Month: Jun 2025

—

こどもの目
とおくにさがす
おわりのかたち
a child’s eye
searches far ahead
for the shape of ending

—

I must have been thirteen when I first understood the full weight of endings.

It was winter. One of those dull Slovenian afternoons where the light dims long before it’s supposed to. I was sitting alone on the carpet of our small apartment, the kind of old socialist housing block where every room echoes with something from the past—ticking clocks, the static hum of a radio, footsteps of neighbors above who always walked too heavily.

Outside, snow fell gently, covering the familiar in something soft and almost forgiving. But inside me, a strange question opened like a doorway: what happens when life ends?

It wasn’t asked in fear. More like curiosity that came from nowhere and everywhere. The kind that doesn’t need an answer, just acknowledgment.

I remember that moment because it was quiet. And because it changed something.

That day, I began to look at people differently—not in the way they moved, but in the way they carried time. Grandparents with slow hands. Teachers with weary eyes. Even my parents, whose bodies had once seemed unshakable, began to look a little more fragile.

But the funny thing is, once you see the end, you also start to see the beginning more clearly. I became fascinated with how people make meaning. How they cope, how they believe. How they build lives knowing they’re made of sand.

—

I didn’t call it spirituality back then. I just called it noticing.

It wasn’t until much later, in Birmingham of all places, that the word began to form into something fuller. I was living in a cold, overpriced student flat, the kind where mold slowly takes the corners of your walls if you don’t fight it every day. There were seven of us sharing that space, each of us from different places, different upbringings, different losses.

One of my flatmates, an Iranian named Dariush, cooked rice like it was an art form. Fluffy long grains with a crisp golden crust at the bottom. He’d play Faramarz Aslani on his cracked phone speaker while explaining how his mother taught him to rinse the rice three times before boiling, as though her voice still lived in the water.

One night, while we ate cross-legged on the kitchen floor, I asked him what he thought happened when we die.

He didn’t hesitate.

“We return,” he said, sipping mint tea. “But maybe not as people.”

He told me about the Koran. Not as something to fear, but as something he had grown up hearing recited in voices filled with longing. He said that faith, for him, wasn’t certainty—it was rhythm. A way to keep walking.

I liked that. Rhythm. I didn’t need to agree to understand it.

That night, I went to bed thinking not about answers, but about continuity.

—

Years later, in Japan, I walked alone through shrines wrapped in cedar and stillness. In Tōhoku, just before I left, someone mentioned a hidden shrine up in the hills near Ichinoseki. It wasn’t famous. No tour groups. Just mossy stone steps and the kind of silence that you could feel between your ribs.

I went in the early evening, as the light turned amber.

It was my last day there.

The forest path twisted like memory—soft, uncertain, beautiful in its crookedness. The shrine wasn’t grand. Just wood and incense. But when I stood in front of it, hands pressed together, I felt the same quiet question return. Not in fear. But in reverence.

Maybe that’s what spirituality is—returning to the same question again and again, each time with a little more tenderness.

—

I grew up in a place where religion was present, but quiet. Christmas, baptisms, the occasional funeral sermon. Enough to know the shape of ritual, but not enough to know its weight. But as I traveled—through dusty Korean temples, through crowded London bookshops, through stormy German train stations—I started seeing pieces of faith in places that had no altars.

In a mother calming her child. In someone boiling water with care. In the way strangers sometimes hold a door open without needing to look back.

—

Now, as more and more people move away from organized belief, I wonder where all of this goes. What fills that space once occupied by gods and ghosts?

I don’t know.

But I know we still gather. Around fires. In circles. In chat threads and crowded bars and quiet libraries. I know we still light candles. We still say goodbye with ritual. We still reach out when we’re scared.

I think we are built for wonder. For community. For some form of rhythm, even if we don’t call it prayer.

We need each other. We need something bigger than ourselves—not for control, but for comfort. Not to dominate, but to remember that we are soft, finite, connected.

Maybe spirituality isn’t about the heavens or the rules.

Maybe it’s just about learning to sit with the mystery.

—

And maybe the soul is not something you have, but something you shape—with stories, with meals, with quiet evenings where you ask questions that don’t need to be solved.

—

When I boil water now, I do it with care.

When I walk a mountain trail, I thank the wind.

When I light incense, it’s not for a god.

It’s for me.

And for everyone I’ve met along the way who helped me carry this invisible thing inside.

—

We are all just travelers with questions folded into our pockets.

And sometimes, when we’re lucky, someone sits beside us and answers not with words, but with presence.

And that is enough.

—

やさしさは
ささいなことに
にじんでいる
kindness lives quietly
in small things we overlook
until we need them

—

We often think of self-care as something curated—an afternoon off with candles, a journal, a walk in the woods wearing linen. But I’ve come to realize that real self-care is less about aesthetic and more about rhythm. Less about what it looks like from the outside and more about what it keeps whole on the inside.

And wholeness, I’ve learned, doesn’t come all at once. It comes in moments. In habits. In the slow return to yourself after the world has peeled away some part of you.

—

In my early twenties, I thought taking care of myself meant pushing through. I ran until I broke. I studied until I forgot why I cared. I stayed up too late, drank too much, said yes too often. It was only after my body began to protest—headaches like pressure points under my eyes, a strange fog in the morning that no amount of caffeine could lift—that I realized there was another way.

It started slowly. First, I began running again—not the compulsive kind of running to beat a number on a watch, but the kind that gets you out before sunrise, alone with the rhythm of your feet and the sound of the world waking up. I remember a stretch in Basel, summer 2014, where I ran along the Rhine at dawn. The city still asleep. The river whispering. I had just moved there. Everything was unfamiliar except for the sound of breath and heartbeat.

I wasn’t running away. I was running back to something. Myself, maybe.

—

Then came the conversations. At first, they seemed unimportant. The kind of talks you have in line for coffee or while waiting for the tram. But some of them lasted hours. With friends from other cities. Strangers who became mirrors. I remember one autumn evening in Regensburg, sitting on the stone steps of the old bridge with a girl who grew up near the Danube. We didn’t know each other well. But we talked about fear, about missing our mothers, about how silence sometimes says more than words.

When we got up to leave, she said, “This is what people forget—that being heard is how we stay whole.”

She was right.

—

Nature. That’s the other place I go to when I forget myself. Not as an escape, but as a reminder. There’s something about being surrounded by things that don’t care about your ambitions—mountains, rivers, crows—that softens the ego. In Yakushima, I once spent an afternoon just watching moss grow on ancient rocks. It was raining gently. Everything smelled alive. I didn’t feel healed. I just felt like I didn’t need healing in that moment.

Sometimes that’s enough.

—

And sleep. Oh, sleep.

I used to hate it. Saw it as wasted time. I remember my first year in Ljubljana, in a flat in Šiška where you could hear the ambulances tearing down the street all night. I slept with one eye open, trying to do more, be more, achieve something vaguely impressive. But I was tired in ways I didn’t know how to name.

Now, sleep is sacred. Not just because it resets the body. But because it gives the mind a chance to fold into itself and sort the pieces. I make tea now before bed. I put my phone away. I sleep like someone who trusts the world enough to let go for a while.

—

There’s also this:

The quiet rituals.

Drinking coffee slowly in the morning. Writing a single paragraph, even if no one will ever read it. Sweeping the floor. Cleaning the dishes while music plays softly in the background.

These are not glamorous acts.

But they are acts of care. Of tending.

Of saying—I matter. My space matters. The way I move through this day matters.

—

Wabi-sabi Lessons from the Everyday

Self-care is not the reward. It’s the soil.

You do not earn rest. You return to it.

The body knows what it needs. The soul does too. You just have to listen.

In a world that constantly asks you to be more, sometimes the bravest thing you can do is to simply be.

Be tired. Be still. Be open.

And in that stillness, watch how quietly everything begins to return to you.

—

So when people ask me now: How do you practice self-care?

I don’t give them a list.

I give them a memory.

Of a quiet run in Basel. Of a conversation by the Danube. Of a forest soaked in rain. Of sleep, finally embraced. Of one cup of coffee savored slowly while the world waits.

That’s how I practice.

That’s how I stay whole.

—

ゆっくりと
こぼれ落ちた時
気づかずに
dripping slowly—
time slips by unnoticed,
until it’s gone.

—

There was a time I thought sleeping in was a failure. That lying down in the middle of the day—even if my body begged for it—meant I was weak, lazy, falling behind.

Productivity was a virtue. And rest? Rest was just the void between two achievements. A necessary evil, like eating or using the bathroom. Something to be minimized, managed, tucked in the folds of “efficiency.”

I used to chase time.

And like most chases, it ended with me exhausted, clutching only the edges of what mattered.

—

The shift happened slowly. A kind of erosion. Not a single event, not a revelation. Just a hundred quiet reminders. Days I felt burned out without having done anything memorable. Moments I forgot how I even got from one room to another.

One day, I was walking through Bern—somewhere between errands. I’d just come back from a trip to Slovenia. I was rushing, always rushing. Crossing the bridge near Rosengarten, I caught my reflection in the glass of a tram. And for a second, I didn’t recognize myself.

Not because I looked different. But because I wasn’t in the moment. I was halfway through a to-do list that hadn’t even started.

The rest of the day passed like a fog. Emails. Calls. Groceries. But it all felt the same—gray, frayed, forgettable.

That evening, I tried something. I lay on the floor. Just lay there. No book. No phone. No purpose.

I stared at the ceiling. Noticed the tiny crack forming where the white paint met the edge of the lamp. Heard the radiator click once. Then again.

Time slowed. Stretched. Softened.

And it didn’t feel wasted.

—

Nowadays, what I consider “wasted time” is different. It’s not the nap. It’s not the quiet walk. It’s not sitting on a park bench watching two birds bicker over a crumb of bread.

What feels wasted now is rushing. Being caught in the in-between.

It’s scrolling on my phone while walking down the street, missing the lilac blooming on the wall I’ve passed a hundred times. It’s half-listening to someone while composing a reply in my head to a message I haven’t received yet.

It’s the fragmentation of attention—the way I used to believe I could multitask joy.

Spoiler: you can’t.

—

I remember a time in London, years ago. I had thirty minutes between two trains at Victoria Station. I bought a coffee. Checked my phone. Opened a book but didn’t read. The time vanished. Not rested. Not enjoyed. Just… disappeared.

Contrast that with another layover, years later, in Regensburg. I had forty minutes to wait. Sat by the Danube. Watched ducks. Ate a sandwich from a local bakery. Rye bread, too much mustard.

That time didn’t vanish. It settled inside me.

The same forty minutes. But one was a blur. The other—a place I can still return to.

—

This isn’t a manifesto against phones or planning or trying to get things done. It’s just a reminder that time is only wasted when it’s forgotten. When we’re not in it.

Even ten minutes, if lived fully, can be richer than ten hours spent drifting.

—

When I was living in Ljubljana, in a small apartment near the main bus line, I used to feel guilty if I didn’t pack every hour. Every slot had to mean something. Study. Work. Socialize. Clean. Learn.

And then I met someone. A flatmate. Quiet type. He once told me:

“You know, people here think staring out the window is a waste of time. But in my country, we call it thinking.”

I laughed. Then I tried it.

He was right.

