For letting silence do some of the talking.
For sitting with the fragments, the slow thoughts, the half-shaped stories that aren’t always trying to teach, but still want to leave something behind.

This isn’t a platform.
Or a brand.
Or a chase.
It’s just a trail of pages.
Some longer.
Some cracked around the edges.
But all honest.

And if you’ve found something in them —
a sentence that lingered,
a story that reminded you of someone,
or even just a kind of quiet you don’t often find —
I’d love for you to stay a little longer.

There’s more coming.
Not faster.
Not louder.
But deeper, I hope.

If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe below —
not for spam, or noise,
but for reminders that something slower is still possible.
And sometimes, worth returning to.

Thanks again.
For the eyes.
For the time.
For walking with me,
even just a few steps.

See you soon.

I must have been five.
Maybe a little older, but not much.
The memory has no date, only weather.

It was winter.
Thick winter.
The kind of snow that doesn’t fall — it settles.
Quietly.
Like it’s remembering something.

We lived then in a small town you wouldn’t find unless you were looking for it, tucked between hills that didn’t quite qualify as mountains and fields that faded into forests. A town with one shop, two buses a day, and houses that all looked like they’d been poured from the same grey mold.

Our apartment was in one of those low, blocky buildings built in the old socialist style — square, sturdy, and uninterested in aesthetics. The walls were thin, the radiators loud, and the floors made that particular hollow sound only worn parquet knows how to make.

But it was warm.
And quiet.
And ours.

I remember sitting on the windowsill with my legs pulled up under me, resting my chin on the cold glass. Outside, everything was white. The trees, the ground, even the clothesline across the yard. It was the kind of snow that made the world feel like it had been erased and drawn again — slower this time.

No internet.
No screens.
Not even a TV in our flat that day — it was broken, or someone else was using it.
Just the snow.
And me.
And the silence.

---

My mother was folding laundry nearby. My father was out, probably clearing snow off the old Yugo parked downstairs. I didn’t speak. I didn’t want to break the spell. I just watched.

A cat passed below, black against the white.
A man carried firewood to a shed.
Two children across the road rolled snowballs that would never become a snowman.

Time moved differently then.
Not slower — just wider.
Each moment had more space in it.

I didn’t know it then, but I was learning something important.

That you can sit without needing to do anything.
That you can observe without reacting.
That you can feel full — deeply, warmly full — without having anything new or exciting happening.

I didn’t need to share the moment.
Didn’t need to capture it, or explain it, or understand it.
It just was.

And that was enough.

---

Years later, when the internet arrived, it felt like magic.
It made the world bigger, faster, louder.
And it gave me things I love — voices, music, friendships stretched across oceans.
But sometimes I forget the earlier magic.

The kind you find in a small apartment, in a town no one talks about,
with snow outside and nothing else going on.

---

The Stillness Beneath the Signal

When people talk about life before the internet, they speak of boredom.
Of waiting.
Of not knowing.

But that’s not what I remember.
I remember attention.
I remember noticing things.
The way snow curved around the edge of the bench.
The way silence felt heavy, but not sad.
The way a moment could stretch out so long it felt like you were inside it.

That’s the life before the internet.
And it still exists.
Even now.

It exists when you let a moment be enough.
When you watch something without needing to document it.
When you choose not to reach.
When you move only when it’s time to move.

It’s the difference between reacting and responding.
Between flinching and seeing clearly.
Between motion and meaning.

---

That day on the windowsill, I didn’t learn a fact.
I learned a posture.
An orientation toward the world.
One that says:
Sit.
See.
Wait.
And know — not everything needs your hand.

Basel, August 2014. The air was thick with summer, the kind that hums in your ear and hangs in the corners of stairwells. We sat on the worn stone steps by the Rhine near Mittlere Brücke, paper cups in our hands, condensation slipping down the sides like the heat itself was trying to escape.

The sun was just starting to fall behind the roofs. Across the river, the windows of old buildings caught the light in a way that made everything look slightly unreal, like we were sitting in a painting someone had never quite finished. The smell of grilled onions drifted faintly from a street cart nearby. Somewhere, a kid played saxophone—not well, but loud enough to feel brave.

“You’ve changed,” she said.

It wasn’t an accusation, more like a soft fact she was holding up to the light, turning it in her hands.

I looked at her. Still the same careful eyes. Still the voice that could say more in silence than most people managed in paragraphs.

“Maybe,” I said, after a long breath. “It’s hard to tell when you’re the one inside it.”

She smiled at that, not because it was profound but because it was true.

There was a pause, the kind that only exists between people who have already survived awkwardness together.

“So,” she said, stretching her legs out in front of her, “what are you good at now?”

I took a sip of coffee. Lukewarm. Bitter. Exactly what I needed.

“For a while, I thought I had to be good at something impressive,” I said.
“You know—like building apps, or speaking five languages, or pretending I knew how wine worked.”

She laughed. “And now?”

“Now, I think I’m good at… waiting.”

Her eyebrows went up a little.
“Waiting?”

“Yeah. I mean it. I’m good at being still. At not forcing things. At learning slowly. I can sit in silence for hours without reaching for my phone. I can spend a day walking with no destination and feel like it meant something. I can be content with almost nothing, and not feel like I’m missing out.”

She didn’t say anything right away. Just held the cup close to her face, as if trying to drink the steam.

“You know,” she said after a while, “I remember when you first arrived here. Summer of 2014. You looked—how do I put this—like someone who’d just lost a fight he didn’t know he was in.”

I laughed. “That’s accurate.”

“You had that one bag, a sunburn, and no idea where your flat was.”

“Fifth floor in Gundeldingen. I remember climbing the stairs and wondering if I’d made a mistake.”

“And?”

“I had. But it turned out to be the right kind.”

I told her about that room again—how the window barely opened, how the air hung like warm soup. The bakery across the street that smelled like yeast and sugar. The electric fan that spun slowly and sighed like it was tired of being alive. No AC, of course. But at night, the streets were quiet. And if I left the window cracked, I could hear people talking from balconies—laughter, long pauses, the sound of plates being cleared.

I didn’t have much. A few books. A used kettle. A journal I kept meaning to write in but never quite did.

“But I sat still,” I said.
“I watched light move across the walls. I listened to the city like it was trying to tell me something. I made pasta and overcooked it and didn’t mind. I learned not to flinch when nothing was happening.”

“And it helped?”

“More than anything else.”

She turned and looked at me.
“That’s rare, you know. Most people panic in that space.”

“I used to. But at some point, I realized stillness wasn’t absence. It was attention. I just hadn’t learned how to notice it yet.”

She tapped her finger on her cup. “You sound like someone who’s been meditating in the mountains.”

“Just sweating in a hot room above a bakery.”

She laughed again.

—

The river moved quietly behind us, wide and forgiving. A family passed, pushing a stroller. The baby pointed at the water. The mother smiled like she’d seen that look a hundred times and it still didn’t get old.

“I think we underestimate how powerful it is,” I said. “To want less.”

She looked at me. “You mean like minimalism?”

“Not really. I mean not craving things. Not needing every day to be exciting. Not needing recognition. Not needing your apartment to look like it belongs in a magazine. Just… learning to be where you are.”

“And be okay with that?”

“Not just okay. Grateful. Because the moment you stop needing more, everything gets brighter. The coffee. The walk. The silence.”

She nodded slowly. “Like a kind of wealth.”

“Exactly. The kind you can’t see, but you can carry.”

—

What You Learn from Stillness

We sat for a while without talking. The saxophone player had stopped. The breeze had returned, soft and aimless.

“You know,” she said, “I think people confuse stillness with laziness. Or passivity. But you’ve changed my mind a little.”

“I think we all need to,” I said. “Because the truth is, being still is one of the hardest things you can do. Waiting without resentment. Learning without proving. Being content without being numb.”

“And you’re good at that now?”

“I’m learning. But yes. I think it’s the one thing I’m good at. Sitting with life long enough to let it show me where to go next.”

She leaned her head back against the stone.
“You’d be surprised how few people can do that.”

“Yeah,” I said, and watched a leaf land gently on the surface of the river,
“but you’d also be surprised how much it gives you back.”

And neither of us spoke for a while after that.

Because some truths, when spoken aloud, don’t need echo.
They just need time.

I lived for a year in Birmingham, in a flat that was never really mine.
It was in a part of town no one spoke of fondly — rows of red brick houses with front gardens that had given up trying. Plastic bins left out longer than necessary. Cigarette butts lodged between cracks in the concrete. Everything permanent, but tired.
I had come from a sunnier place, a calmer year — a town in Bavaria where the streets gleamed in late evening light and the bus drivers said “Servus” like you belonged there.
Regensburg.
There, time moved gently.
In Birmingham, time groaned.

