life

Month: Aug 2025

  • Why I Write Here

    steam curls from green tea
    quiet chairs in empty room
    old friends take their seats

    When I was sixteen, my mother handed me a notebook. She didn’t dress it up as a gift. She didn’t call it special. She just placed it on the table, the way someone might set down bread or fruit. The cover was a plain brown, the color of autumn dirt, soft and fragile at the corners.

    “Maybe you should write things down before they disappear,” she said.

    That was all.

    I didn’t know what she meant. At sixteen, you don’t think anything will disappear. You think every day is endless, that nothing important could possibly slip away. But I opened the notebook anyway.

    At first, I wrote about the weather. The rain that drummed on my window before school. The fog that swallowed the lamp posts and made them look like trees. The sunlight that broke through just before dinner, staining everything gold. Then I wrote about myself. About how tired I felt after cycling too far. About the way exhaustion could make your body ache and your thoughts blur. About the strange hunger that came after exams, not for food, but for silence.

    Soon the pages filled with more fragile things. My girlfriends. The excitement of holding a hand for the first time. The disappointment when words didn’t come out the way I meant them. The awkwardness of being noticed. The loneliness of being invisible. The troubles at school—the teachers who didn’t understand, the friends who slipped away.

    And then, quietly, something shifted. I began writing not only about what had happened, but what I wanted to happen. Little things. Hopes. Secret wishes I would never say aloud. A trip, a conversation, a chance. And sometimes—more often than I expected—those things arrived. Not like lightning, not instantly, but gradually, as if writing them kept them alive long enough to take root in the world.

    It felt private. Sacred. Mysterious in a way I couldn’t explain. So I kept writing.

    The notebooks multiplied. By my twenties, they were everywhere—piled in drawers, stacked in boxes, each one heavy with years that no one else had seen. Some pages were messy, scrawled in a hurry. Others were careful, written with a hand that wanted the words to last. They contained my loves, my failures, my wishes, my fears, my weather, my fatigue. They became a mirror, though I rarely looked back at them.

    Travel deepened the habit. Japan, Slovenia, Switzerland. Trains sliding through the night. Ferries rocking on dark water. Mountain paths dissolving into fog. Each journey filled more pages. Some with landscapes: volcanic craters glowing at dawn, rice fields buzzing with insects, mountains breathing in their mist. Some with smaller moments: the taste of soup when I was too tired to stand, the sound of jazz leaking from a basement bar, the smell of rain on my jacket.

    And still, hidden among them, the future appeared. Hopes I scribbled half seriously, and years later, I’d find myself living them. It wasn’t magic. But it wasn’t coincidence either.

    One day I looked at the stack of notebooks and felt a kind of sadness. I had been writing for almost two decades. But no one had ever read a word. All those fragments of my life, all that weather and fatigue and love and disappointment, were locked away in paper. It felt like I had pressed entire years into flowers no one would ever touch.

    That’s why I began this blog.

    Not because I thought the words were important. Not because I believed the world needed them. But because they deserved to breathe. Because I wanted to see what happened when the fragments stepped outside of their boxes.

    What you’ll find here is simple.

    Travel stories, but not polished itineraries—snapshots, fragments, half-moments. A station at dawn. A room with a single cracked window. A temple so quiet it made me hold my breath. Reflections on walking until my legs turned to stone. Observations on weather—the kind of rain that forces you into shelter, the sunlight that arrives just as you are about to give up, the wind that reminds you how fragile you are. Lessons, too, though I don’t like to call them that—things I once wrote to myself as reminders. Notes about patience. About persistence. About paying attention.

    I don’t live them perfectly. Most days I forget. But writing them down means they don’t vanish. Writing them down means they can come back.

    Sometimes I wonder why I still write. Why I keep going. The answer is small but steady: because it changes me. Because the act of writing is itself a kind of living. Once something is written, it can’t be taken away. Once a thought has shape, it can guide you, or haunt you, or wait patiently until you are ready.

    And sometimes, when I write something I want to happen, the world tilts. Slowly. Subtly. And years later I realize I’ve walked into the very scene I once scribbled in the margin of a notebook.

    It doesn’t happen every time. It doesn’t obey rules. But it happens often enough to leave me humbled.

    I think about my mother sometimes, the way she handed me that first notebook as if it were nothing. As if she had no idea what she was giving me. Or maybe she knew exactly. She never asked to read a page. She never pried. She just smiled when she saw me writing, as though that was enough.

    And maybe it was.