—

Years later, in Tokyo, I found myself in a tiny kissaten in Shimokitazawa. Wooden counter. No menu. Just the owner behind the bar, slow-dripping coffee in silence.

He looked at me and said:

“Too many people rush coffee. That’s not coffee. That’s liquid stress.”

We sat there, two strangers, not talking, just watching the steam rise.

It was the best coffee I ever had.

Not because of the beans. Because it had time inside it.

—

Wabi-sabi Lesson

Imperfect moments, lived fully, are more lasting than perfect plans rushed through.

Slowness is not a lack of productivity. It’s the texture of presence.

You don’t have to be efficient to be alive.

The cracks in our schedule—the pauses, the unfilled gaps—are not mistakes. They’re windows.

We forget this, often. Until someone reminds us. Or until we remember for ourselves.

—

If you ask me now how I waste time, I’d say:

I don’t waste time by sleeping. I don’t waste time by resting. I waste time when I don’t notice that I’m alive.

So here’s to the small benches. The unhurried coffee. The walks with no destination.

To letting the sun touch your shoulder like a question.

To stopping in the middle of nowhere and saying: “This, too, is worth my time.”

—

You can’t always catch time. But you can stop chasing it. And sometimes, when you stop— time returns to you.

—

ふるさとの
においがしみた
やさしい味
flavors of home—
soft with the scent
of all I used to be

—

I don’t eat it often.
But when I do, it happens without warning.

The first spoonful, and I’m gone.
Not physically, of course. I’m still wherever I am—at the kitchen table, or some café that tried to bottle nostalgia in enamelware and neutral-toned playlists. But inside? I’m barefoot again. In a tiled kitchen back in Slovenia, where the windows barely closed, and the wind moved like it belonged.

The dish?
Polenta with warm milk and coffee.

A bit of salt.
A swirl of bitterness.
No sugar.

It sounds like nothing.
But nothings can be entire worlds, quietly held together by memory and steam.

—

I must’ve been five or six the first time I tasted it.
My mother served it in a chipped ceramic bowl with a faded blue rim.
One of those bowls that stays because it always stayed.
The spoon was too big for my hand, but I didn’t mind.
It felt like being trusted.

She didn’t say much, just: “Eat before it cools.”
And the house around me did its usual choreography—my father fixing something with electrical tape, the radio murmuring softly, a drafty breeze sneaking through the back door. It was winter, but not unkind.

Only years later did I learn: she always stirred a bit of butter into the polenta.
She never mentioned it.
But it made all the difference.

—

Years later, I tried to remake it.
This time, in Ljubljana.

I was just seventeen. Rented a shared room in Šiška, right next to the main bus line, where ambulance sirens sliced the night open like clockwork. The windows were thin, and the walls felt tired. It was cold—not the romantic kind, but the kind that seeped into your socks and made you boil tea just to warm your hands.

Back then, I used to go running through Tivoli park with what were basically just regular shoes—nothing made for running, really. Just the same sneakers I wore to lectures and cafés. But I ran anyway, because it was one of the only times I felt like I could leave something behind.

That winter, I made polenta with milk and coffee for the first time by myself.
The polenta clumped. The milk bubbled too much.
It still worked. It still warmed me.
It still whispered, you’re still here.

—

And then again—another version, years later.
In Birmingham.

I was living in a shared student flat near Aston, the kind of place where toast attracted ants if you left it unsupervised.
The kitchen was damp, someone was always trying to clean it but never quite succeeding.
The supermarkets were worse.
So I started walking behind the Bull Ring to the old open market where old men still shouted prices over crates of eggs and sad-looking cabbages.

I didn’t have any real cooking skills back then.
Bought some discounted vegetables, confused spices, and asked my Indian roommate how to cook them.
He laughed, then explained.
And in that moment—somewhere between learning how to cut onions and avoid overcooking rice—I felt a kind of strange love for the human capacity to teach one another.

I tried to make the polenta again there too.
It didn’t taste like home.
But it tasted like trying, and sometimes that’s close enough.

—

Wabi-sabi Lesson
You can run in shoes not meant for running.
You can cook in kitchens with ants.
You can find warmth in soup that doesn’t taste quite right.

You can remember something not for how perfect it was,
but for how honestly you tried to remake it.

—

Now, when I sit down to eat that simple bowl—when I even think about it—it’s not just polenta, milk, and coffee.

It’s a thousand small rooms.
Cold apartments with bad heating.
Tivoli in late autumn.
A flea-market bowl on a second-hand desk.
A roommate explaining turmeric like it was treasure.
A market stall behind a train station.
The steam of the past reaching back through time to say:

“You were becoming. You didn’t even know it.”

—

So, no—
I don’t eat it often.

But when I do,
it carries every quiet version of me
who kept going, even when they weren’t sure why.

ふれるたび
ひとひら消える
記憶の雪

each time I touch it
a flake of memory melts—
snow that never stays

I don’t know his name.
That’s the point.

When people talk about favorite historical figures, they usually mention the towering ones. The names that made it into monuments or textbooks. Leaders, revolutionaries, inventors. The ones whose lives were so large, the rest of us shrink in their shadows.

But lately, I’ve been thinking more about the ones who never asked to be remembered. The ones who lived well, not loudly. Who held entire communities together with a silent kind of strength. The woman who stitched coats for soldiers in a village with no name. The man who taught children how to draw birds in the dirt during wartime when there were no pencils. The farmer who planted a single tree, knowing it would never bear fruit in his lifetime.

We don’t remember them with parades.
But something in us is made from them.
And that’s enough.

I once read about a temple builder in Nara who worked all his life carving wooden beams, though none of his chisels bore his signature. They say he would arrive at sunrise, work in silence, and return home before the monks even lit their evening candles. One day, he simply stopped coming. No fanfare. No final masterpiece. But when the great bell rang years later and the roof didn’t collapse, people whispered, “He’s still here.”

That’s the kind of legacy I respect.

And maybe that’s why my favorite historical figure is someone we’ll never read about. Someone who walked quietly through history, leaving behind not a statue or quote—but good soil.

A Walk in Basel

It was late summer, the air already hinting at the crispness to come. I was wandering through the old town of Basel when I noticed a stone plaque near the base of a fountain. It was worn smooth, unreadable. The name had faded, if it had ever been there. But someone still placed flowers beside it. Nothing grand—just wild ones. Picked, not bought.

A man walked by with a cane.
He paused, nodded at the flowers, and kept going.

Later that day, I asked someone at a café about the plaque.
She shrugged. “Nobody really knows anymore,” she said. “But someone loved them enough to keep remembering.”

I thought about that all evening.
How quiet the truly important things become.

An Inner Pilgrimage

I think we all carry the longing to be remembered.
To leave a mark, even if it’s small.

But there’s something quietly noble about letting go of that.
About living fully, even if no one ever writes it down.

I think of the friend I met in northern Finland—a woman who had been a wilderness guide for decades. She told me how she used to keep journals of every expedition. Lists, drawings, weather. But one day her tent burned down, and all the journals with it. At first, she said, she cried like someone had died. But later, she realized something strange.

“I had to start carrying the memory inside me,” she said.
“And I think I became more honest that way.”

The Book with No Author

There’s an old volume in a monastery I visited in northern Italy—handwritten, with no name. Just stories, small ones, about village life, reflections on silence, sketches of clouds. The monks say they’ve passed it around for centuries, each adding a line, a drawing, a small observation.

One page reads:

“I planted three olives this morning. One for the birds,
one for the shade, and one for the person I’ll never meet.”

I remember sitting in the stone courtyard of that monastery and feeling something shift. Like I was being reminded of a truth I had once known and forgotten.

We are all contributing to something larger than ourselves.
Even if we never see it bloom.

What They Don’t Teach in History Class

They don’t teach you how the old man in Sarajevo used to fix children’s shoes for free.
Or the woman in Osaka who wrote lullabies for orphans during the war.
Or the nun in Ljubljana who translated poetry in secret and taught it to the dying.

They don’t tell you about the fisherman who stopped taking more than he needed.
Or the girl who refused to step on ants, even when mocked.
Or the librarian in Kraków who read aloud to blind neighbors every Thursday at 5.

They don’t teach it—but those are the people who shape the soul of a place.
The ones who don’t try to change the world but change the square meter around them.
Quietly.
Without glory.

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: The Power of Being Unseen

The philosophy of wabi-sabi tells us to embrace imperfection, impermanence, and incompleteness.
To see beauty not in what is perfect and immortal, but in what is fleeting and flawed.

My favorite historical figure—whoever they are—understood this.
They didn’t need to shine.
They just needed to be present.
To do their work.
To pass on a little light, even if no one ever knew where it came from.

The Real Inheritance

Maybe the truest inheritance is not a name carved in stone,
but the way someone’s choice ripples through time.

Maybe it’s the recipe that survived a war.
The kindness taught to a child who grew up to teach it again.
The habit of looking at the stars and wondering—not for answers, but for awe.

That’s what I want to be part of.
A lineage of gentle strength.
Of invisible hands.
Of good soil.

So who is my favorite historical figure?

The one who swept the temple steps for 30 years without ever stepping into the spotlight.
The one who loved their corner of the world so deeply, it stayed gentle even after they were gone.
The one who didn’t need to be remembered—because they were already part of everything.

Maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that’s everything.

There is no such thing as a single first crush. That’s the thing no one tells you. Every one of them—each flutter, each moment of staring too long—is the first until it isn’t. And even then, it lingers. Like steam on a mirror after a bath.

It begins small, usually. A look. An almost-touch. A badly timed laugh.

When I was maybe five, in a town so small you could walk across it in twelve minutes, I fell for a girl who wore bright red boots even on sunny days. Her name doesn’t matter. We were in the same sandbox once. She made a tunnel and I pretended not to watch her do it. I remember the shape of her hands more than her face. She moved with certainty—like she already knew what she was supposed to become.

I remember thinking: I want to be near this. Not own it. Not even hold it. Just near.

That was the beginning.

It wasn’t long before these silent infatuations became a sort of habit. Someone at school who wrote better than me. Someone at the station who waited with a book in hand. Someone who once returned my borrowed pen and added, “You write like you think too much.”

By the time I was seventeen, I had a small diary filled with names I never dared to say out loud. The pages were brittle with time and some sort of unnamed ache. Not quite sadness. More like a longing to be seen fully, even once.

There was one, though—someone who almost turned the crush into something larger.

It was the year I lived in Regensburg. I had taken a gap semester before figuring out what to do with my life, and the city was generous in its confusion. I stayed in a small room above a bakery, the smell of rye and yeast rising every morning like an alarm clock. I spent afternoons wandering cobblestone streets that looked like they remembered more than I did.

That’s where I met her.

She worked at a tea shop two blocks from my place. Dark hair, always tied back, and a voice that made even ordinary words sound considered. She spoke to everyone in the same soft register, as if not to wake some sleeping part of them. I went back for jasmine green I didn’t like just to hear her ask, “And how was this one?”

We spoke maybe ten times.

The last time, she handed me my tea, paused, then added, “You seem like someone who waits for things a little too long.”

She smiled, but it wasn’t pity. It was recognition.

I never went back. Not out of shame. But because she was right. And when someone sees you clearly, it’s either the beginning of something real or a sign to move on.