The flat was technically “student accommodation,” which was another way of saying overpriced, under-loved, and under-heated.
I shared it with three others, none of whom I’d met before arrival.
The rooms were arranged like someone had drawn them in a rush — one slightly too large, one a converted storage unit with no real window, mine long and narrow like a train carriage with a single radiator that hissed in protest whenever it was asked to work.
The walls had once been white but now wore the greyish tint of too many seasons without repainting.
And the kitchen… the kitchen belonged to the ants.

They arrived sometime in October.
First, in small numbers — bold scouts crossing the windowsill like they had business to attend to.
By November, they had organized.
You couldn’t leave toast unattended.
Not for five minutes.
Not for two.
They didn’t just go for crumbs. They went for the whole slice, as if mocking the idea that this was your space and not theirs.
We tried everything: sprays, cinnamon, vinegar, sealing things in bags, sealing those bags inside other bags.
They came anyway.
Persistent. Tireless.
Like regret.

Every morning was a decision: make toast and stand guard, or just go without.

—

The flat was always cold.
Not in the romantic, blanket-wrapped, snowy-window sort of way.
Cold like your bones noticed.
Like you hesitated to take a shower because it meant leaving the only warm layer you had managed to create with your body heat.
The kind of cold where you’d boil water just to hold the mug.
Sometimes I’d sit at the little desk pressed against the wall, wrapped in my coat, typing half-sentences into a document that wouldn’t go anywhere. The window next to me let in more wind than light. You could hear the buses on Bristol Road before you saw them, brakes squealing like a child had been let loose on a trumpet.

Some nights, sirens echoed down the street.
Ambulances slicing through the dark.
I’d lie in bed and wonder who they were for.
Sometimes I imagined them coming for a version of myself that couldn’t quite manage.
I wasn’t sad exactly, just… fogged.
Like the kind of rain that falls sideways — gentle, but inescapable.

—

But for all that, it wasn’t a bad year.
Not really.
I made friends.
The kind you don’t keep forever, but who matter in that specific chapter.
We met in shared lectures and kitchen run-ins, in library corners where we were supposed to be writing essays but ended up whispering about everything else.
There was a girl from Manchester who could name every tree on campus. A guy from Cairo who always made too much pasta and left half of it in the communal fridge with notes that said “help yourself.”
We had movie nights in the common room, sitting on beanbags that felt like they’d been dragged through war.
Someone always brought cookies. Someone always forgot the plot halfway through and asked too many questions.

I laughed a lot that year.
More than I expected.
It surprised me — that laughter could survive so much mildew and mold.
But it did.

There’s one night I still remember with strange clarity.
It was February.
Cold.
We had lost power for some reason, and the whole block was dark.
Instead of complaining, we gathered in the hallway with flashlights and candles.
Someone played music through a speaker charged earlier in the day.
And we sat.
Four people who barely knew each other, wrapped in coats and scarves, telling stories as the wax puddled and the walls breathed.
I think I might have been happy.
I think I didn’t realize it at the time.

—

And that’s the part that stings, looking back.
Not the ants.
Not the damp.
Not even the awful electric shower that never worked right.

But that I didn’t enjoy it more.

I spent so much time waiting for it to get better,
telling myself it was a transitional year,
that real life would come afterward —
in the next flat, the next country, the next season.

But what if that was it?
What if that was real life?
The toast.
The hallway candles.
The Monday lectures and Wednesday beers and Sunday mornings where the light hit the carpet in a way that made you want to forgive everything.

—

What “Having It All” Means

Now, when someone asks me what it means to “have it all,” I don’t think of success or money or anything shiny.
I think of that cold kitchen.
I think of the moment when I stopped wanting it to be different.
Not because it was ideal —
but because, for a brief moment, I was fully inside it.
Not wishing it away.
Not measuring it.
Just… there.

And here’s the lesson I didn’t know then:
Not wanting something is just as good as having it.

Maybe even better.
Because once the wanting quiets down,
you start to notice what’s already in your hands.

And it’s always imperfect.
Always incomplete.
Always full of ants.

But it’s yours.

And sometimes, that’s everything.

If I could sit across from anyone right now, it wouldn’t be a famous writer, or a friend I’ve grown apart from, or someone I miss but don’t know how to talk to anymore.
It would be you.

Seventeen.
In that shared room in Šiška, Ljubljana.
Late winter.
Your first time living away from home in a way that felt real, not just temporary or exciting or new.
The kind of solitude that sinks in after the initial rush fades.
The bed by the cracked window, the sound of the main street below never quite letting you sleep fully. Trams gliding like slow insects. Ambulances cutting the night open, disappearing into silence again. The radiator clanking every few hours like it was remembering how to work but never quite succeeding.

It was the kind of room where you kept your socks on even in bed. Where the floor was always cold, and the steam from your breath stayed longer than it should.
The kitchen was small, shared, uninviting. You wiped the counters before you used them, then again after, not out of politeness, but because you didn’t know how else to belong. The hallway light flickered. The bathroom fan made a noise like a tired animal. But you lived there, and that meant something. It meant you were starting.

—

That morning — the one I still think about more than I should — you decided to try pour-over coffee for the first time. Not because you wanted to impress anyone or because you thought you’d be good at it. You didn’t even really know what it was supposed to taste like. You just wanted to make something. Something small and deliberate that felt like it belonged to you.

You had found the dripper in a corner of a kitchen supply store. Cheap plastic. The kind that feels like it might melt if the water’s too hot. The filters didn’t fit exactly, but you figured it didn’t matter. The beans were stale, you knew that, too — but they were the only ones you could afford. Some brand with a picture of a mountain on it, sealed but scentless.

You boiled water in a dented pot on the shared stovetop. Watched the bubbles rise without knowing when to stop. Poured too quickly, unevenly. The coffee bloomed and collapsed all at once — no timing, no care. The smell filled the room: sharp, smoky, a little like wet paper burning. You poured the dark liquid into the chipped mug someone had left behind. You didn’t love the mug, but it had weight. It felt real.

The first sip was terrible.
Bitter.
Hollow.
Like something had been overcooked and underdone at the same time.
But it was warm.
And you had made it.
So you drank the whole thing, sitting on the floor with your back against the heater, notebook in your lap, trying not to be disappointed that the moment didn’t feel more cinematic.

—

And yet that cup — that terrible cup — is something I return to often.
Because that was the first thing you made just for yourself.
Not to prove anything. Not to show anyone.
Just to feel alive in the morning.
To mark the beginning of a day that otherwise might have blurred into the one before.

You didn’t realize it then, but that was the first act of devotion.
Not to coffee, not even to writing — but to your own presence.
To being there, even if it didn’t feel particularly special.

You did it again the next day.
And again the day after that.
You learned to pour slower.
To listen to the sound of water on grounds.
To be gentler with your expectations.

Not just of coffee, but of yourself.

—

I would tell you now, if I could, that this is how everything starts.
Not with certainty.
Not with skill.
But with a cold room, a bad cup of coffee, and the quiet courage to keep showing up anyway.

You will move through brighter rooms and darker ones.
You will make coffee that tastes like ritual.
You will write things that matter.
You will lose people, and find them again in dreams.
You will hurt, but not forever.
You will change, but not all at once.
And you will always remember that first cup.
Because it wasn’t about taste.
It was about attention.

And that, more than anything,
is what I’d want to thank you for.

If my apartment ever caught fire, I know what I’d take.
Not my passport. Not my laptop. Not even the jacket I bought in Kyoto that still smells faintly of cedar and cigarette smoke.

I’d take the blue cloth box.
The one tucked quietly behind the extra blankets.
Inside it: seventeen notebooks.
My collection.
Not of stamps, or records, or photographs.
But of myself.

—

I started the first one at seventeen.
Bought it on a humid afternoon in Ljubljana, impulsively, after missing a train.
The paper was thin, the cover was soft, and I thought I wouldn’t finish it.
But I did.

And then I kept going.

It became two and a half notebooks per year.
On average.
Some years more, some years less.
But that’s the rhythm.
Two and a half chances every twelve months to write myself into existence.

Some people post. I wrote.

I wrote on buses and rooftops, in café corners and windowless rooms. I wrote while waiting for someone who didn’t show up, and again after they did. I wrote drunk. I wrote alone. I wrote when I didn’t have anything to say, just to remember the feeling of movement.