    Now, when I travel, I carry a notebook the way others carry cameras. I scribble on trains about the color of a stranger’s coat, the murmur of half-heard voices, the rhythm of the tracks beneath my feet. I write in cafés about cracked glass, about music that floats too softly to catch, about how fatigue makes even ordinary tea feel like medicine. I write on mountains about humidity, about silence, about the way the air becomes heavier as the body slows.

    Each scribble feels small, but together they form a life.

    This blog is not perfect. It is not complete. It is a mosaic of fragments: foggy mornings on ferry decks, the taste of miso soup when I hadn’t slept, the quiet of an empty street in Ljubljana, the sting of failure, the softness of love. Notes about weather. Notes about fatigue. Notes about lessons I found along the way. Some of them are practical, some are hopeful, some are simply there because I needed them.

    That is enough.

    This is what wabi-sabi means to me. Not perfection. Not a flawless story. But the acceptance that cracks are proof of life, that imperfection is the only true record of time.

    So this is why I write here.

    Because my mother once placed a notebook in my hand. Because I once thought words were too small to matter, and now I know they are the only way to keep anything from disappearing. Because travel, love, fatigue, weather, and memory are not trivial. They are everything.

    This blog is my way of holding those things to the light.

    If you read, I hope you find something here that speaks to you. Not in grand revelations, not in polished wisdom, but in fragments. Because fragments are all we truly have.

    And if, someday, you open a drawer and find a line you wrote long ago suddenly alive in your life—don’t be surprised. It happens. Quietly. Almost always when you’re not looking.

  • The Committee in the Quiet Room

    steam curls from green tea
    quiet chairs in empty room
    old friends take their seats

    One evening, at a kitchen table with chipped edges, I asked an old friend a question I couldn’t quite phrase. The kettle clicked off, releasing steam that curled like a half-forgotten memory. We poured cups of green tea, too bitter, and I told him about an idea that had followed me for months: the imaginary committee.

    He didn’t look surprised. “It’s the people you call when you’re alone,” he said, tapping his finger against the wood. “Not in flesh, but in thought. You gather them in an empty room inside your head. You sit them down and ask: what should I do with this mess of mine?”

    I liked the honesty of that—mess of mine. Life is rarely tidy. It’s a series of half-built bridges and rooms we forgot to furnish. Yet this invisible council offers something solid. A way of testing your choices against the voices you trust most.

    Not everyone is blessed with mentors. But inside, if you listen, you already carry them. A grandmother who stretched coins across seven mouths. A teacher who pressed the weight of language into your palm. A friend who laughed at your excuses. A stranger whose single sentence outlived the book it came from.

    They gather without invitation.

    Walking home later, the street was wet with rain. Neon fractured in the puddles, as if the city itself had split into pieces and had to live with the cracks. I tried to picture my own committee.

    I saw my grandmother first. Her voice, blunt as the worn blade of a kitchen knife. She never spoke of wealth, only of enough. Enough was her kingdom.

    Then came my literature teacher, who still whispers that words are dangerous tools, sharp enough to wound their owners.

    In the corner sat a novelist I’ve never met, silent, almost indifferent, reminding me that mystery has its place. Not everything should be solved.

    And there was the boy I used to be, barefoot in Slovenian fields, cupping fireflies in his hands, asking me whether I still remembered how to look at the world without fear.

    That was my committee. Not tycoons, not polished executives. Just ghosts stitched into memory.

    Travel plants new chairs at the table. A market in Fukuoka, the call of a vendor. A bus ride through mist-draped mountains in Kyushu. The rhythm of a stranger’s voice in Ljubljana. Later, when decisions arrive, those voices return. They argue, they tease, they warn, and sometimes they comfort.

    Reading does the same. Each book opens another doorway into the room. A warrior sharpening his blade, reminding you that discipline is freedom. A poet describing rivers that forget their beginnings, nudging you not to cling too tightly. A philosopher who refuses easy answers, forcing you to walk the longer path.

    This is why we read. This is why we move through unfamiliar streets. Not for souvenirs or photographs but because every encounter becomes another thread in the invisible fabric, another voice on the council that shapes us.

    The room inside grows crowded. Sometimes the voices clash. They argue like old rivals. But even in the argument, there is clarity. You are reminded to test your instincts, to step back from the easy lie of self-certainty. Alone, we are too quick to forgive our own laziness. Surrounded by the voices of those we respect, even in imagination, excuses crumble.

    I asked my friend about his own committee. He hesitated, then spoke softly.