Years passed. There were others.

A classmate in London who drew stars in her margins. A street musician in Ljubljana with eyes like November. A stranger on a ferry in Nagasaki who gave me a boiled egg and said, “Even birds must land.”

All of them first crushes. All of them last.

And still, they kept arriving.

I used to think it meant I was broken—this way of loving briefly, silently, from the edge of things. But I’ve come to believe it’s simply one way the heart tries to stay awake.

Because eventually, something changes.

You meet someone and they don’t just shimmer—they stay.

They ask the second question. They listen without looking at their phone. They remember the exact way you stir your coffee.

It happened to me once.

I was in Bern. Midwinter. The streets were quiet in that holy kind of way snow makes everything hush. I had just finished a shift at the gallery where I interned. Cold fingers. Full heart. And then, at the tram stop, a voice: “Do you think silence means the same thing in every language?”

That was her first sentence to me.

She had a mole on her left wrist and the habit of saying, “Unfold that thought for me,” instead of “Tell me more.”

With her, it wasn’t electricity. It was warmth.

And warmth, I learned, goes deeper.

But this isn’t about her.

This is about all the firsts.

The girl with the red boots. The tea shop in Regensburg. The ferry in Nagasaki.

And the quiet moment on a bench in the Berner Oberland where I realized something:

None of it had to last to matter.

These people—these ghosts of almost-love—they carved something into me. Patience. Wonder. The ability to sit with longing without demanding it become anything else.

There’s a lesson in that. One I only understand now, looking back.

That a crush is not about possession. It’s about recognition.

Seeing something beautiful in someone else and allowing it to stay beautiful without needing to hold it.

I think of the boy in Krakow. The girl in the train to Split who fell asleep on my shoulder without apology. The bookstore clerk in Aso who laughed too hard at my bad Japanese.

They are part of me. Not in the way lovers are. In the way landscapes are.

You pass through them. They shape you. And when you leave, you carry their weather in your bones.

And so, I return to the beginning.

There is no such thing as a single first crush.

Every time the heart opens, even a little, it feels like a miracle.

And maybe it is.

Not because it lasts.

But because you let it happen at all.

—

Wabi-sabi lesson:

Nothing incomplete is worthless. No brief encounter is meaningless.

To see beauty and not try to claim it is a quiet strength.

And sometimes, the best part of falling is the knowing—you’re still capable of feeling that much.

Even if it doesn’t become a story.

Even if all it leaves you with is the memory of red boots on a dry summer day.

And a name you never said aloud.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said, her voice a warm thread in the crisp silence, stirring her tea with a spoon that looked like it belonged to another time. “What countries do you still want to visit?”

We were sitting on a stone bench behind the small station in Samedan. Early spring still held the Alps in its teeth. The train had gone, the square was quiet, and the clouds hovered like indecisive thoughts just above the peaks. Her scarf was wrapped twice around her neck, its ends trailing like punctuation marks for something unsaid.

I could have said Iceland. I could have said Mongolia. Or Madagascar. But instead, I looked at her for a moment, then down at the gravel by my boots, and said, “I don’t really think in countries anymore.”

She raised her eyebrows in the way she did when I said something either poetic or evasive. “You’ve stopped believing in stamps?”

“Maybe. Or maybe I just started noticing what it was I was really searching for.”

She didn’t respond. Just tilted her head slightly and waited. That was her gift. Letting silence do the work without ever making it feel awkward.

I took a sip of my tea. Lukewarm already.

“There’s a version of me I met in Japan,” I began. “Somewhere north. In a ryokan near the edge of Tohoku, not far from Ichinoseki. It had snowed that morning, enough to soften the outlines of everything. I didn’t check my phone that day. Didn’t have to. There was no signal. No notifications. Just a kettle, a view of bare trees, and a futon on the floor. I folded my clothes carefully and sat still for longer than I usually let myself. That place? That was the country of Patience. And I didn’t even know I’d arrived until I left.”

She exhaled softly, the way one does after opening a window into someone else’s memory.

“I think I went there once,” she said, almost to herself.

“Where?”

“Not Japan,” she clarified. “But that country you just named. Patience. I was nineteen. I had just broken up with someone I thought I would marry. I spent three weeks alone in a cabin near Lake Bled. There was no heating except a wood stove. I had to chop wood every day just to stay warm. I thought I was being punished. But now I think… maybe I was just learning how to sit still. How to not run away.”

We were both quiet then.

The mountain shadow moved a little further across the square.

“There’s another country,” I said after a while. “One I visited in Coimbra. In Portugal. It was hot. I was reading a book on a cracked balcony while old men argued below about football and something that sounded like politics but could’ve just been about fishing. I realized then how much of life is background noise. And how little of it needs translating. That country? I call it Enough.”

“That’s a rare one,” she nodded. “Harder to find than any capital city.”

“And then there’s the place where grief doesn’t ask to be solved. Where you just carry it, like a stone in your pocket. Not heavy. Just there.”

She reached for her tea again. The spoon had stopped spinning. “What’s that place called?”

“Still working on the name,” I said. “But I think it’s somewhere in Slovenia. Maybe a bus stop between towns. Maybe in the guestbook of a hostel where someone wrote a message to someone who’d never read it.”

The sun slipped behind a cloud. Her face lost its golden edge.

She said, “I think I’ve only ever lived in the country of Trying.”

“That’s not a bad place.”

“No. But it’s exhausting. The currency there is effort. And it depreciates quickly.”

We both smiled. Then she added, more serious now, “Sometimes I want to leave. But I don’t know how.”

I looked at her. Really looked.

“Maybe,” I said slowly, “you don’t have to leave. Just stop asking it to be more than it is.”

She turned toward the mountains. There was something in her expression that reminded me of driftwood. Weathered, but not ruined.

The train would come again. But not yet.

That evening, back at the guesthouse, I thought about her question again. What countries do I want to visit?

I thought about a man I met in a ramen shop in Takeo, Kyushu. He was sixty-something, waiting for a diagnosis. Stage four. He spoke English haltingly, but with the rhythm of someone who had learned it from songs, not textbooks. He had four grandchildren and a dog he adored. He said the best ramen is the one where the onions make you cry. He didn’t mean from spice.

That country? I call it Surrender. He lived there. I only passed through.

I thought about a night spent in Ljubljana, walking alone through Šiška after a failed attempt at conversation. I remember standing in front of a vending machine, not knowing what to choose, not caring. A boy on a skateboard passed by and nodded at me like I mattered.

That country? Belonging.

I want to go back.

And there’s the country I visit in dreams. The one where I’m not trying to fix myself. Just being. Drinking lukewarm coffee on the veranda of a house I’ll never afford. My grandparents are still alive there. My sister is always laughing. The birds never leave.

It smells like basil and rain.

No capital. No flag. No anthem.

But it’s home.

Wabi-Sabi Lesson from the Borderless Map

The places that shape us are rarely on maps. They live in glances, in gestures, in the tea that goes cold before you finish it.

Not all journeys ask for passports. Some just ask for presence.

So next time someone asks where you want to go, maybe tell them about the country of Enough. Or the country of Letting Go. Or Stillness. Or Belonging.

And if they look confused, just smile.

They’ll get there.

Eventually.

borrowed from the wind
a kindness I wore gently—
it stayed, and I grew

It began in a damp train station in Porto. I was 21 and lost—lost in the good way, the kind where you know there’s no map, and that’s the point. I had just missed my connection, and the rain was coming sideways. The vending machine ate my coin. The air smelled of seaweed and exhaust. And still—someone offered me half their sandwich. An old woman with thin, paper-like skin and a face shaped like time itself. She didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak Portuguese. But I understood the gesture.

That’s where it started. Not my journey—those are dime a dozen. No, that was the first time I understood that the best parts of myself were borrowed.

In Naples, it was a baker named Carlo who taught me the value of rhythm. Not spoken rhythm, not music—but the cadence of routine. I lived above his bakery for three weeks. At 4:42 every morning, I’d wake to the sound of dough being slapped against wood. One morning, I asked him how he did it without getting tired.

He looked at me and said, “Because I’m not trying to be anything. Just bread today.”

That stayed with me longer than any philosophy book I’ve read.

In Jeonju, South Korea, I was twenty-six and in love with someone who wasn’t in love with me. She’d gone back to Seoul. I stayed in a hanok guesthouse run by a former monk who brewed his own tea. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, he looked you directly in the eyes, like he wanted to see what you weren’t saying.

Over hojicha, he said, “Attachment is not love. Love is letting the other go and still staying soft.”

I didn’t write it down. But I never forgot it.

In rural Slovenia, where my grandparents still live, I watched my grandfather dig out weeds from under a cherry tree. It was July. The sky was bruised with heat. I was impatient.

“Why don’t you just cut them all at once?” I asked.

He smiled, not looking up. “Because not all roots are visible. You’ll just be cutting the leaves.”

He wasn’t talking about gardening, but I only realized that years later, in a Zurich park after a long walk alone.

In Oaxaca, I shared a ride with a woman who had lost her child and now volunteered at a birth center. We didn’t talk for the first hour. Then she asked me if I believed pain made people better.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Me neither,” she replied. “But it makes us real.”

She gave me a bracelet she’d woven from palm leaves. It broke a few weeks later. But I still have the bead.

In Bern, Switzerland, I met a retired architect who built nothing after sixty. He just walked. One day, we sat together near the Aare river, watching the ducks.

He said, “I spent my life trying to leave something behind. But the most lasting thing I ever did was listen when my wife spoke.”

I never met his wife. But I felt like I had.

In the Berner Oberland, I biked for six hours on a heatwave afternoon with someone I barely knew. We didn’t talk much. Just sweat, sun, and mountains. That kind of silence becomes its own language.

At the end, we collapsed in a field of wild thyme and dandelions. He said, “You know, the only way I know who I am… is by noticing how I change around others.”

That sentence still echoes.

Wabi-Sabi Lessons from the Road

• What we call “ourselves” is often made from others. The kindnesses. The pauses. The small beliefs they passed on in silence.
• Nothing has to be perfect to shape you. Most of the people I carry in me were imperfect—some deeply flawed—but their fragments made me more whole.
• Travel doesn’t just show you the world. It shows you the mirrors in other people. And if you’re lucky, you see enough reflections to piece yourself together differently.
• When you walk through life open—even a little—you collect seeds. Some sprout decades later, quietly, in places you never planned to visit again.

A Final Thought

What I love most about myself are the invisible fingerprints of everyone who’s left something with me. Their rhythm, their words, their silence. Even the heartbreaks, the strangers, the ones I disappointed and the ones who forgave me.

They’re in me. All of them.

And maybe that’s the most human thing about any of us:
We are not our own creations.

We are mosaics of fleeting kindness.

A thousand quiet borrowings held together by time.

A self made of selves.

やめるより 続けるほうがいい 波の音と

Better to go on
than stop—like the sound of waves
that never clock out.

I don’t want to retire. Not because I love work. Not because I’m some stoic disciple of hustle culture. But because I never imagined a version of myself that simply… stops.

Maybe that’s a flaw. Or maybe it’s a kind of loyalty—to the quiet pulse of doing something that matters. Even when no one notices.