—

One of the notebooks still smells like Regensburg.
There was a year I lived there — a full year of wide skies and sunlight that lasted until almost ten at night.
It was the kind of place where even mistakes felt polite, where rivers carried thoughts downstream and strangers always returned your nods.

I wrote a lot that year.
Long walks along the Donau.
Even longer summer evenings with beer that came in tall glasses and made time feel slow in a good way.
Most of those entries are quiet.
Grateful.
Full of small pleasures — fresh cherries, a folded map, an old man who played jazz guitar near the bridge like he had nowhere else to be.

—

The year after, I ended up in Birmingham.
Different kind of place.
Different kind of year.
The pages turned darker. Not melodramatic — just gray, like the skies that refused to break open all winter.
Crappy flat. Strange landlord.
People who asked how you were but didn’t wait for the answer.

There’s an entry from November. It says only:
“Today I bought bread. It was the best part.”

Sometimes that’s all there is.
Sometimes that’s what keeps you going.

I didn’t love that year.
But I don’t regret writing it down.
Even pain deserves paper.
Especially pain.

—

If you stacked them all, the seventeen books, they’d rise just high enough to rest your elbow on.
Some are bound in leather.
Some are softcover, already fraying.
A few have ticket stubs taped to the back pages — trains I barely remember riding.
Receipts for meals I do.

And through them, the seasons repeat.
Warm summers.
Gloomy winters.
People arriving.
People fading.
The same doubts with different handwriting.
The same hopes, slightly bruised, but still there.

—

What surprises me most is not what I wrote.
It’s what I didn’t.
Whole heartbreaks reduced to a single sentence.
Life-changing conversations left unmentioned.
And yet a bowl of ramen in Kyushu gets three pages of description,
down to the exact shape of the naruto swirl floating on top.

That’s how memory works.
We don’t choose what stays.
We just record what we can
before it fades.

—

Wabi-Sabi Between the Lines

I don’t read them often.
Only sometimes—when I’m not sure who I am and need to remember who I was.
When I flip through them, I see the cracks.
Pages ripped. Ink blurred.
Whole months where nothing made it to paper.
Mistakes circled. Apologies crossed out.

But I never feel embarrassed.
Only tender.

Because that’s what a diary is.
Not a performance.
Not an archive of brilliance.
Just presence.
Proof that you were there.
That you tried.
That you changed.

And that somehow, through the years,
you kept moving.

—

So yes, that’s my collection.
Seventeen notebooks.
Two and a half each year.
A life in pieces.
In layers.
In loose pages that smell like different countries.

And when I hold them all at once,
it feels like I’m holding something sacred.
Not perfect.
Not complete.
But honest.

And that
is enough.

Someone once asked me if I collect anything.
We were sitting outside a laundromat in Sangenjaya, waiting for the dryer to finish its second cycle.
It was late autumn.
You could smell sweet potato from a nearby cart.
The question came out of nowhere, as such questions do.
And I didn’t know how to answer.
Not right away.

I don’t collect stamps.
Or coins.
Or vinyls, though I admire people who do.
My shelves aren’t curated. My books are dog-eared. I’ve lost more keepsakes than I’ve kept.

But later that night, walking home, it came to me—
I do collect things.
They’re just harder to see.

—

I collect small silences.
The kind that appear when you’re sitting next to someone you trust, and neither of you feels the need to fill the air.
The kind that live in early trains and late diners and bedrooms right before one of you says something that changes everything.

I collect almosts.
Almost said it.
Almost stayed.
Almost made it to the station on time.
Almost changed your life with one sentence.

I collect faces of people I never spoke to—
a girl who sat across from me in a ferry to Yakushima reading Banana Yoshimoto,
a man in a beige coat who lit a cigarette in the exact rhythm of my father,
a boy in Kyoto running after a crow like it had stolen his name.

I collect things I regret throwing away,
old letters,
a scarf from a stranger,
the sweater I wore the night I fell in love and didn’t realize it.

I collect misunderstandings,
half-heard phrases that burrowed too deep,
texts I reread too many times,
moments I thought meant nothing that turned out to be the hinge of everything.

And lately,
I’ve been collecting versions of myself I’ve outgrown.
Not to mourn them,
but to keep them close—
like faded Polaroids I don’t want to display,
but can’t bear to lose.

—

People think collections are neat things, labeled and arranged.
Mine aren’t.
They live in the back of drawers.
In playlists I never finish.
In the smell of old tea.
In photos I never took but remember clearly.
In words I haven’t said out loud yet, but whisper to myself before falling asleep.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Unsorted

Not all collections are trophies.
Some are evidence.
That you were here.
That something mattered, even if no one else saw it.

And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that’s what it means to be a person—
to keep picking up little fragments
of days,
of feelings,
of almosts,
and carry them with you quietly.

Not because they’re worth something.
But because they are yours.

So yes.
I collect things.
Even if no one would pay for them.
Even if they don’t fit on a shelf.

Especially then.

cracked teacup gleams bright
golden veins map broken past
new stories take root

There’s a moment when you hold a broken tea bowl in your hands—fragments of glaze and clay that once formed a perfect vessel, now lying in pieces. Do you discard the shards and mourn what’s lost, or do you let the fractures guide you toward something new? It was on a misty afternoon in Hasami that I discovered the answer.

---

Discovering the Kintsugi Workshop in Hasami

I arrived in Hasami, the Japanese town famous for its centuries-old porcelain tradition, just as a light rain began to blur the distant hills. Steam rose from the kilns like ancient spirits, and narrow lanes wound between workshops and pottery shops. Guided by the scent of earth and clay, I found her studio tucked beside the Ōyama River—a modest building with sliding doors and lanterns swaying in the breeze.

Inside, lacquered tables held hundreds of ceramic fragments: teacups splintered by time, bowls chipped at the rims, plates cracked down the center. Each piece looked abandoned—until the workshop’s master appeared, her silhouette framed by kiln smoke.

---

The Master and the Art of Kintsugi

At ninety-two, she moved with serene intent. Silver hair coiled into a low bun; her hands trembled only slightly as she selected a cracked tea bowl. She mixed powdered gold into a clear lacquer, the adhesive turning molten and bright in her palm.

“When something breaks,” she said, voice soft yet unwavering, “we choose how its story continues. We can hide the damage or celebrate it.”

With delicate strokes, she applied gold-laced lacquer along the fracture. Each thin line glowed like a sunrise, binding clay and memory. She set the bowl aside to dry, then turned to welcome her students—local potters and visitors eager to learn kintsugi techniques firsthand.

---

Learning to See Beauty in Imperfection

I settled at the workbench, where her apprentices arranged broken pieces before us. She guided our hands:

1. Cleaning the Shards: Rinse each fragment, removing dust and debris that obscure its history.
2. Mixing the Lacquer: Blend pine resin with powdered gold, silver, or platinum—metals that symbolize healing.
3. Reassembling the Pieces: Press fragments together, letting the lacquer seep into crevices.
4. Highlighting the Scars: Once set, brush excess lacquer away so only fine golden veins remain.

As I pressed two clay shards together, I felt a connection to every craftsman who had shaped Hasami ware for generations. The broken tea bowl in my hands became a bridge between past and future.

---

Teaching and Mentorship: A Living Legacy

I spent the afternoon watching the master teach a new generation. A schoolteacher, her apron dusted with clay, learned to steady her breath as she aligned tiny fragments. A local potter, whose kiln had once closed for lack of apprentices, found renewed purpose in preserving this heritage.

At dusk, I asked the master what legacy she hoped to leave behind.

“My legacy,” she replied, “is not a museum piece or a single masterpiece. It is every student who carries kintsugi forward—every bowl they mend, every story they pass on.”

Her words resonated like a chime in the hushed studio. Instead of seeking perfection, she celebrated imperfection as an opportunity for rebirth.

---

Planting Shards and Growing Futures

That evening, I carried my newly mended tea bowl to the riverbank. Under a cherry tree, I dug a small hole and pressed the bowl’s base into the soil, shards upturned like seeds. Around it, I scattered sakura petals and whispered wishes for resilience and compassion.

Each morning since, I’ve watered that spot, imagining golden veins blooming into flowers of understanding. At home, I journal daily—writing letters to future generations, folding each page into an origami crane before releasing it into a stream of memory and hope.