    “My mother,” he said. “She worked in silence. She never asked for recognition, but everything I am rests on her shoulders. She’s there to tell me if I’m being lazy.”

    “Who else?” I asked.

    “A poet I read once. I don’t even remember his name. He wrote about rivers forgetting their beginnings. That one line has followed me for years. He’s there too.”

    “And anyone alive?”

    “Yes,” he said, looking at me. “You.”

    The words startled me. I laughed, embarrassed, and asked why.

    “Because you remind me not to take myself too seriously,” he said. “Every committee needs a voice like that.”

    The thought stayed with me. That we are all unknowingly sitting on each other’s councils. That we walk through the world leaving echoes behind, and those echoes live on as someone else’s compass. It made me wonder whose quiet room I inhabited. What decisions my ghost might be shaping when I wasn’t looking.

    Later that night, back in my own room, I tried the ritual. I closed my eyes, pictured the committee gathered, and placed a question before them.

    Should I keep writing these strange essays? Or surrender to the practical demands that press like heavy hands against my back?

    The committee listened. My grandmother spoke first, her tone brisk and unforgiving. “Do not waste time doubting. You already know.”

    My teacher leaned forward, eyes stern. “Words are work, not decoration. Treat them with care, or not at all.”

    The novelist said nothing, his silence somehow louder than words. Mystery, he reminded me, doesn’t need explanation.

    And the barefoot boy grinned. “You’re asking the wrong question. Stop pretending you don’t know.”

    When I opened my eyes, the room was empty again. Empty, but not empty.

    The trick is not to ask whether the committee is real. The trick is to accept that it already exists. Every person we love, every book we read, every journey we take—each one leaves behind a fragment. Together, those fragments gather, waiting to be called upon.

    And when the silence grows too heavy, when the decision feels unbearable, you can summon them. They will sit with you. They will hold your fear to the light.

    This is why reading matters. This is why travel matters. They plant new voices in the room, new perspectives to test your instincts against. A crowded committee is not confusion. It is wealth. It is survival. It is remembering that you are never truly alone.

    The world tells us to chase wealth, recognition, certainty. But judgment is the real treasure. The ability to hear the voices that challenge you, not flatter you. Judgment does not come from isolation. It comes from the council we assemble without realizing it. From the grandmother with her frugal wisdom, from the poet whose words outlast his name, from the teacher who warned you to respect the weight of language.

    And maybe, if you listen closely enough, you’ll hear yourself speaking on someone else’s committee too.

  • Weather in the Mind

    mist lifts off the stone
    a bus hums past quiet fields
    clouds forget your name

    There was a night in Ljubljana, sometime in my twenties, when I worked at a Deadmau5 concert. Not because I was a fan — though I remember the bass shaking the concrete floors like tectonic plates — but because I needed money. The job came through a friend of a friend, a temporary position at a temporary bar, the kind that disappears the moment the music stops.

    They gave me a red T-shirt with a logo I never wore again, a stack of vouchers, and pointed me toward the counter. “Pour beer. Pour vodka with Red Bull. Keep the line moving.” That was it. For hours my hands were sticky, my shirt damp, my ears ringing with the kind of beats that flatten thought. The salary was bad, a handful of euros for an entire night, but I told myself the music was payment enough.

    Beside me worked another temp. He was thin, serious, older than me by a few years, maybe early thirties. He moved with precision, pouring drinks like he had done it many times before. His English was halting, broken, but enough to pass the hours. He told me he was from China, though he didn’t say why he was in Slovenia. Maybe he was studying. Maybe working. Maybe just drifting. Some people you meet only at the edge of their stories.

    We didn’t talk much during the chaos. Just nods, short words, shrugs when the beer ran out. But when the lights dimmed and the crowd began to thin, we finally sat on empty crates behind the bar, sweat cooling on our skin. The hall was filled with silence and the sour smell of spilled alcohol. My ears buzzed with phantom beats. He lit a cigarette, drew in deeply, exhaled.

    Then he said something I’ve never forgotten.

    “Feelings… they are like weather. Passing through the mind.”

    He spoke slowly, choosing words as if testing each before releasing it. His grammar was rough, but the meaning was sharp. He flicked ash onto the floor.

    “Now calm. Now restless. Now nothing. But… not me. Just happening. The question is not: how do I feel? The question is: can I see it? Not fight. Not hold.”

    I nodded, though I didn’t really understand at the time. We didn’t speak much after that. We cleaned up, stacked the crates, threw out empty cans. By the time we left the hall, the sky was pale with dawn. I never saw him again.