I come from a long line of people who never stopped. My grandparents worked until their hands gave out. Until their knees could no longer bend. Until their breath turned shallow but their will remained deep. They were farmers, builders, seamstresses, nurses. People who understood that meaning wasn’t given, it was made—in the cracks of dawn and the sore-shouldered evenings.

My grandmother used to rise before the sun, cook for the family, and tend a garden that fed more than just our stomachs. It fed our dignity. She grew potatoes that tasted like kindness and beans that hummed with quiet strength. I remember her hands. Bent, scarred, gentle. She never called herself tired, even when she was. Work was not what took from her—it was what kept her.

She would wipe her brow with the hem of her apron, and then pause just long enough to listen. To birds. To weather. To silence. That pause was her prayer.

My grandfather built houses. Laid bricks with the same precision he used to stir sugar into his coffee. He never had much to say about his work. Just that “it stood.” That was his measure of pride: it stood. I used to think that was too small a dream. Now I think it was the biggest kind of love. To make something that stays upright, even when you’re gone.

He once let me carry his level. A simple tool—a small vial of liquid inside a metal bar. “The bubble tells the truth,” he said. “It doesn’t care how hard you worked if the wall’s not straight.”

They didn’t retire. They slowed. And then, one day, they simply didn’t wake up to the alarm.

My parents followed suit. They left their hometowns to find factory jobs and make enough to raise kids in a world that had already outrun them. My mother cleaned hotel rooms for thirty years. She never once complained. I asked her once if she ever wanted to stop.

She looked at me, half-laughing. “Stop and do what? Wait to die?”

At the time, I thought that was tragic. Now I think it was honest. She found rhythm in the repetition. In knowing what each day would ask of her. In folding sheets with corners so tight they held the shape of her pride. She didn’t want to stop. She wanted to matter.

She told me once that when she made a room beautiful, she left a little piece of herself behind. A perfectly folded towel. A window that let in morning light. A bed smoothed so clean it looked like calm.

My father was quieter about it. He worked construction, wore the same boots until the soles gave in. Even now, he still “helps out” at his friend’s small carpentry business. Says he likes the sawdust. The smell of real things being shaped. He has arthritis in both hands, but says it hurts less when he’s busy.

I think that’s true for a lot of us.

When people talk about retirement, they speak of leisure like it’s salvation. Travel, hobbies, golf. But I’ve seen too many people disappear into that stillness. Not in a peaceful way. In a forgotten way. They go from being someone to no one. From having a reason to wake up, to sleeping in without hunger.

I’m not afraid of aging. I’m afraid of being unnecessary.

Maybe that’s why I keep doing things that don’t make sense on paper. Writing blog posts that earn nothing. Fixing broken bowls with gold because I can’t stand to see something tossed away. Having long, meandering conversations with strangers at flea markets. None of it pays. But all of it matters.

Because I was taught that the value of a thing isn’t in how long it lasts, but in whether it left something behind. A repaired cup. A cleaned room. A sturdy wall. A sentence that held someone’s breath for a moment longer than usual.

I think about the kind of old man I want to become. Not the kind who sits by the window waiting for someone to visit. I want to be the one who still shows up, even if no one asks.

To still write, even if the eyes blur. Still shape clay, even if the fingers stiffen. Still fix what I can. Still grow something from soil.

I don’t want to retire because I don’t want to drift. I want to keep swimming until the tide turns me over. I want to keep saying thank you to the world, in whatever small ways I still can. With hands, with words, with presence.

To retire would mean to step out of that conversation. To go quiet when there’s still something worth saying.

I think that’s the saddest thing of all.

People think work is what burns us out. But I think it’s the absence of meaning that does. To work without joy, yes—that will eat you alive. But to do something out of love, out of care, out of need? That is a kind of fuel.

My grandmother kept weaving long after her vision failed. She wove by feel. The blankets got crooked. The patterns broke. But she said they kept her warm. And not just physically.

I understood too late.

Sometimes I imagine a different life. One where I made more money, saved better, bought a house early, planned for a smooth retirement. But that version of me is someone I don’t know how to love. He is quiet in a way that feels like absence, not peace.

I want noise. I want the clatter of tools, the smell of old books, the soft crack of glaze cooling on a freshly fired cup. I want to wake up tired because I gave the day something.

Even if it’s just one person reading this.

Even if it’s just me.

I don’t want to retire. I want to keep walking until the shoes wear out. Then I’ll go barefoot.

Then I’ll crawl.

But I’ll still be going.

There is a Japanese phrase I love: 『ikigai』. A reason for being.

It is not your job. It is not your title. It is the thing that makes you glad the sun came up again.

Some find it in raising a child. Some in fixing an engine. Some in writing words no one may read. But it’s there. And when you find it, you don’t want to stop. You don’t want to retire. You want to keep honoring it, however you can.

So I keep writing. I keep fixing. I keep listening. I keep showing up, even when the voice is quiet.

Wabi-sabi teaches us this: there is beauty in what is worn, what is chipped, what is fading. Not because it is broken, but because it has endured. Retirement, for me, feels like an attempt to polish what should be left raw. Life is not a bowl to be stored on a shelf. It is one that should be used, repaired, used again. And again. Until the gold lines of all its cracks gleam with memory.

Like my grandfather’s level. Like my grandmother’s bent fingers. Like my mother’s quiet pride. Like my own scratched desk, still bearing the weight of these words.

So what does this mean for you, reader?

Maybe you’re wondering if you’re wasting your time on small things. Maybe you’ve been told you’re too old to start over, or too young to matter. But maybe—just maybe—the small things are the whole point. Maybe it’s the way you greet the mailman. The way you mend your coat. The way you pick up the phone when it rings.

You don’t need to do what I do. But you do need to keep doing what keeps you human. Stay useful. Stay soft. Stay in motion. Make something that outlives you.

And if you have no idea where to begin, maybe start here:

What small thing could you do today that leaves a trace of care?

Tell me in the comments. I’ll be here, still writing. Still listening.

Because we don’t stop.

We continue.

It was a soaked morning in Snowdonia—mist clung to every branch, rain drummed the cottage roof like distant thunder—and still, my friend and I set out before first light. We slipped into sodden jackets, boots gurgling with cold water, and followed a trail that vanished into gray nothingness.

As we climbed, the world narrowed to rhythm: boot on stone, breath in, breath out. Every tendon and sinew in my legs and back argued with fatigue, yet carried on, whispering: one more step. My lungs burned with chilled air; my heart pounded in an ancient drumbeat; my skin prickled with purpose.

Near the summit, the clouds thinned for a breath. Gold light spilled over jagged fells, igniting droplets on bracken and rock. My friend whooped—an unrefined cry of delight—and I felt tears mingle with the rain on my cheeks. My body, that familiar vessel of scars and strength, had guided me through mud and gale and doubt to this unguarded wonder.

Descending, each foothold demanded attention: loose scree, hidden roots, moss-slick stones. My muscles remembered every uphill battle, every tremor of exertion. I pressed a palm to an ancient oak’s damp trunk, feeling sap pulse beneath the bark—nature’s mirror to my own living frame.

At the cottage, I shed drenched layers until only my skin remained—each droplet a testament to the morning’s journey. I stepped into the shower’s embrace, hot water cascading like absolution. Steam curled around me, and every ache sighed into warmth. I pressed my back to cool tile, closed my eyes, and whispered:

“Thank you.”

Because this body—my oldest and most enduring possession—has carried me through storms and summits, through doubt and delight, and still wakes each day ready for the next path.

Wabi-Sabi Lessons from the Body’s Journey

• Imperfection is proof of life: Every ache and scar tells a story.
• Strength grows through surrender: Yield to discomfort, and you discover resilience.
• Presence over perfection: The summit’s beauty isn’t in conquest but in mindful steps.
• Rhythm is its own wisdom: Boot on stone, breath in, breath out—find your flow.
• Gratitude is the final warmth: Even the hottest shower is richer when you’ve earned it.

からから道
心の奥まで
あせをかく

dusty summer path
sweat trickles into the soul
quiet endurance

—

We started early, not because we were prepared, but because the sun hadn’t yet decided to punish us. I met Leo at the edge of the old city, both of us squinting through sleep and sunscreen, bikes already sticky from the day before. The idea was vague: ride as far into the Berner Oberland as we could before one of us gave up or the weather made the decision for us.

We didn’t talk much at the start. The hum of the tires on the asphalt was enough conversation. Past small villages, through patches of forest that offered momentary mercy, then into open fields that shimmered like heat was something you could see.

By midday, the silence between us was no longer comfortable — it was just all we had energy for.

“You think we’re lost?” Leo finally asked, not really caring.

I looked around. Everything was green, but aggressively so. Wildflowers like spilled paint. Cows that didn’t even lift their heads as we passed. A wooden sign pointed vaguely toward something that sounded Swiss enough to trust. I shrugged.

“We’re somewhere,” I said. “That counts.”

—

The climb started around two. The kind of incline that didn’t look bad until you tried pedaling up it and realized your body had been lying to you all morning. Sweat started in earnest. Dripped into my eyes. Into my thoughts.

And somewhere in that struggle — in the burning of thighs and lungs and sunburned shoulders — I remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years.

A conversation I had with my mother after my first heartbreak.

“You’ll get through it,” she’d said. “You always do.”

“How do you know?”

She paused. “Because that’s who you are.”

—

That’s the thing about the soul. It remembers who you are when your mind is too tired and your body’s too sore to pretend anymore. It’s the part of you that doesn’t care about the climb, the destination, the Instagram photo.

It just… endures.

It stays. Quietly. Even when everything else wants to quit.

—

We finally reached a plateau — not the top, but enough to breathe. Enough to collapse into grass that felt like cold water for the spine. Leo lay flat on his back, eyes closed.

“You ever think about how long we’ve been riding?” he said.

“Too long.”

“No, I mean… not just today.”

I looked at him. He wasn’t talking about bikes anymore.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think about it all the time.”

—

Later, we found a small alpine hut that served coffee. The kind of place with handwritten prices and flies that couldn’t be bothered. We sat on a bench. Shared a lukewarm espresso. Watched a cloud drift so slowly across the face of the Eiger it felt like it might never arrive.

And I thought: This is the soul, too.

Not just the part that survives.

But the part that learns to sit still.
To notice.
To receive the day without needing to improve it.

—

Notes from a Quiet Soul on a Hot Day

• The soul doesn’t rush. It endures.
• Some climbs aren’t for views — they’re for remembering who you are.
• Pain can clean out the noise. Make room.
• Endurance is sacred.
• The road doesn’t always tell you why. Sometimes the soul answers later.

—

We rode back slower. Not because the terrain changed. But because we had.

We didn’t speak much.
We didn’t need to.
The wind had picked up, and for a few blessed kilometers, it was at our backs.

And somewhere inside me, beneath the burn and the bruises of the day, I felt something old and quiet still holding the handlebars.

Still guiding me home.

—

There’s this one moment that keeps coming back to me, like a stray note from a song I heard long ago. It doesn’t stand out. No fireworks. No breakthrough. It wasn’t the kind of moment you’d write home about. But it stayed.

It was early June, one of those in-between days when Switzerland forgets what season it’s in. The morning still carried the cool hush of spring, but the light had already changed. It was gentler, warmer, like a hand resting quietly on your shoulder.