---

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: Legacy Beyond Perfection

In the heart of Hasami, I learned that legacy is woven from fractured moments and imperfect choices. Wabi-sabi teaches us:

• Healing Through Embrace: Mending what’s broken with gold reminds us that scars can become symbols of strength.
• Shared Craftsmanship: Passing on techniques and stories ensures that tradition evolves rather than ossifies.
• Impermanence as Gift: The very cracks we fear carry the potential for new beauty and deeper meaning.
• Action Over Monument: True legacy lives in small daily acts—teaching, repairing, planting—more than in grand monuments.

When you face your own broken moments, remember the golden paths that bind clay and memory. Choose to repair, to teach, and to plant seeds of possibility. In doing so, you leave behind a legacy that shines long after the last flame of the kiln has faded.

frost-laced morning air
silent breaths drift upward
embers glow within

There’s a moment when cold weather arrives—a bridge between sleep and waking—when each breath crystallizes in the air, and the world feels sharpened, as if life itself has been carved by frost. It’s the hush before dawn, when warmth is no longer a given, and every sensation belongs entirely to you.

---

I arrived at the mountain ryokan just after the first snow of the season. The path was glazed in white, the trees bowed under icy weight. Inside, the hearth crackled, sending waves of heat across woven rugs. I shed layers by the door—wool scarf, down jacket, gloves stiff with chill—and felt the warmth seep back into my bones.

A young innkeeper with cheeks bright as persimmons greeted me. He offered a mug of yuzu-infused tea, its citrus oil dancing on the steam. Outside, distant pines stood rigid against the pale sky; inside, the amber glow of lanterns softened every edge. I cradled the mug, noticing how the heat traced lines along my fingertips, reminding me how precious warmth can be.

---

Later, I ventured into the courtyard. Each step crunched in rhythm—one, two, one—like a slow drumbeat. My breath formed clouds that drifted across snowdrifts. I paused by a stone lantern half-buried in powder and ran my gloved hand along its rim. The coldness of the stone felt alive, insistent, a tangible reminder of impermanence.

The innkeeper’s grandmother emerged from the shadows, her shawl wrapped tight. At seventy-nine, she moved with deliberate grace. She pointed to the distant smoke rising from the chimney, then to the moon’s pale arc above the pines. In her eyes, I saw a welcome: cold weather is not an enemy, but a teacher.

---

Back inside, I sank into a floor cushion near the hearth and opened a slim travel journal. I wrote slowly, guided by the hush that only cold can bring:

Cold air sharpens senses
Silence shaped by frozen breath
Warmth glows like sunrise

The fire’s crackle punctuated each line. Outside, the wind sighed through eaves, and snowflakes drifted against paper screens, tracing slow patterns before melting.

---

That night, as the onsen’s steaming waters embraced me, I felt the contrast strike deeper than anywhere else. Skin that moments before had numbed to pain now tingled with vitality. My thoughts stretched out, unhurried—memories of childhood winters, first snowfall, hot cocoa shared with strangers. In that water, I discovered that cold weather does not harden the heart; it opens it, carving space for gratitude and presence.

---

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: Embracing the Chill

Cold weather teaches us that beauty often arrives in the harshest moments:

– Clarity in Contrast: Just as snow’s white reveals every green twig, cold air sharpens our awareness of warmth.
– Impermanence Made Visible: Frost melts at dawn; each crystal reminds us that change is the only constant.
– Resilience Through Discomfort: Enduring the chill deepens appreciation for simple comforts—a glowing hearth, a shared cup of tea.
– Stillness as Gift: In the hush of winter, we find the quiet between thoughts, the space where inspiration takes root.

When cold winds blow, don’t retreat. Lean into the frost—let each frozen breath remind you that life’s warmth is all the more precious for its fleeting glow.

Have you ever broken a bone?

People ask it casually. Like it’s a campfire story or a badge of childhood. Skateboard accident. Bike crash. Snowboard trip gone wrong. Something clean. Dramatic. Contained.

I usually just nod and say yes. I don’t tell them which one.
Because the one I broke wasn’t the kind they put in a cast.

It was my collarbone.
Winter.
Years ago.

Not from anything noble or cinematic. I wasn’t saving someone. I wasn’t on a mountain or in a fight. I slipped on a patch of ice outside a laundromat, holding a bag of oranges.

I remember how the world tilted mid-fall. How everything slowed just long enough for me to register that I was alone. That no one saw. That I would have to get up by myself.

The fracture was small. Hairline, they called it. Just a crack. But for weeks I couldn’t lie on my side, couldn’t lift my arm without that dull ache pulsing like memory under the skin.

Funny thing is, it healed. Like they said it would.

But not quite right.

To this day, when the weather shifts—when it rains in the wrong direction or the wind carries too much history—I feel it again. A ghost pain. A reminder that healing doesn’t always mean untouched. Sometimes it means changed.

And I think we all have bones like that.

Not literal ones.
But the kind you can’t point to on an x-ray.

The trust that shattered when someone didn’t come back.
The confidence that cracked under too many late-night self-doubts.
The quiet part of you that once felt safe in the world, until it didn’t.

We get up. We walk again. We smile.
But we carry the ache.
Invisible. Unspoken.
Present.

And maybe the real question isn’t have you ever broken a bone?
Maybe it’s what have you learned to live with?

The ache that teaches you to slow down.
The fracture that makes you more careful with others.
The healed part that still twinges, reminding you where you’ve been.

That day outside the laundromat, my bag split open. Oranges rolled out onto the sidewalk like coins in a rigged slot machine. I remember chasing them with one arm pressed to my ribs, laughing—not because it was funny, but because it wasn’t.

Because sometimes all you can do is laugh, gather what you can, and carry the rest differently.

Years later, I still reach for my shoulder when the sky feels off.

And I remember: healing doesn’t mean forgetting.
It means knowing your limits.
Honoring the crack.
And walking forward anyway.

Even if you carry a little more weather than before.

Are you a leader or a follower?

It was the kind of question we used to get in school, right before they handed out some color-coded personality test and told us who we were supposed to become. Red if you were bold. Blue if you were thoughtful. Yellow for the dreamers. Green if you followed the rules.

I never knew how to answer it. I still don’t.

I’ve followed people into places I didn’t belong, just to feel less alone. I’ve led people into situations I wasn’t ready for, just because I couldn’t bear to disappoint them. Some days I move like water, adjusting to every curve. Other days, I am the stone that refuses to shift.

And I’ve come to believe the question itself is flawed.

Most of us aren’t one or the other. We’re just trying to find our footing. Some seasons we lead. Some seasons we follow. Some seasons we just try to stay standing.

I was thinking about all this the day I found myself in the Mori Art Museum.

It had been one of those shapeless afternoons—too early for dinner, too late to go home. I wandered into Roppongi Hills with nothing in particular to do. The mall was pulsing with soft jazz and the gentle perfume of polished ambition. Shoppers moved like they had somewhere to be. I didn’t. So I kept walking.

Past cafés where the chairs were too elegant to sit in for long. Past boutiques filled with linen shirts folded with the kind of reverence usually reserved for scripture. Up escalators, through corridors, following signs not because I was curious, but because it was easier than deciding.

And then: the museum. Tucked into the sky like a secret only the quiet ones find.

Admission: 2,000 yen.

I hesitated. That was two meals. That was laundry money. That was more than I’d usually spend on something with no tangible return. But something inside nudged me. A quiet, unreasonable voice. Not logic. Not budget. Just… go.

So I went.

And what I found wasn’t just art. It was a recalibration.

Large-format canvases that seemed to breathe when you blinked. Sculptures suspended mid-air, defying gravity and reason. Video installations that washed over you like dreams you didn’t know you remembered. Rooms built to confuse your sense of time. Light bent in ways that made you question whether you’d ever actually seen it before.

One piece was made entirely of steel thread. Just lines and tension. But it hummed with presence. It had no meaning unless you stood still, unless you offered it your time. And I did. Not because I understood it. But because it asked nothing from me except stillness.

I thought about that question again.

Leader or follower?

But what if the better question is:

Can you be led by wonder? Can you follow beauty into places where logic says you don’t belong?

I remembered being younger, broke, anxious, always calculating. Always hungry—for certainty, for validation, for meaning. I remember passing galleries with my head down, pretending I wasn’t curious. Pretending I couldn’t care less. Because I thought beauty was something you earned. Something reserved for those who had already made it.

But there I was, high above Tokyo, standing face-to-face with art that asked nothing of me. No degree. No credentials. No invitation.

Just 2,000 yen and a willingness to be moved.