I was walking a narrow trail somewhere above the Lauterbrunnen valley. No destination. No pressure. Just walking. The river kept me company, flowing with that soft glacial clarity, cold and honest. I remember passing a field where cows grazed without urgency. The sound of their bells rang low and soft, like the world itself was breathing slowly.

And then, a bench.

Wooden. Slightly tilted. One leg shorter than the rest. Half in shadow, half kissed by sunlight. It wasn’t special. But something about it called me. Maybe it was the tiredness in my legs. Maybe it was the quiet. Maybe it was just time.

I sat.

I didn’t reach for my phone. I didn’t take a photo. I didn’t try to think anything useful. I just sat and let the sun touch the back of my neck. It wasn’t hot. Just warm enough to remind me I was still here. Still a part of this world. Still breathing.

The smell of pine and something faintly sweet—wildflowers or memory—drifted past. I could hear the wind in the tall grass, in the trees above, in my own lungs.

And then I noticed something strange:
For a moment, the constant hum inside me—the one that keeps track of time and worth and goals and loss—went silent.

Just for a moment.

And in that silence, I felt something unclench inside me. Something I didn’t even know I’d been holding.

—

We talk a lot about favorite moments. Big ones. Loud ones. First kisses. Graduations. The kind of things people cheer for.

But this? This was different.

It didn’t want anything from me.

It didn’t care who I was, or who I was trying to be.

It just let me be.

—

And maybe that’s what I’ve learned over the years. That peace isn’t something you fight for. It’s something you stumble into, when you stop fighting yourself. When you stop trying to curate your joy, and instead just let it happen. Let it arrive unannounced.

That bench, that breeze, that day—I carry them with me.

Not because they changed everything.

But because they reminded me that nothing needed to be changed in that moment.

And sometimes, that’s more than enough.

—

If you ever find yourself tired of everything—of people, of noise, of trying too hard to be someone you’re not—go find a quiet place.

Sit down.

Let the wind do the talking.

You might be surprised how much of yourself returns to you when you stop searching.

The next day it was barely dawn when I continued my journey, slipped out of the cottage, the world still wrapped in mist. The air tasted of damp stone and distant pine, and every step on the dew-soaked grass felt like an invitation to something unnamed. I hadn’t planned on walking. I only meant to clear my head before breakfast, to shake loose the weight of restless nights and half-formed worries.

The lake lay flat and silver behind the trees—so calm it looked like glass untouched since summer began. A lone fisherman stood at its edge, rod in hand, waiting. His silhouette didn’t startle me. He seemed part of the landscape, as if he’d been there all his life, learning how patience contours itself around water.

I wandered toward the hills, following a faint footpath that curved through wildflowers. Each bloom bowed under its own color—bluebells, daisies, pale lavender—reminding me how insistently small things persist. The sun was still low, sending pale fingers of light between the trunks. I felt the chill in my chest loosen, inch by inch, as if the morning itself were breathing life back into me.

Somewhere along the way, I passed an abandoned stone wall, moss-covered and leaning at an angle. I paused, tracing its rough edge with my fingers, imagining the hands that once built it—steady, unhurried, certain. There was no hurry now. No plan beyond moving forward until the path asked me to stop.

Later that evening, I found myself back in town, sitting at the edge of a half-empty beer garden. Nothing fancy—wooden benches, chipped paint, the hum of conversations I wasn’t part of. I had a Rivella and a small plate of something fried. The sun had begun its slow descent behind the hills, and everything was dipped in that golden syrup light that makes even sadness look holy.

An older man sat across from me without asking. Maybe in his sixties, wearing a worn denim shirt with sleeves rolled up. His hands were calloused. He had the kind of presence that doesn’t enter a room—it quietly reveals it.

We sat in silence for a while. He lit a cigarette, not out of need, but routine.

“You’re not from here,” he said finally, in German thick with the Alps. “But you sat on that bench up by the pines. I saw you.”

I looked at him, a little surprised. Nodded.

“Nice view,” I said.

“It’s not the view people sit there for,” he replied. “It’s the weight they need to put down.”

He tapped his ash into a makeshift tin ashtray, then looked out at the distant peaks. “I used to go up there after my wife passed. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. But the bench didn’t ask questions.”

I didn’t say anything, but something in my chest responded—like someone tuning an instrument I didn’t know I had.

He looked at me again. “You’re carrying something too, aren’t you?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t always know the name for it.”

“You don’t have to,” he said. “Some things are too old for words.”

—

We sat there for a long while, watching a dog circle a tree in slow loops. Then he spoke again, softer this time:

“People always think healing is a loud thing. That you cry or scream or confess something and then it’s done. But real healing is boring. It’s sitting with yourself. Letting the silence touch the parts you keep hidden.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, then stood. “Keep sitting. The world has enough people running around.”

He left without saying goodbye.

And somehow, it felt complete.

—

Later, walking back through the village, I passed the pine-covered trail that led back up to that bench.

And I thought—maybe that’s all a good day really needs:

A warm beam of light on your back,
a stranger who doesn’t ask for your story,
and a place where the silence doesn’t make you feel alone.

—

Coming home is always a little off-tempo.

Not because the house has changed. Not because the furniture is different.
But because the air is.

It smells fuller now—sweet and wild, the kind of fragrance that only rises when roots have had time to spread and tangle beneath the surface.

I stepped off the bus and walked the old path through the fields, noticing how the wind moved differently here—slower, gentler, as if it had finally remembered how to breathe.

Pine needles lined the gutters. The garden hummed with invisible wings.
Even the soil seemed to pulse underfoot—richer, more alive, like time had been quietly composted into something fertile.

The house stood like a memory I wasn’t quite ready to touch.
Faded shutters. The tiled roof still holding onto summer heat.
And the faint, familiar sound of the coffee machine—grinding beans with a tired purr—echoing through the window like the opening note of a well-worn song.

My grandfather sat outside on the old wooden chair, the one that leans slightly left.
A cigarette in one hand, the other tucked into his cardigan.
He looked out over the garden the way some people watch the sea.

I joined him in silence.

After a while, he blew a long stream of smoke toward the trees.
“Still walking too fast, are you?”

I smiled. “Trying to slow down.”

The coffee machine clicked off inside, but he didn’t move.

“Why did you build it like this?” I asked, nodding toward the uneven path, the crooked shed, the wild rows of herbs.

He didn’t even blink.
“Because it’s beautiful,” he said, like that was enough.

And maybe it was.

—

Inside, my grandmother poured the coffee into two mismatched porcelain cups.
Not fancy. Not perfect. But they fit the hand just right.
Steam curled up into the green air of the kitchen. Earth and roast and time.

She handed me a cup and walked toward the window—the one with the wide ledge and the little bird-shaped dish that never held anything.

She pointed.

“See that pine?” she said. “I planted it when I was about your age. I thought maybe… if I was lucky, one day I’d sit here and drink coffee and watch the birds play.”

She looked away from the tree, back to her hands.
“I sit here now. And they come. Every morning. Drinking coffee from the machine you bought us with your first salary.”

She didn’t look at me.
But she smiled, small and quiet. The kind of smile that doesn’t need an audience.

—

I stayed a while, just watching them.

The way he tapped his cigarette against the ashtray he made with his own hands decades ago.
The way she moved through the kitchen with the grace of someone who knows where everything lives—not by sight, but by rhythm.

When I was young, I didn’t understand how they could seem so full while doing so little.
I thought they were stuck. Or bored.

I didn’t know the effort it takes to keep something quietly alive.

To tend a garden—not for show, but to keep the weeds at bay.
To boil the same water each morning—not for change, but for steadiness.
To sit beside someone day after day—not for excitement, but because it matters.

—

Wabi-Sabi Lessons from the Quiet

• To build a life, you don’t need noise. You need care.
• Beauty doesn’t come from perfection, but from presence.
• What you tend grows—not just plants, but people, places, and mornings like this.
• A pine tree planted with intention can become a companion 40 years later.
• You don’t have to do much to live deeply. You just have to pay attention.

—

Later, as the shadows stretched long across the fields, I walked back down the path.
The trees rustled above me.
Birds dipped low through the evening air.

And I realized—
maybe what makes this place smell so alive isn’t just the flowers or the soil.

Maybe it’s the years.
The quiet acts of care.
Still echoing in the air.

two cups still steaming—
only one pair of hands moves,
the story begins

—

We were sitting in a dim café near Bern’s old clocktower, the kind that still smelled faintly of roasted chestnuts and old wood polish. The café had chipped brick walls, small arched windows fogged with breath and winter, and tables that wobbled if you leaned too hard into your elbows. The ceiling hung low, giving it that cloistered monastery feel, and the lights—bare bulbs wrapped in paper lanterns—cast a drowsy amber glow that made time feel soft around the edges.

She wore a green scarf tucked tightly around her collarbone, like someone who had been walking into wind for a decade. We hadn’t seen each other in five years. Five years that had curled inwards like a fern under frost.

“Still chasing storms?” she asked, her voice playful but hushed, stirring her tea absentmindedly. She didn’t lift it. Just watched the swirl of milk vanish like a thought half-remembered.

“More like learning to watch the sky first,” I said, trying to match her metaphor. “You?”

She smiled—tired and bright at the same time—the way people do when they’ve learned how to hold disappointment like an old friend.

“I left New York,” she said, and something in her posture softened. “Again.”

I looked up. “But that was the plan, wasn’t it? The rooftop parties? The subway poetry?”

“I thought so too,” she said. “But it turns out, being good at surviving isn’t the same as being passionate.”

—

She told me how London taught her to perform poise under fluorescent light, how to cry in a bathroom stall at work without smudging her eyeliner, how to talk about the weather when her world was collapsing.

She said New York taught her velocity—that you could move every minute of the day and still go nowhere. That you could be in a room full of people and feel like wallpaper.

“In London, people pretend not to see you. In New York, they see you too fast. I got tired of both.”

There was a silence then. Wide, unhurried. A silence that felt earned.

“What about you?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Still restless. But a bit less eager to call it passion.”

She laughed. “That’s the most honest thing you’ve ever said.”

—

We talked about jobs we didn’t care for—spreadsheets, branding decks, campaigns with no soul. Apartments that smelled like mildew and someone else’s cologne. Mornings when waking up felt like starting someone else’s life.

“You know what I envy?” she asked, tilting her cup just to hear the last sip shift inside. “People who grow roots without feeling stuck.”

I nodded. “And people who grow wings without needing a runway.”

She looked at me. “So what are we then?”

“I think we’re just people who got good at noticing. That’s a kind of passion, too.”

—

She finally finished her tea. Held the cup with both hands as if she were weighing a memory.

“I used to think passion had to look like fire,” she said. “Like urgency. Like being consumed. But now I think it’s just showing up. Not letting the days blur. Letting a place touch you, without letting it own you.”

From her bag, she pulled out a notebook—creased at the corners, held together by a rubber band.

“This is the only thing I’ve kept from every city,” she said.

Inside were quick sketches—graffiti tags, hands, shadows on fire escapes. Snippets of conversations overheard on trains. A pressed flower between two ticket stubs. And in the middle, on a torn page, a line written in pen that had bled slightly:

It’s not about what you love.It’s about how you love, quietly, consistently, even when no one is watching.