And in that moment, I realized: the doors aren’t always locked. Sometimes we just forget to knock. Or we tell ourselves it isn’t meant for us. Or we wait for someone to lead us inside.

But the truth is, we’re already allowed.

Even if we’re lost. Even if we don’t know what the piece means. Even if we feel small, or uncertain, or unworthy.

Especially then.

Because some things—some true, unforgettable things—aren’t waiting for leaders or followers.

They’re waiting for you to stop walking past. To stop saying maybe next time. To stop assuming that a masterpiece requires a map.

And sometimes, all it takes is 2,000 yen and the courage to be a little foolish. To stand still in front of something you don’t understand. To follow the part of you that doesn’t speak in logic.

And maybe that’s leadership too.

The kind that starts with admitting you don’t have the answers.
The kind that dares to follow awe.
The kind that leads you quietly back to yourself.

No spotlight. No applause. Just a long hallway, a silent room, a feeling you can’t quite name.

And a version of you—older, maybe—who finally steps in.

I was standing in the Mori Art Museum, five floors above Tokyo. Maybe more. High enough that the windows looked like they had given up trying to frame the city and instead just surrendered to it. The view stretched past Shibuya and beyond, all silver angles and blinking lights, like the inside of a machine trying to dream.

The entrance had cost me 2,000 yen.

World-class art, the sign said. And it was true.

Large-format pieces that took up entire rooms. Sculptures with their own gravitational pull. Video installations that whispered strange truths in half-languages. One wall pulsed with projected light like a living organism. Another held a canvas so quiet you could barely look at it without blinking too fast.

But what struck me wasn’t the art itself.

It was how close I was allowed to stand.

No velvet ropes. No glass. Just me and a work someone had maybe poured years into. Inches apart. I could see the cracks in the paint, the hesitation in the brushstroke. I could feel the heat of a thought made visible.

And for 2,000 yen.

A bowl of ramen cost almost the same.

I stood in front of a piece made entirely of steel and thread. The kind of thing that made no sense unless you stood very still for a very long time. And there was something so unbearably human about that—how the piece asked for your attention, not your approval. How it didn’t try to sell you anything. How it just… existed.

And I remembered a time, years ago, when I couldn’t have afforded even that.

Back then, I’d walk past galleries with my head down. Pretend I wasn’t interested. I’d eat convenience store bread in Yoyogi Park and wonder how people made it work. How they got inside the buildings with warm lighting and clean bathrooms and drinks that came with napkins.

I thought, then, that access came after success. That beauty was something reserved for later.

But now I know—sometimes, it only costs 2,000 yen.

Not everything worthwhile is behind a gate.

You just have to know when to stop walking past. When to go up. When to pay attention.

And maybe that’s the secret of it all.

You won’t always be able to afford everything.
But there will be moments—small, quiet ones—where the world opens up and says, this one’s for you.

Even if it’s just for an afternoon.
Even if you leave with nothing but a softened heart and a little less noise in your head.

Some days, that’s the masterpiece.

Watching that young couple up there—him with his onigiri, her with the custard crepe—I couldn’t help but think of a time when I stood in nearly the same spot. Different roof, different view, but the same city. Same soft hope.

I was about their age then. Maybe a little older. Living in a one-room apartment in Suginami with a view of a concrete wall and a laundry pole that squeaked in the wind. I used to eat conbini dinners on my balcony—if you could call that slab of concrete a balcony—and dream about making it. Though I didn’t quite know what “it” was yet. Just not… this. Not instant curry. Not a futon with a thin middle. Not checking my bank app before every convenience store purchase.

I remember once walking home from an interview that didn’t go anywhere. I stopped at a vending machine and bought a black coffee in a can because it felt like the kind of thing someone decisive would do. I drank it under a rusted streetlamp and thought, How do people survive this?

Life, I realized slowly, has edges. Invisible ones.
On both sides of the road you’re trying to walk, there’s a steep fall.

One side is apathy—the temptation to stop trying, to settle into the softness of giving up. It feels safe, at first. Like rest. But it’s a trap. A slow erosion of your spirit disguised as “being realistic.”

The other side is obsession—the kind of hunger that devours your present in the name of some imagined future. It promises success, meaning, freedom. But it comes at the cost of your health, your peace, your relationships. You can win, yes. But you can also burn out before the winning means anything.

You think the path forward is obvious.
But most days it’s like walking a tightrope in the fog.
There are no guardrails. No signs. Just your breath, your intention, your balance.

I’ve swayed toward both sides. Too tired to care. Too driven to rest.
I’ve lied to myself in both directions.

But here I am now. Still walking. A little slower. A little quieter. Less interested in proving anything, more curious about what it means to stay standing.

So when I saw that young man watching Shibuya race beneath him—with his girl by his side and his 100 yen rice ball in hand—I wanted to say:

Be careful with your hope. But don’t let go of it.
Stay on the road. Even when it disappears beneath you for a while.
Let love help you balance.

There’s no map. No guaranteed reward. But there’s something to be said for walking your own way and learning not to fall for the promises on either side.

Sometimes, that’s enough.
Sometimes, that’s what makes the difference.

I hadn’t meant to go up that high. I’d ducked into Hikarie mostly to use the restroom—maybe wander the basement levels and touch things I couldn’t afford, as one often does in places like that.

Hikarie, for those who haven’t been, is a glass-and-steel tower that rises like a shard of light above Shibuya. It’s sleek, modern, and designed to be many things at once—shopping complex, art gallery, office space, gourmet maze, event hall, quiet retreat, and hyper-curated lifestyle display. A vertical city for people who move fast but still want beauty in the in-between.

You enter straight from the station, and the hum of Shibuya’s chaos is swallowed almost immediately by soft jazz piped through invisible speakers. Escalators take you up like conveyor belts through different strata of intent: floors of artisan kitchen knives, minimalist home goods, niche perfumes, concept cafes with velvet chairs and matcha lattes that arrive with edible flowers balanced on top.

It’s the kind of place that wants you to believe in a more elegant version of yourself.

I wasn’t there to buy anything. Just to walk through, float a little, let my mind rest in the spaces between things.

But somehow, I kept going up. Past the department store calm, past the galleries and open atriums, until I ended up on the top floor.

And that’s where I saw it.

A Lawson. A small, quietly glowing convenience store tucked into a corner like a secret—offering the same onigiri, same plastic-wrapped sandwiches, same Vitamin C drinks and aluminum-wrapped nikuman as the one next to your neighborhood train station. It felt out of place, and yet absolutely right.

Next to it was a terrace. One of those rooftop spaces where the city falls away beneath you. The kind of view you forget you’re allowed to stand in front of without paying for a ticket.

And that’s where I saw them.

A young man and a girl. Early twenties, maybe. He wore a grey hoodie pulled slightly over his head, the kind that softens with age and holds the shape of someone trying. In one hand, a 100 yen onigiri. In the other, nothing. She stood beside him with a custard crème crepe, wrapped carefully in its paper sleeve, holding it like something she didn’t want to finish too fast.

They weren’t talking. They were just watching Shibuya move.

And there’s something about that—watching the city from above—that strips people down. They weren’t checking their phones. They weren’t posing. They were just there.

And in that stillness, I saw it: hope.

Not loud, inspirational hope. Not the kind made for motivational posters. But the kind that hums beneath your ribs when you’re trying to build a life.

He wanted to succeed. You could feel it in the way he held himself, even as he rested. The way he watched the city below like it held a future he hadn’t quite stepped into yet. Not fame. Not money. Just something better than what he had. Something he could build with his own hands. Stability. Health. A kind of freedom.

She wasn’t rushing him. She wasn’t asking for more. Her body language said: this is enough. For now.

And maybe that’s the kind of love that survives. The kind that lives in shared onigiri and rooftop silence. In being seen. In being allowed to dream quietly, together.

I stood there a while. Long enough to finish the tea I’d bought out of curiosity more than thirst. Long enough to feel that strange, aching kind of gratitude for strangers you’ll never know.

I didn’t take a photo.

I didn’t need to.

Because I knew I’d remember it—not the view, but the feeling. That moment when two people looked out at a hard, glittering world and quietly decided not to be afraid of it.

---

What You Learn in a Place Like That

You go into a place like Hikarie expecting design and polish. A curated experience. Something removed from the messiness of real life.

But sometimes, at the top, in the corners, where no one is really paying attention, you find something far more important.

You find two people eating convenience store food, watching a city that might never give them everything they want—but still daring to want anyway.

And in that moment, you remember:

Hope doesn’t have to be loud.
Success doesn’t have to be fast.
And the future doesn’t need to be glamorous to be worth reaching for.