—

What She Taught Me (Even If She Didn’t Mean To)

• Passion doesn’t shout. It stays. It notices. It remembers.
• The places you live aren’t trophies. They’re weather systems. Let them change you.
• You don’t need a calling. You need a rhythm—your own way of showing up, curious, honest, unfinished.
• Sometimes, passion is the ability to sit across from someone, let them speak their truth, and not feel the need to correct it with your own.

—

Outside, the bells of Zytglogge rang. We both turned toward the sound, as if some part of us was still synchronized with old machines.

I asked, “Will you stay in Bern?”

She stood, adjusting her scarf. The green was starting to unravel at the end.

“Long enough to learn something.”

She walked out into the wind.

And I stayed there a little longer, holding her empty cup.
Still warm.

We were somewhere near Budva when the road curved tight around the cliffs and the sea opened up below like a secret. That soft turquoise clarity that always makes you feel like the world is older than anything you’ll ever understand.

It was early spring. The kind that still has winter in its lungs.

I was sixteen. The bus smelled like damp backpacks and potato chips. A mix of excitement and sweat. The kind of travel that runs on youth and low expectations.

Next to me sat a boy from the back row. I don’t remember his name. Maybe his name didn’t matter. But I remember his eyes—dark, still, with that look some people get when they’re always listening even if their mouth is moving.

He said something I’ve never forgotten.

“You always talk about how you love summer,” he said, looking out the window. “But I think it’s a waste to wait for one season.”

I laughed. “Summer is the best. Long days, no jackets, the sun actually wants you to exist.”

He smiled. “Sure. But don’t you think it’s human to want to make the most out of whatever you get?”

There was a pause, the kind that feels bigger than the conversation.

“I love winter,” he continued. “I love hot drinks, and seeing my breath when I talk. I love how it slows everyone down. Autumn smells like school books and wet trees. Spring is messy and awkward and alive. And summer—yeah, summer’s great. But if I only waited for that, I’d spend three quarters of the year being disappointed.”

Outside the window, the Adriatic glistened like a mirage. We passed laundry lines flapping on small balconies, kids chasing balls barefoot, old women sitting in pairs by empty roadside stands. Time, somehow, didn’t feel linear. Not in the Balkans. It felt circular, like seasons.

Maybe that’s when I started thinking differently about time.

Wabi-Sabi of the Rotating Sky

I used to think summer was the destination. Now I think every season is a window, a lens.
They don’t exist to be compared.
They exist to be entered.

What that boy taught me on that road to Montenegro still rings true:

• Winter teaches presence. It strips life down to breath and shelter.
• Spring reminds us that growth is never graceful, but it is persistent.
• Summer gives us ease. But ease is only precious when it’s not permanent.
• Autumn tells us how to let go with dignity. How to rust beautifully.

Now I live by a rhythm, not a preference.
I sweat when it’s hot.
I shiver when it’s cold.
And I try not to wish for anything other than what’s already here.

That boy—I never spoke to him again after that trip.
But his words followed me.
Through the cities I moved to.
The rooms I sat in.
The seasons I stopped waiting for.

Because life doesn’t slow down for our favorites.

It just keeps turning.
And if you’re lucky—really lucky—
you get to turn with it.

Even once around the sun is a gift.
So try to enjoy all of it.

Even the rain.

Even the wind.

Even the years that don’t make sense until much later.

For years I never saw it for what it was. Just a stream. A twist of the wrist. A pulse from some unseen boiler behind the wall. Nothing remarkable. Just hot water.

But the things we think of as basic are often the ones holding our lives together.

It was in Birmingham, during the worst winter I can remember, that this truth began to unfold. I was living in a shared flat, the kind that makes you question your decision-making at least once a day. The bathroom walls were damp year-round. The extractor fan didn’t extract anything but hope. There was mold near the ceiling that looked like some ancient map of a country no one survived.

Our water heater had moods—angry, sullen, silent. Mostly silent. The water that came out of the tap was cold enough to hurt. You could feel your bones retract. You learned to time your shampooing like a military operation. Rinse. Lather. Gasp.

One evening, after coming home soaked by an unforecasted rain, I stood in front of the sink and stared. That night, for some unknowable reason, the water came hot.

And I cried. I didn’t sob. No heaving chest. Just tears, sudden and uninvited. Not because of pain. But because of warmth.

I remembered Ljubljana that night. A converted attic apartment near Šiška, beside the tram line that rattled like memory. The windows let in every whisper of winter, and the floors creaked like they had stories to tell. But there was a tiny bathroom. An old boiler. And when it worked, it worked like magic. The room steamed up in minutes, fog curling on the mirror, warmth rising like incense.

It wasn’t about being clean. It was about return. About feeling like you still had some softness left in you. That no matter how fragmented the day, you could gather the pieces and stand still.

Even now, in better places and warmer spaces, I never take hot water lightly.

It became my definition of luxury—not designer clothes or rare wines or airport lounges. Just hot water on skin. The sound of it. The feel of it. The transformation it brings. The weight it rinses away.

And when I travel now—when I walk under sun-heavy skies in Regensburg or through alpine mornings in Bern—I notice the taps. I test the temperature. And I never forget to thank the invisible systems that bring that simple heat to my hand.

Wabi-Sabi Lessons from a Boiler:

• Gratitude doesn’t need to be loud. It needs to be honest.
• Comfort isn’t always about what’s new. Sometimes it’s what flows, what holds, what warms.
• Even the most mundane rituals can become sacred when you’ve known their absence.
• Real luxury is not what impresses others. It’s what brings you back to yourself.

We talk a lot about optimization these days. More productivity. More gain. Better routines. Faster mornings.

But sometimes, the most human thing you can do is step into a hot shower, close your eyes, and let the steam pull you back to stillness.

So if you ask me what I can’t live without, I won’t say status or gear or gourmet this or that.

I’ll say water. Warm. Running. Quiet.

And I’ll mean it with all I have.

sun slips down too fast—
but I chase it with bare hands,
greedy for the gold

It always creeps in. That first day in April when the light outlives the workday. Not by much. But enough. Enough to stretch the walk home. Enough to put your phone away. Enough to stop at a bench that doesn’t ask for anything but presence.

It begins then. This yearly pact I make with summer. That I won’t waste a second of it. That every ray, every soft beam bouncing off the cobblestones, every golden breath through leaves—I will meet it. Outside.

It’s been like this for over a decade now. Ljubljana, Regensburg, Basel. Places I arrived at first unsure and always pale from too much indoor thinking. And always, when spring arrived, it taught me again how to live in a body.

I become solar. I plan my days around light. A coffee in a paper cup by the riverside. Sweaty shirts from uphill walks. Books half-read in parks. And the same playlist that never gets old.

When the Coffee Stops Tasting Right

There is no alarm for burnout. For digital overload. For dopamine fatigue. It doesn’t come with red lights or alerts. It sneaks in. You don’t notice it at first—until the coffee doesn’t hit the same. Until the scroll is automatic. Until your feet itch, but you tell them to wait.

When that happens, I go back to basics. Not productivity hacks. Not resets. Just sun. Just silence. Just moving through the world again without checking in.

Because real presence doesn’t come through a screen. It comes through the weight of the air. The sound of bees. The moment your shadow gets long and you realize it’s already 7:00 p.m.

Wabi-Sabi in the Long Light

• You don’t have to fix everything. Just feel the sun on your face.
• You are not behind. The light always returns.
• Not all beauty is urgent. Some of it is quiet and waits by the bench.
• Let the world soften you. Let the light pull the edge off your ambition.
• Even the unproductive days teach you how to be whole.

There are summers I barely remember. But I always remember how they felt. The taste of warm water. The stickiness of fruit eaten standing up. The way a city breathes differently when everyone stays out late.

So I keep showing up. One walk at a time. I keep chasing that sun with open palms. And when it slips away behind the roofs and hills—I thank it. Because I was there. And that’s enough. What about you?

early rain whispers
words I never dared to say
now fall without weight

If humans had taglines, mine would be: “No is a full sentence.”

I didn’t learn these lessons all at once.
They came quietly, like light slipping beneath the door at sunrise.
One arrived while folding socks. Another during the silence after an argument.
Growth rarely shouts. It rustles.

These are the truths I carry now:

• “No” is a full sentence. You owe no justification for honoring your peace.
• Being unbothered is a skill. Not indifference—discernment.
• Silence is a response. And sometimes, it’s the most respectful one.
• Most “urgent” things can wait. True emergencies are rare. Most things can simmer.
• Respect > Attention. One is felt in your absence. The other fades with the scroll.
• Apologies mean nothing without action. Words are easy. Movement is rare.
• Movement is medicine. Not for the body alone, but for the spirit.
• You’re not for everyone—and that’s freedom. You stop shrinking when you accept it.

I scribbled these once on the back of a receipt in a café near Ueno Park.
Outside, rain stitched the pavement with quiet insistence.
Inside, the barista wiped down empty tables while an old stereo murmured Chet Baker through static. A cat sat on the windowsill, half-asleep, entirely whole.

At the next table, a man stirred his coffee and said, to no one in particular:

“Funny how silence becomes more generous the older you get.”

I looked up. He didn’t look at me.
But I knew exactly what he meant.

Since then, I’ve let notifications pile up.
I’ve stopped responding just to be polite.
I’ve found beauty in unread messages, in unanswered questions.
I’ve learned that slowing down isn’t laziness—it’s listening.
And running in the early morning, before the world has a name, has become my form of prayer.

What this post wants you to learn:
That your time is sacred.
That urgency is often artificial.
That boundaries—real ones—don’t require apology.
That you don’t need to be louder to be heard.
You just need to be clear.

If you’re feeling burnt out, pulled in ten directions, or unsure why your days feel so noisy—try saying less. Try moving more. Try listening to the quiet between things.

Your turn.

If humans had taglines, what would yours be?
Mine is: “No is a full sentence.”
It took me years to speak it with a calm heart.

Maybe yours is:
“I bend, but I do not break.”
Or: “Still water runs deep.”
Or: “I leave room for silence.”

Have you learned anything lately that feels like it’s shaping you quietly from within?

Write it here.

“Who do you spend the most time with?”

We were sitting on the roof of his building in 2013, just past midnight. It had just rained. The kind of summer storm that passes through without warning and leaves everything damp and electric.

He was drinking canned coffee. I had a cheap beer I didn’t like but kept sipping.

We were 24. Or maybe 25. That blurry stretch of years where you still believe that everything unresolved will somehow resolve itself.

He lit a cigarette and asked,
“Who do you spend the most time with?”

I thought he meant romantically. Or maybe family. But he just kept looking at the cloudless sky like it owed him something.

I said, “I don’t know. I guess my coworkers?”

He nodded. “Yeah, but I meant… when you’re walking alone. When you’re lying in bed. When you’re waiting for your train. Who’s there with you?”

I knew the answer.
He did too.

It was me.
It’s always been me.

You don’t realize it at first. How much time you spend with your own voice in your head.
The one that second-guesses what you said at dinner.
The one that wonders if your best years already happened.
The one that gets quiet when things go well, then panics in the silence.

People come and go.
Cities change.
Jobs end.
But that voice? That version of you you carry around?
That one doesn’t leave.

And if you don’t learn to live with it—
If you don’t learn to sit beside yourself without flinching—
You’ll spend your whole life trying to fill that space with noise.

That night on the rooftop, the conversation drifted. We talked about how we’d both read Norwegian Wood too young.
About the girl he used to love who only texted him when she was sad.
About how we both wanted to go somewhere quieter, maybe a cabin, maybe the coast.

But what stayed with me wasn’t the cigarette smoke or the stars or the sound of the AC units humming below.

It was the question.

Who do you spend the most time with?

Ten years later, I still think about it.
When I cancel plans.
When I walk home alone.
When I catch my reflection in a dark window and feel like a stranger to myself.

I don’t always like the answer.
But I’ve stopped trying to escape it.

I take myself for coffee.
I sit on park benches without looking at my phone.
I forgive myself more than I used to.

Because if I’m going to spend a lifetime with someone,
I might as well try to make peace with them.

Even if they still flinch at the sound of their own thoughts sometimes.
Even if they’re still learning how to stay.

Lessons From the Rooftop

• You will always spend the most time with yourself. Learn to make it bearable.
• That voice in your head? It’s not always right, but it’s always there.
• Don’t rush to fill silence. Let it teach you something.
• Some people leave. Some cities forget you. But the person inside your chest doesn’t go anywhere.

So take them with you.
Be kind to them.
And maybe—just maybe—start liking their company.

Even if they still drink beer they don’t like sometimes.

If this moved you, share it with someone else who’s spending a little too much time alone with themselves lately. And if you haven’t already, subscribe below—so we can keep having these conversations, quietly, when you need them most.

no name stays untouched—
weathered by mouths and meanings,
still it holds its shape

—

There’s a question that floats around sometimes.
In conversations that veer a little too close to icebreakers,
or in forms that assume you want reinvention.

“If you had to change your name, what would it be?”

And I always pause.
Not because I haven’t thought about it—
but because I have.

I’ve imagined names softer at the edges,
names that might fit easier into foreign mouths,
names that don’t have to be repeated twice,
then spelled out loud like a puzzle.

I’ve imagined names that sound like they belong to someone more decisive.
More elegant.
Less of a question mark.

But then I return to mine.
Always.

Because my name isn’t just syllables.
It’s dirt and dialect.
It’s snow in the gutters outside my childhood home in Slovenia.
It’s the rust of bikes leaned against concrete stairwells.
It’s the sound my grandmother made when calling us in for soup.

It has softened and sharpened through three alphabets.
Been mispronounced in Japan,
mangled at airports,
clipped short by bank clerks.

But it’s held.

And in some strange way—
all those missteps became part of it.
A name worn smooth by other people’s hands.
A stone passed around long enough to shine.

—

Not One, But Many

I’ve used different names in cafés,
when I didn’t want to explain again.
Nicknames that slid off like jackets.
Online handles that let me disappear.

But underneath,
there was always the original.

Not perfect.
Not poetic.
But real.
Tested by years,
by friendships that didn’t last,
and ones that did.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Identity That Stays

A name doesn’t need to be elegant.
It needs to fit—not in the world,
but in your own bones.

It needs to echo.

And mine does.

So if someone asks me now what I’d rename myself,
I smile and think: I already have a name with a thousand faces.

It’s been spoken in at least four countries,
written in journals I’ve never shared,
and whispered in love once or twice.

Why would I trade that for anything smoother?

I’ve worked too long to grow into it.
Let it carry the weight of who I was.
Let it stretch to hold who I’m becoming.

A name like that doesn’t need changing.
It needs to be lived into.

Again and again.

:
A fragment of fleeting solace drifts between tongue and chest, teaching us to embrace the cracks that shape our moments. In the hush between heartbeats, imperfection becomes a quiet sanctuary—a reminder of the beauty found in what is incomplete.

I hold a slender shard of dusk in my palm. It feels cool—almost damp—like a stone smoothed by forgotten streams. Its surface bears tiny fissures, delicate as spiderlegs. I press it to my lips. A soft resistance yields, releasing a faint, earthy sweetness that lingers in the air like smoke at dawn.

I close my eyes. In that darkness, the world shifts. The grit of memories—rain on bamboo leaves, a chipped teacup’s hesitant drip—melds into a single, continuous sensation. Each nuance unfolds like the slow bloom of a lotus: slow, deliberate, patient.

Breathe in. Exhale. I taste rain-drenched soil, the first page of a book left open under a drizzle. My mind wanders to an old wooden chair, its varnish worn away by years of shifting weight. It creaks with every movement—a small concession to time’s erosion. Yet it stands.

A simple ritual unfolds. I press the shard against my tongue. At first, bitterness scratches like wind through bare branches. Then gentle warmth follows, softening edges I never noticed. Familiar warmth, as if someone has lit a small candle somewhere deep inside me. For a moment, I am fully present—an observer in my own life.

A chipped teacup sits nearby. Its glaze chipped at the rim reveals clay beneath, raw and unguarded. It holds water that trembles with each breath. I imagine tracing those cracks with my fingertip, mapping the journey of every imperfection. There’s poetry in that form of wabi-sabi: finding grace not in flawless surfaces, but in the scars that tell our stories.

Light shifts through the window. Shadows stretch like slow dancers across the tatami floor. I lift the shard again, staring at its uneven silhouette. There is no rush. No need for grand gestures. Just this small, imperfect fragment—its edges worn, its texture uneven—offering comfort in impermanence.

How often do we chase perfection? We polish until there’s nothing left but cold hardness. But here, in this moment, the brittle surface yields to a tender surrender. I taste memory: a childhood afternoon chasing cicadas beneath maple trees, the metallic tang of excitement on my tongue. I taste solitude—warm, but not lonely—like sitting quietly in a garden of stones.

Imperfection reminds me to notice what is. To feel the rough grain under my fingertips. To hear the silence between each breath. The shard dissolves, leaving behind nothing but a faint echo in my mouth. I bow my head, offering silent gratitude for that echo.

Outside, neon lights cast fractured reflections on wet pavement. Passing cars hum through puddles. In the distance, an old man feeds stray cats beneath a flickering lantern. Each moment is fractured, imperfect—yet alive with restless beauty.

When I rise, I carry that whisper of imperfection with me. It settles in my chest like a hidden melody, a subtle rhythm that guides each step. I walk into the night, footprints soft against the asphalt. The world around me continues—shopfronts closing, crickets beginning their evening song. And I am here, flawed and breathing, alive in the gentle decay of what was and what will be.

I don’t remember when I first read it exactly—maybe I was eight, maybe nine.
But I remember the cover: thick font, bright blue, a sketch of Saturn’s rings drifting behind a white rocket. It was a children’s encyclopedia of science.
Not fantasy. Not fiction.
Just friction. Pressure. Electricity. Stars.

I read it in the hallway, sitting cross-legged beside the heating pipe in our tiny socialist flat in Slovenia. I liked how the hot air from the pipe curled into my sleeves as I flipped pages about magnetic fields and volcanoes. There was something comforting about reading facts. How certain they were.
No plot. No drama. Just: “this is how it works.”

At school, other kids were reading adventure stories or comics with talking animals and sword fights. I had a book that showed me why the sky is blue and how levers amplify force.
And somehow, it felt just as magical.

Years later, in Ljubljana, I carried that same sense of wonder in a different form.
The facts had changed, grown more complex—quantum tunneling, neuroplasticity, entropy—but the feeling was the same.
I still liked reading about how the world fit together.
Especially when mine didn’t.

Then came university.
And with it, Darwin.

I’d heard of evolution before, of course—basic schoolbook gloss—but it was there, in the quiet university library, with cheap instant coffee and that dry winter air soaked into every page of my notes, that I finally understood it.

Not as theory.
But as rhythm.
As the slow, almost imperceptible waltz of trial and error across millennia.

It hit me that this wasn’t just about animals and fossils.
It was about everything.

About survival and change. About letting go of what doesn’t serve you.
About the brutal, beautiful way that life reshapes itself again and again,
quietly, stubbornly, without asking permission.

And I remember staring out of the dusty window after reading that passage,
watching a crow hop between patches of melting snow.
It felt like something in me shifted.
Like I had been trying to force too many things to stay the same.

In Regensburg, it rained so much that year.
I’d sit by the window with tea gone cold, rereading a book on first principles thinking.
Stripping away complexity. Starting from zero.
Those were the books that helped me move forward—not by giving answers,
but by showing me how to ask better questions.

Then came London.
Birmingham, really.
The books I loved then were still non-fiction. Still science. But the titles changed:

• Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
• The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
• The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk

I didn’t finish all of them. Some were too heavy, too clinical.
But even when I read just a chapter, I’d find myself slowing down—
pausing at sentences that felt like someone had finally described something I’d never had words for.
How the brain protects us. How patterns loop. How everything, eventually, seeks balance.

It’s strange—when life falls apart, I don’t reach for comfort fiction.
I reach for diagrams.
For drawings of gears and tides and synapses.

Maybe it’s because when I feel lost, I need something grounded.
Something that doesn’t care how I feel.
Something that reminds me:
“This is how the world works. And you are part of it.”

Wabi-sabi in the Equation

I’ve come to believe there’s a kind of beauty in this, too.
In knowing the rules,
in relearning them when they change,
in letting science be your candle through fog.

There is no perfect book.
But there are books that return to you—
whispering familiar truths when you’ve forgotten your own.

And sometimes the best story isn’t one someone else imagined.
It’s the one that explains why your tea cools,
why your heart races,
why the sun still rises—
even when you didn’t ask it to.

Because maybe the most magical thing about the world
is that it continues
whether we understand it or not.

But when we do—
even just a little—
we get to feel less alone.

three cities, three spines—quiet lights beneath the skin,guiding me through dusk

—

In Ljubljana, I first learned how quiet can hurt.
A city just big enough to disappear in,
just small enough to feel watched.
It was the winter of my seventeenth year.
Snow fell too softly to cover anything real.

That’s when I read “Norwegian Wood.”
A book that didn’t offer answers,
but made me feel okay about not asking the right questions.
I remember finishing it in my cramped room in Šiška,
wrapped in two blankets,
sirens sliding by on the icy street below.
It made loneliness sound like jazz—
melancholic, yes,
but honest.

I needed that honesty.
The world had started lying to me:
“Just be normal.”
“Just want what everyone wants.”
But the pages whispered,
“It’s okay to be silent inside.”
And I believed them.

—

A year later, in Regensburg,
the sun wouldn’t leave me alone.
It was too bright, too warm,
too full of things I didn’t yet believe I deserved.

I spent afternoons by the river,
feet in the water, head in “Letters to a Young Poet.”
Rilke taught me that solitude wasn’t punishment.
It was preparation.
To become.
To create.
To wait for love that doesn’t ask you to shrink.

He wrote:
“Live the questions now.”
And I did.
With sticky fingers from too many Bavarian pretzels,
and a cheap notebook filled with half-truths I was still trying to grow into.

—

By the time I got to London,
everything was loud again.
My flat in Birmingham was damp and too expensive.
Toast bred ants overnight.
My laptop was stolen.
I remember standing in Euston Station
with one bag, no plan, and the quiet dread of being behind in life.

That’s when I read “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius.
Yes, the Roman emperor.
Strange companion in a cold British winter.