Sometimes it’s enough to just keep standing beside someone with a crepe in one hand and a view in the other.

And to believe, quietly, that you’ll both find a way.

That Monday I didn’t wake up on time. Not because I was tired, or sick, or overwhelmed. I simply didn’t move when the alarm buzzed. I watched the sunlight stretch across the floorboards, let it crawl up the side of my bed like an old friend, and didn’t chase the day like I usually do.

Somewhere, meetings were starting. Emails were being written. People were rushing into subways and fumbling with their umbrellas and pretending the start of the week didn’t ache a little.

But I stayed in bed.

There was guilt at first. The kind that wears a tie and calls itself responsible. But after a while, the guilt quieted. Gave way to something gentler. The understanding that rest is not laziness. That some days are not for chasing.

I boiled water. Made tea. Ate a banana slowly. I sat by the window and watched the neighbors hang out their laundry, the fabric snapping like flags in a war I no longer felt pressed to fight.

I watched a crow land on the telephone wire, then take off again, as if the pause was enough. I listened to the faint sound of jazz coming from a second-story apartment, the trumpet notes curling like smoke above the rooftops.

There was something sacred about how little happened. And how full it still felt.

And I realized, somewhere between the second sip and the sound of someone’s radio leaking through the window:

Not every moment must be filled. Not every day must be seized. Some days ask only for presence. For noticing. For being alive enough to say no to the noise.

Freedom, I thought, is not about doing whatever you want. It’s about knowing when not to. It’s about feeling your own pulse again in a world that races past it.

That morning I missed work.

But I didn’t miss myself. I met myself again. And he was quieter than I remembered. And kinder, too.

I stepped into the sento just after noon. A weekday, late enough for the morning crowd to be gone, early enough to avoid the post-work regulars.

The tile was pale blue, worn smooth by decades of soap and water and skin. Steam curled from the baths like a sigh. The mural on the wall was a mountain—somewhere between Fuji and a dream—painted in faded pastels, the kind that only grow more beautiful once the original colors forget their names.

There were no digital clocks. No music. Just the occasional splash, the rustle of towels, the hollow sound of water dripping from ladles into tubs.

I sat on a low stool, washed slowly. The way they do here—not rushed, not distracted. Just the rhythm of soap, rinse, repeat.

When I slid into the hottest bath, the heat climbed up my spine like a long-forgotten memory. My muscles let go of something I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

There was an older man across from me. He wore a towel over his head like a crown and didn’t look up once. We didn’t speak. But his stillness mirrored mine. Not silence as in absence, but silence as in presence.

And it hit me, somewhere in that fog of heat and chlorine and mountain mural:

Freedom isn’t escape. It isn’t a plane ticket or a blank schedule. It’s the ability to be completely where you are. To stop fleeing your own mind long enough to inhabit your body.

To sit in a tub that has held a thousand bodies before yours and not feel lost among them. To be alone, and not lonely. To be bare, and not ashamed.

That was freedom.

I stayed longer than I meant to.

There was something unspoken in the air—an understanding between the tiles and the skin and the heat—that this moment did not need to be improved. It was enough, exactly as it was. The air was heavy, but not oppressive. It held you in place. As if asking you gently: where else do you need to be?

A boy came in with his grandfather. They spoke in soft Kansai dialect. The boy giggled when he poured too much water on his back. The grandfather didn’t scold him. Just smiled. Adjusted the faucet.

It felt like watching a lesson being passed on—not in words, but in repetition. In the act of doing a thing well, with presence.

Eventually, the old man across from me stood, dried off with slow, deliberate care, and stepped out. The echo of his feet against the tile followed him down the narrow hallway like a memory refusing to fade.

I watched the steam settle where he had been. Nothing dramatic. Just the ghost of warmth.

Outside, the air was cooler than I remembered. I passed a vending machine with glass so clean it reflected my face back at me like a question I wasn’t ready to answer. I bought a bottle of barley tea and drank it on the curb. The asphalt was warm beneath me. The world moved as it always did—buses sighing into stops, bicycles rattling by, a child crying somewhere in the distance—but something inside had shifted.

Not with answers. But with space. A kind of lightness that had nothing to do with flight.

I walked slowly. Past shuttered storefronts. Past the quiet hum of laundry behind windows. Past a cat asleep in a circle of sun.

And for the first time in days, I didn’t feel like I had to be anywhere else.

Not because life had changed. But because, for a brief moment, I had remembered how to live it.

I used to catch myself believing I had to have it all figured out. That by a certain age, the questions would quiet, the map would be drawn, the steps would make sense. That there’d be a moment—clear, clean, cinematic—when I’d finally feel like I’d arrived.

But life doesn’t unfold like that. It stutters. It doubles back. It asks you to choose with incomplete information and walk forward anyway.

You see the outside of other lives—finished degrees, booked flights, babies held like miracles in arms that seem so sure. But you don’t see the unraveling beneath. The nights they doubted every decision. The ache of missing someone they can’t admit they still love. The weight of being strong too long.

You don’t see the invisible repairs—stitched quietly with routine, laughter, silence. The moments they almost gave up. The slow rebuild. The daily decision to keep going.

If you feel like you’re behind, lost, late to your own becoming—pause. Look again.

Maybe you’re not off course. Maybe this is the work.

Because the truth is, nobody arrives. We just keep unfolding. One step. One heartbreak. One ordinary Tuesday at a time.

This life you’re living—its pauses, its uneven rhythm, its coffee-stained notebooks and too-late apologies—it’s not a detour. It’s the story.

And maybe, like a Murakami character drifting through strange, quiet cities, you’re not meant to reach a destination. Maybe you’re meant to notice the music in the vending machines, the poetry in the sidewalks, the strange clarity that only comes in moments of uncertainty.

Because Wabi-sabi reminds us: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing is permanent.

That person who seems at peace? They’re still finding their way too. Just in a different light.

So stay with your life. Especially when it makes no sense. Especially then.

The longer you walk beside it, the more it starts to feel like a companion instead of a puzzle.
Not something to fix.
But something to walk with. Even when it’s quiet. Especially then.

stories drift like steam
a newborn’s breath cradles hope
book spines guide the lost

I arrived at Takeo Onsen just as the earliest light braided through bamboo groves. Steam curled from hidden springs, carrying the scent of hinoki and hot earth. In the soft glow, I spotted the sign for the new youth hostel: a simple wooden board painted pale green, the name almost swallowed by morning mist. Pushing open the sliding door, I stepped into a world where warmth and stories intertwined.

---

First Impressions

Inside, tatami mats softened my footsteps. Lanterns hung low, their paper shades warmed by gentle bulbs. Along one wall, shelves bowed beneath well-loved books: weathered travel memoirs, dog-eared poetry collections, novels whose covers had faded to whispers of color. A hand-written sign read, “Take a book if your heart needs it, leave one when you can.” I felt a tug at my chest—this was more than hospitality; it was an invitation to belong.

Behind the reception desk, a young couple moved in easy harmony. He was folding laundry, his hands steady despite the hush of dawn; she was cradling their infant daughter, whose soft coos punctuated the silence. Their eyes met mine with a gentle welcome, as if they’d been waiting not for guests, but for companions in this quiet sanctuary.

---

Morning Rituals

Each day began before the onsen’s communal bath ever warmed. I watched him stoke the cast-iron stove, water hissing into readiness. She arranged green tea and homemade onigiri on low lacquered tables, then tucked a blanket around their baby, whose small fist curled around a stray page of a poetry chapbook. In that moment, I understood: they were weaving routine from the raw threads of new parenthood and fledgling business.

I browsed the shelves. A volume of Bashō’s haiku fell into my hands, a scratch along its spine guiding me to a poem about dewdrops on bamboo leaves. I carried it to a cushion by the hearth, where the steam’s warmth and the baby’s breathing formed a silent lullaby. Outside, the mist drifted through sliding windows; inside, each syllable felt like a breath of unhurried time.

---

Borrowed Stories

As the sun climbed, guests trickled in—backpackers with mud-spattered boots, cyclists whose tires still dripped forest damp, a lone writer chasing solitude. They moved toward the shelves with a reverence I hadn’t expected: fingertips brushing spines, eyes closing as if to drink in the weight of each story. Some slipped paperbacks into their packs; others paused, reading lines aloud to no one in particular.