But he didn’t tell me what to do.
He reminded me:
You can suffer with grace.
You can observe your chaos, name it, and not become it.
You can wake up in a moldy student dorm
and still choose your next thought.

It wasn’t stoicism as an armor.
It was stoicism as a soft, quiet lantern.

—

Three Books That Changed Me:

1. “Norwegian Wood” – Haruki Murakami
   For teaching me that it’s okay to feel too much.
2. “Letters to a Young Poet” – Rainer Maria Rilke
   For giving me permission to not know who I was yet.
3. “Meditations” – Marcus Aurelius
   For helping me sit still inside the storm.

—

Books don’t fix you.
They echo back the shape of your questions.
They become cities you walk in when your own feels too sharp.
They give you language for your silence.

And sometimes—if you’re lucky—
they find you in just the right year,
on just the right bench,
under a sky that doesn’t need you to explain yourself.

So if you’re lost,
find the book that feels like a whisper.
Let it sit with you.
Let it mirror the part you’ve been trying to forget.

And then—
step forward,
one paragraph at a time.

ants weave silent lines
burnt stains and toast slip away
lives converge like steam

I arrived at Aston University in late September, suitcase in hand and hope in my heart. The modern brick building stood against a charcoal sky, its glass corridors reflecting city lights. I’d imagined dorm life would begin with handshake greetings and echoing footsteps through tidy halls. Instead, I stepped into a cramped flat whose kitchen floor was alive with ants—tiny black specks marching in regimented rows toward unseen spoil.

Living Among Ants and Ashes

I’d barely unpacked when I spotted them: ant trails skirting beneath the fridge, snaking around the trash bin, disappearing under cracked linoleum. Every morning, I swept them away only to find them back by evening. The scent of burnt toast hung in the air—an invisible haze that clung to the cabinets and made my throat itch. Each week, I watched the diabetic lady next door scrub the stove’s charred residue with deliberate care. Her knuckles were ringed with scars, yet she moved in slow, patient arcs, wiping and rinsing until every blackened corner gleamed. She never complained; instead, she hummed a melody I couldn’t place—something like a lullaby for broken things.

Three Flatmates, Three Stories

The Iranian Biomedical Student

In the living room, I met Navid: tall, soft-spoken, with his left arm bound in cloth. He was entering the biomedical program—dreaming of research that might one day heal injuries like his own. Six months earlier, a rocket attack in his hometown had shattered his elbow and scattered his future. He spoke in quiet bursts, his English halting but honest. When he removed the bandages, I saw deep pink scars beneath yellowing skin—proof that survival could be as jagged as artillery fragments. Yet he smiled each morning as he packed his books: Advanced Genetics, Cellular Pathology, Anatomy and Physiology. He said, “I study what nearly took me, so I can help others survive.”

The Indian Toast Enthusiast

On the other side of the flat lived Raj, whose presence was as warm as the buttered toast he loved. He rolled from his bed each morning to the kitchen stove, confecting slabs of white bread in thick rosettes of butter—crisply fried, then slathered in a second layer so glossy it gleamed under the fluorescent light. The aroma of melting butter became his signature; it drifted into hallways and across floors, announcing his arrival before he even spoke. He was studying Business Administration but claimed that the real education happened at 8 AM, when toast could feel like a celebration rather than a breakfast.

Me, the Newcomer

And then there was me—still raw from a breakup that had cleaved my heart into shards, still numb from the night my laptop was stolen at King’s Cross Station in London while I ate ramen. The files, music playlists, and half-finished stories vanished in an instant, like steam in autumn air. With no savings left, I had retraced my path to Birmingham, limping on borrowed courage and the last cash my parents had. They’d sacrificed their own needs to help me settle: rent for one month and a secondhand laptop so I could keep chasing words. Their quiet generosity felt like warm broth for a husk of a spirit.

Morning Rituals and Hidden Lessons

Each sunrise, I’d hear Navid weighting his backpack, followed by the scrape of Raj’s chair as he slid toward the stove. In the glow of dawn, I knelt on the kitchen floor, trying to stamp out ant trails before they reached the crumbs that Raj inevitably left. With each sweep, I realized the real battle wasn’t with bugs, but with surrender—against the inertia that threatened to swallow me whole.

One morning, the diabetic lady appeared in the hallway. She introduced herself as Mrs. Hayashi—though no one was exactly sure of her nationality—and offered me a damp rag. “The ants come for crumbs,” she said, voice soft as falling snow. “Keep corners clean. And remember: even the hardest stain can be wiped away, but only if you don’t give up after one try.”

Her words echoed in my mind as I scrubbed the stove with baking soda paste—white foam clinging to char, dissolving black into gray into gleaming steel. I’d arrived broken, but each plate I repaired and every counter I cleaned felt like an act of rebuilding.

Converging Lives, Diverging Hopes

Days blurred into weeks. I discovered Navid’s locked drawer, where he kept X-rays of his healed elbow. On slow afternoons, he described cellular regeneration as if recounting a victory. “Bodies remember violence,” he said, “but they also remember how to mend.” In return, I shared my fragments: a poem about ramen broth turning bitter, a short story about a cat that spoke only to broken souls. He listened with a careful nod, his eyes tracing the words like a researcher charting data.

Raj, always barefoot and shirtless, draped his towel over his shoulder as he buttered another slice of toast. He offered me a piece one morning—golden, crisp, impossible to refuse. “Food feeds more than hunger,” he said, “it heals what you can’t see.” With each bite, I felt my chest loosen, a faint cinder of hope igniting.

Mrs. Hayashi’s nightly visits grew from stove cleaning to shared tea and conversation. She told me about her own son who’d moved to Tokyo, chasing a dream of robotics. She’d stayed behind, living with diabetes, scrubbing stoves and battling ants to keep her small sanctuary intact. She said, “Life is a series of small wins. One clean plate, one hard lesson, one shared moment.”

Wabi-Sabi in the Dorm’s Heart

The flat was infested with contradictions: ants marching like clockwork, buttered toast like a sweet rebellion, a broken arm binding a dream, a stove scarred by past mistakes. And yet, amid that chaos, I found wabi-sabi lessons in every corner:

– Impermanence of Comfort: My laptop could vanish in one ramen-steeped moment; relationships could fracture like porcelain. Each loss reminded me that nothing stays pristine.
– Beauty in Fractures: Navid’s scar, like a golden kintsugi seam, spoke of survival. Raj’s toast, though messy with butter, was a small defiance against lack. Mrs. Hayashi’s rituals, humble and tireless, revealed tenderness in routine.
– Resilience in Community: Alone, I’d felt lost. Together, we shared our wounds—physical, emotional, financial—and became each other’s unexpected lifelines.
– Value of Small Acts: Each sweep of the broom, each slice of buttered toast, each clean plate built an unstable, imperfect sanctuary where hope could take root.

Finding Light in Shared Shadows

By midterms, I’d transformed that kitchen into a quiet battlefield won one morning at a time. The ants retreated when we eliminated every crumb. The stove gleamed under Mrs. Hayashi’s steady hand and my grudging gratitude. Navid’s elbow steadily regained its strength; his labs had come back showing progress in bone density. Raj’s toast aroma no longer felt like a nuisance but a reminder that pleasure could exist in simple excess. And I, I began writing again—on borrowed library computers, in dusty notebooks, in margins of textbooks.

One rain-washed evening, as the city lights blurred into puddles of color, I stood by my dorm window, watching ant trails disappear beneath tiled floors and smoke curl from distant chimneys. I cradled a cup of tea borrowed from Mrs. Hayashi and thought of my parents: their last cash, a second chance, a lifeline cast across miles.

I realized then: my legacy at Aston, my fragile imprint on this dorm, wouldn’t be spotless streaks of perfection. It would be the warmth I shared when the kitchen was cold. The empathy I offered when Navid looked at his scar. The laughter I joined when Raj smeared butter on toast. And the acceptance I found in myself when I stopped resisting every crack in my story.

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: Embracing Shared Imperfections

In a dorm where ants marched like ghostly echoes and lives converged in mismatched routines, I discovered that true beauty lies in raw, unguarded moments:

• Small Acts Forge Bonds: A slice of buttered toast, a wiped stove, a whispered poem—all can transform a cold flat into a home.
• Fractures Illuminate Strength: A rocket-scarred arm, a stolen laptop, diabetic routines—each fracture became a testament to resilience.
• Imperfection as Connection: In sharing our broken parts, we found common ground where hope and kindness grew.
• Grace in the Everyday: Each ant swept away, each burnt residue cleaned, each butter-laden toast eaten—these were everyday rituals that echoed larger truths about survival and grace.

When you find yourself standing alone in a kitchen overrun by tiny marchers, remember: the cracks you fear can guide you toward unexpected kinship. Let the raw threads of your story weave into the lives around you, and you’ll discover that satin-like sheen isn’t found in perfection, but in the gentle glow of shared humanity.

—

There’s something quiet and defiant about choosing joy in the morning.

Not the sweeping, cinematic kind of joy you chase with credit cards or weekends away.
Not the kind you post about.
But the slow kind—
the kind that comes with the right spread of apricot jam on a single slice of warm bread.

I’ve done this for years.
It started without ceremony.
A leftover jar in a sublet kitchen in Ljubljana,
one winter morning in a room too small for anything except a bed, a kettle, and an old tin toaster that sparked when you looked at it wrong.

I remember it clearly because I didn’t expect anything from that day.
I had no plans. No ambition.
Just toast. And jam.

—

The Unremarkable Becomes the Sacred

It sounds absurd to write about this.
I know.
But that’s the thing—
The absurd is where joy lives.

Every time I open a fresh jar of jam,
there’s this moment of pause—
the subtle pop of the seal breaking,
the thick amber sheen at the top catching a slant of morning light.

I don’t eat it quickly.
I spread it with care.
I sit down.
No phone.
No background noise.
Just the slow bite of sweet and sour,
like memory itself crystallized in fruit.

Some mornings, I cry without knowing why.
Not sadness exactly—
More like something unspoken loosening inside me.

—

From Small Things, A Rhythm

What began as nothing has become everything.

It teaches me to:

• Slow down when everything says rush.
• Choose sweetness even when life is salt.
• Find rhythm in the ritual, not the result.
• Remember that simplicity isn’t lack—it’s precision.

I’ve done this in Japan, in Basel, in a cheap hostel in Birmingham with terrible tea and brilliant sunrises.
Always with the same intention:
To begin the day with one thing that reminds me I’m not just surviving it.
I’m inhabiting it.

—

The Wabi-Sabi of a Toasted Life

Wabi-sabi says:
Imperfect things, tended to daily, become beautiful.
And so I tend to my mornings.
Not with grand affirmations or productivity hacks.
Just toast.
And apricot jam.
And stillness.

Because when life gets too much—
when news cycles spin and algorithms seduce and our dreams feel like rusted-out cars on cinderblocks—
what brings me back isn’t more ambition.
It’s less.

One small joy, chosen deliberately.

—

If you’re lost,
don’t reach for the next big thing.
Reach for your version of apricot jam.
One tiny thing done every day
until it anchors you back to yourself.

That’s how joy arrives.
On quiet feet.
Through a cracked window.
In a spoonful of something golden.

Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just true.

And just enough.