A solo traveler from Osaka found a battered travel diary and shared a passage about desert skies with me. Two German cyclists discovered a novel about mountain pilgrimages and praised its loose binding—proof it had been loved on many journeys. I realized then that the books were more than decor; they were moving companions, connectors between strangers, carriers of the hostel’s quiet generosity.

---

Midday Conversations

By lunchtime, the lobby hummed with soft chatter. I joined the couple at a low table, steaming bowls of miso soup balanced before us. Between sips, I asked how they managed a newborn alongside a hostel. She smiled, brushing a lock of hair back. “We rest when she rests,” she said. “And when we can’t, we trust that the books will hold our guests.” His eyes shone with pride. “Every volume is a gift—and a promise that kindness travels.”

I thought of my own journeys, how a single act of generosity—offering directions, sharing a phrasebook—had once changed my path. Here, they’d amplified that gesture a hundredfold, embedding it in every corridor and cushion.

---

Evening Lullabies

As dusk settled, lanterns glowed like fireflies returned to earth. The baby’s first cry—a small, clear bell—echoed through the hall. A guest paused mid-step, concern flickering across her face, then smiled as the mother scooped up her daughter and hummed a lullaby that mingled with the hiss of the onsen.

In that soft cascade, visitors drifted back to the bookshelves. I watched one man tug a volume of Murakami short stories from the shelf, then settle beside me, the baby’s lullaby and page-turning the only soundtrack. Outside, the cicadas paused their evening chorus, as though to listen.

---

Night’s Quiet Offering

Later, when the doors were locked and only the baby’s breathing and the distant drip of baths remained, I found the couple at a low table under a single lamp. They shared a battered paperback between them, reading passages aloud in turn. The husband whispered, “We hope each story finds a home.” She nodded, tucking a bookmark into the worn spine. “And that every traveler leaves something behind—just as they take something with them.”

I lingered in the doorway, realizing that this hostel was more than a stop on my journey. It was a living poem of hospitality, each borrowed book a verse, each lullaby a refrain.

---

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: Stories in Motion

In the gentle cradle of Takeo Onsen, I learned that sharing impermanence can create the deepest connections. Wabi-sabi reveals that value lies not in polished perfection, but in the humble exchange of hearts and pages:

• Gifts of Impermanence: A borrowed book carries the hostel’s spirit into the wider world, returning changed.
• Quiet Generosity: A lullaby and a loaned volume hold equal power to soothe and inspire.
• Community in Small Acts: Each onigiri shared, each story passed hand to hand, weaves a tapestry of belonging.
• Embrace the Unfinished: Like each reader’s notes in the margins, our lives grow richer in the incomplete stories we carry forward.

I departed at dawn, book tucked under my arm, baby’s laughter echoing in my mind. The hostel faded into mist, but its stories—mine and theirs—continue to travel, drifting like steam across the landscapes of memory.

There’s a moment at the end of a journey—after your luggage is stowed, the onsen bath waits, and every itinerary box has been checked—when the world pauses and offers you one last choice. It doesn’t come with fanfare. It’s the stray second before you turn for the hot spring. But if you lean into it, you’ll find a sliver of freedom.

It happens when the bustle behind you softens.
When the map no longer speaks.
When every footstep feels less like a plan and more like a question.

Most of us don’t notice that instant.
We rush toward comfort.
We slip into routines.
We trade curiosity for convenience.

But real discovery lives in that breath of possibility—when no one’s watching and nothing compels you to proceed.

—

I was poised to sink into Hagi’s famous onsen—steam rising in practiced arcs, the promise of smooth stones and weightless warmth. Instead, I turned left onto a narrow alley flanked by weathered earthen walls. The mud plaster was scored with age, as if each crack whispered stories of samurai and merchants long gone.

The air smelled faintly of sugar and sea salt. A wooden sign swung overhead, its kanji worn thin: 甘味処 (kanmidokoro), “sweet spot.” Inside, lacquered counters gleamed beneath paper lanterns. Rows of yokan and daifuku sat like tiny monuments, each one polished to a soft glow.

Behind the counter stood a woman of ninety-five years: hair silver as moonlight, spine curved like an ancient cedar, yet her voice rang clear and bright—an unexpected hymn. She greeted me with a bow that seemed to carry centuries of gratitude.

I watched her hands move: wrapping a gossamer sheet of mochi around sweet bean paste, dusting it with kinako, then sliding it onto a plate as if presenting a treasure.

“Try the yuzu manju,” she said, voice bubbling like warm sap. “It’s summer’s poem in pastry form.”

Her eyes danced as she spoke, unfurling memories of citrus orchards and childhood laughter. I bit into the soft cake: citrus spark, cloud-white dough, a sweetness that spoke of patience.

We talked—her youthful cadence weaving through my questions. She told me how she opened this shop after the war, how she’d learned recipes from traveling tea masters, how each batch of sugar crystals was a lesson in impermanence. I asked why she stayed here, day after day, age after age.

“Because people come and go,” she said, “but a taste can linger. And that’s my story.”

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Unseen Path

Wabi-sabi celebrates the quiet choices no one watches. It finds beauty in the trembling hands of a nonagenarian confectioner, in the cracks of an alley wall, in the last detour before a planned ritual. It reminds us:

– True community lives in small exchanges, not grand gestures.
– Presence is the sweetest ingredient—more potent than any recipe.
– Imperfect moments, unhurried pauses, shape our memories more than polished tours.

So next time the world nudges you toward the obvious, linger in that uncharted second. Turn down the silent alley. Choose the confection over the onsen. Listen to the voices that echo long after the lanterns dim.

Don’t hurry back to the bath. Just walk.
And let the sweetness of stillness be enough.

We stepped off Nakadake’s rim as the sun dipped behind Aso’s distant peaks, stretching shadows long across the ash-dust path. Each footfall stirred faint puffs of grey—remnants of eruptions past—while the wind carried distant laughter and the low rumble of shifting earth. Descending felt like moving through layers of time, from ancient fury to present calm, each step a reminder that the mountain has witnessed more extremes than any headline could capture.

---

Halfway down, the journalist paused to jot in his notebook, fingers stained with ash. He frowned at his phone’s screen, where notifications flickered like restless fireflies. “Every channel feels shouting,” he muttered. “Left, right, louder, louder.” His wife—the crossword expert—traced her pencil along a weathered rock, then looked up. “It’s like a pendulum,” she said softly. “It swings so far one way we can’t see the other. Then it swings back and we forget the space in between.” The trail curved beneath us in a gentle arc, as if echoing her words.

---

Below, terraced fields sprawled in patchwork greens and golds. A lone tractor trundled along the horizon, its engine’s steady hum cutting through the tension of our talk. “Even this farmer,” the journalist mused, “must feel the pull of extremes—market prices, weather whims. Yet he finds rhythm in planting and harvest.” As dusk settled, the roar of global debates felt distant here. Between the ridges and rice paddies, balance seemed possible.

---

As twilight deepened and fireflies blinked along the path’s edges, our conversation turned inward. The journalist closed his notebook. “Tell me,” he said, “in a world of constant branding and labels, what ‘brand’ guides you?” His question hung in the air, mingling with the hush of crickets.

I answered quietly:

The Brand of Impermanence
A concept built on the beauty of fading moments—where value lives in the transient, the worn, the ever-changing.

The Brand of Resonance
Defined by echoes—stories and silences that linger, reminding us that meaning often emerges long after the first note fades.

The Brand of Open-Endedness
An identity shaped by questions, not answers—where half-finished ideas invite collaboration and unexpected discovery.

The Brand of Quiet Revelation
Centered on subtle transformations—soft glows, gentle shifts, unexpected insights that whisper rather than shout.

They exchanged a glance. She tapped her pencil on her pad and wrote:

ash drifts through the air
split worlds search for common ground
moonlight finds the seam

He read it twice, then tucked the paper into his pack as though safeguarding a new refrain.

---

At the timberline, stars began to pierce the violet sky. We halted on a lichen-rimed boulder, the world below absorbed in its nightly quiet. In that moment, our conceptual “brands” — impermanence, resonance, open-endedness, quiet revelation — felt less like abstract ideas and more like lanterns guiding us through an uncertain descent.

Back on the final switchback, the path narrowed and the air cooled. We boarded the waiting bus in companionable silence, each of us carrying the weight of polarized voices in our pockets—and the memory of a mountain that knows how to hold the in-between. As the engine rumbled to life, I realized that the true descent wasn’t down the slope, but into that quiet midpoint where extremes soften and new perspectives can take root.

---

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: Honoring the In-Between

In a world swinging between fervent extremes, true wisdom lives in the grey space where opposites meet. Like volcanic ash settling into fertile furrows, the tension between “us” and “them” can nourish deeper understanding—if only we pause to listen. Wabi-sabi shows us that beauty arises not at the peaks or valleys of opinion, but in the imperfect balance that holds us all together.

The day began in Arita, where the scent of old kilns still lingers in the streets.
Every spring, this quiet town in Saga Prefecture transforms into a slow-moving sea of footsteps and ceramic clatter—the Arita and Hirasumi Pottery Festival. Rows of stalls stretch for kilometers, spilling porcelain in all shades of white and blue, from antique Nabeshima plates to imperfect yunomi cups, glazed like clouds with cracked edges.

You go there not to shop quickly, but to wander.
To feel texture with your fingers.
To watch old potters who once fired with firewood now sell their legacy beneath plastic tents.

I walked for hours.
Arita to Hirasumi.
Back again.
Down side streets, into family-run shops with tatami mats and handwritten signs.
Some vendors offered tea. Others stories.
No rush.
No pressure.
Just clay shaped into permanence by patient hands.

When I finally checked the bus schedule, I realized I had missed the last afternoon ride back.
Typical.
I didn’t feel annoyed, just tired—bone tired.
So I walked again, slowly, to Takeo City.
And there, almost without planning it, I ended up inside the Takeo City Library.

—

It wasn’t like any library I’d been to.
A long glass wall filtered the light just enough to feel like sunset all day.
Wooden beams lined the ceilings like a temple.
Books arranged with care, not crammed.
There was a Starbucks inside, but it didn’t feel loud. Somehow, it fit.
A quiet hum of life, not distraction.

I sat for two hours without reading a single thing.
Just listening.
To paper sliding.
To children whispering.
To a student somewhere gently tapping a pencil, lost in thought.

Sometimes rest doesn’t mean stopping.
It just means stopping the need to make progress.
And that’s what the library gave me—space to stop without guilt.

—

When the sun began to slip behind the mountains, I walked to the Takeo Onsen gardens.
No plan.
Just enough light for the maple leaves to flicker like small lamps in the dusk.
There’s an old camphor tree there—one of Japan’s largest.
It looks less like a tree and more like a forgotten god, half-asleep, letting its moss grow wild and its roots split stones without asking permission.

I stood in front of it for a long time.
Didn’t pray.
Didn’t think.
Just stood.
Sometimes, being in the presence of something ancient is more nourishing than food.

But by the time I made it back to town, I realized I was starving.

—

That’s how I found the ramen place.

Tiny.
Tucked into the corner of a silent block.
One old woman slicing green onions, chop chop, with machine rhythm.
One man behind the counter. Middle-aged. Wearing an apron stained by years of broth and time.

When I walked in, he looked up.
I asked, “What do you recommend?”
He said, “Ramen.”

I smiled.
Tried again.
“What kind of ramen?”
He shrugged. “Ramen.”

So I sat.
And I waited.
And eventually, a bowl arrived.

Steam rising in soft spirals.
The smell of green onion so thick it felt like air itself had been seasoned.

The broth was clear, not showy.
The noodles—chewy, almost elastic.
No egg. No frills. Just onion, noodle, broth.
A few slices of pork curled gently at the edge.
Everything was touched by green onion.
Every bite a variation of the same sharp, earthy note.

It was perfect.

—

The Simplicity That Doesn’t Apologize

That bowl of ramen taught me something I’d forgotten:

• Don’t explain too much. Let the thing speak for itself.
• You don’t need variety to have depth. Just honesty.
• Sometimes the clearest moves are the strongest.
• When you strip away what’s unnecessary, the essence finally has space to shine.

It reminded me of a principle once taught by a man who studied more than war—he believed in cutting clean, not to impress, but to end confusion.
The way the ramen shop owner answered my question with the same word—ramen—again and again.
Because sometimes, that’s all there is.
The work.
The bowl.
The moment.

The lesson is always this:
Refinement is not addition.
It’s subtraction.
Keep removing until what’s left is undeniable.

And that night, in a near-empty shop in Takeo, with steam rising in front of me and silence outside,
what was left
was ramen.
And it was enough.

It was in Kagoshima, a night when the air smelled like warm asphalt after rain, when the neon signs hummed like insects and the ferries slept heavy against the docks.
I had wandered too far from the station, too long down streets that curled in on themselves like lazy handwriting, without any real plan except to feel the shape of a city that didn’t expect anything from me.

I stopped at one of those vending machines glowing too bright for the hour, bought a lukewarm bottle of green tea, and leaned against a stone wall, watching the mist rise from the wet pavement.

That’s when she walked by.
Small, wiry, wearing a navy skirt and a soft grey sweater two sizes too big, her bag swinging against her hip like it had been part of her since birth.
She glanced at me, curious but not suspicious, the way people do when they recognize someone who isn’t quite part of the usual scenery.

I nodded. She nodded back.
And somehow, without anyone really deciding it, we started talking.

—

Her name was Aki.
She said it like it was obvious. No last name. No explanations.

She had just finished a job—not office work, not school, something vaguer, something she didn’t dress up or apologize for.
She told me she did delivery work sometimes, different kinds, whatever was needed.
Driving. Picking up parcels. Sometimes escorting businessmen from hotels to hostess bars when they got too drunk to find their way.
“I know Kagoshima better than taxi driver,” she said, smiling like it was a small joke just for herself.

She was only twenty, but there was something in her voice that was older than that.
Not jaded. Not bitter.
Just… solid.
Like a tree that had learned not to waste energy growing too fast.

She asked me what I was doing in Kagoshima.
I shrugged.
“Looking for nothing,” I said.
She laughed—quick, soft—and said,
「いいね。なにも探さないとき、いちばんいいもの見つかるよ。」
[That’s good. When you’re not looking for anything, that’s when you find the best things.]

It didn’t feel like a line.
It felt like she meant it.

—

We sat down on the curb next to the vending machine, passing the tea bottle back and forth like we had known each other longer than fifteen minutes.
The road glistened under the streetlights, empty except for the occasional cat slinking across like it had secret business to attend to.

Aki told me about growing up here.
How most people left if they could.
How she stayed because she liked the mountains being close, liked that even when the city tried to grow loud and fast, the sea and the volcano kept it humble.

“People rush too much,” she said, staring up at the black sky.
「小さいこと、ちゃんと見たら、大きいこともわかる。」
[If you learn to really see the small things, you can understand the big things too.]

I thought about that.
The way she said it, casually, like passing on something obvious—like telling me where the nearest konbini was, not something huge and philosophical.
But it stayed with me.
Hung there between us, bigger than the mist, bigger than the neon, bigger than the whole ferry port put together.

—

Knowing Small Things First

I realized then that she lived differently than most people I knew.
She didn’t move like someone trying to win a race.
She didn’t speak like someone gathering words to sound smart.
She didn’t dream about faraway cities because she needed to prove she was too good for the one she was born in.

She just lived exactly where she was.
Paid attention to the cracks in the sidewalk.
Knew which vending machine always ran out of milk tea first.
Noticed when the stray cat that usually slept on the pachinko steps was missing.

Small things.
Quiet things.
Things most people would miss, trying too hard to find something “important.”

Maybe that’s what Musashi meant, long ago, in a language we don’t speak but still somehow understand—
to know small things is to know the big ones too.
To see the thread running through a girl’s beat-up sneakers and the whole wild history of human stubbornness braided together.

—

Wabi-Sabi at the Edge of the Docks

We didn’t exchange numbers.
Didn’t pretend we’d meet again.

When the tea bottle was empty and the night had thinned into that strange blue just before dawn,
she stood up, dusted off her skirt, and bowed slightly.

「じゃあ、がんばってね。」
[Well then… do your best, alright?]

I bowed back, awkward in my heavier way.
「あなたも。」
[You too.]

She laughed once, short and real, and walked off down a side street that bent sharply out of sight.
No looking back.
No performance.

Just moving forward the way trees lean toward the light—without thinking about it, without explaining themselves, without forgetting the ground they came from.

—

I stayed a while longer by the vending machine, feeling the city breathe slowly around me,
thinking how easy it is to chase after big things,
how hard it is to notice the small ones when they’re already right in front of you.

And when I finally walked back toward my little rented room above the izakaya,
I moved slower,
like I was practicing something I hadn’t known was important until now.

The art of seeing without rushing.
The art of knowing without needing to explain.
The art of being where you are, even if only for one soft, breathing night at the edge of a city that nobody had really noticed was still dreaming.