    I caught the first bus out of Ljubljana central. It was half empty, rattling along narrow roads toward the outskirts. My body was exhausted, my clothes smelled of sugar and smoke, my mind dulled from the hours of noise. I leaned against the window, watching fields blur by, the mist lifting slowly from the ground.

    I was heading to my girlfriend’s place, a small flat in another town. The relationship was young, fragile, beautiful in the way early relationships often are. I thought it might last forever. It didn’t. It ended the way many things end in your twenties — with confusion, silence, and the gradual realization that what feels eternal can be as brief as morning fog.

    But I remember that bus ride more than I remember the relationship itself. The empty seats. The slow hum of the engine. The way the sunlight began to edge its way over the horizon. And most of all, the words of that stranger in broken English echoing in my head: feelings are weather.

    I carried that phrase with me without knowing why. It surfaced years later, in Basel, when I found myself unable to focus. I sat at my desk, staring at half-written notes, restless without reason. Normally I would push against it — try to distract myself, drink another coffee, force myself into clarity. But that day, for the first time, I didn’t. I simply watched. Restlessness, like a summer storm, came, thundered for a while, and then passed.

    Another time, in Shinjuku, I was walking alone at night. Neon flickered in puddles, crowds moved around me in waves, and inside I felt nothing in particular. An emptiness that might have unsettled me before. But I remembered his words. This too is weather. Clouds covering a sky that is still there, even when you can’t see it.

    The lesson wasn’t to escape feelings. It wasn’t about pretending calm when there was none. It was about remembering they were not permanent, not defining. Just weather. Passing.

    When I think of that stranger now, I realize his English, broken as it was, carried something whole. Maybe he had read it somewhere. Maybe it was his own discovery. Maybe it was just the way he made sense of a difficult life far from home. But it stayed with me more than anything else from those years.

    It taught me to stop asking “How do I feel?” as if the answer mattered more than everything else. Feelings shift. They always do. The better question is, “Can I watch them move without clinging or resisting?”

    It’s not easy. There are storms that feel endless — grief, anger, longing. But even the longest storm eventually passes. And when it does, you realize the sky was never gone. Only hidden.

    That girlfriend in Slovenia? We ended, as expected. But when I think of her now, it isn’t with regret. She was part of that season of my life, as fleeting and necessary as rain. Without her, I wouldn’t have learned what it meant to lose something important and still continue. Without her, I wouldn’t know how to let certain things go without clinging.

    The stranger from China? I never saw him again. But I’ve carried his words longer than I carried entire friendships. Maybe that was his role: to pass through, like weather, leaving behind a trace of clarity.

    And myself? I am still learning. Some mornings I wake restless, some calm, some empty. But I no longer confuse those states with who I am. They are weather, moving across the mind’s sky.

    The bed remains. The sky remains. And I remain, watching.

  • The Smallest Victories

    folded sheets whisper
    a morning breath of order
    the day aligns slow

    There’s a room I used to rent in Basel, a small corner apartment above a bakery. The smell of bread rose through the windows every morning, and if you opened them wide enough, it was like waking inside an oven. The walls were damp in winter, the ceiling cracked, and the radiator only worked when it felt like it. But I remember that room clearly because of one thing: I began making my bed every morning.

    It sounds like nothing, but at the time it was everything. The bed was a simple futon mattress on a wooden frame, the kind you could carry alone if you balanced it right. I’d fold the blanket neatly, smooth the pillow, tuck the corners in so it looked almost military. It wasn’t about neatness. It was about momentum. Before breakfast, before work, before I faced anyone else, I had already done something with order.

    Some days that was the only order I made. The world outside remained as chaotic as ever: missed trams, long lines at the post office, lectures that stretched too long. But that small act meant I had already won once. I could come home tired, defeated, and the bed would still be waiting, tidy, as if to remind me: you managed at least this.

    Years later, in Tokyo, I met a man who taught me the second habit — not directly, but by how he lived. His name was Sakamoto, though everyone just called him “Saka.” He ran a second-hand jazz bar in Nishi-Ogikubo, where the walls were lined with records stacked so precariously you felt one wrong move might bring them down. I went there often during a humid summer, mostly to sit in the cool dark with a drink in my hand.

    One evening, when the cicadas outside were shrieking loud enough to cut through Coltrane’s sax, I asked him why he never put up posters or menus.

    He shrugged. “Because then I’d be lying. I don’t know what I’ll play tomorrow, or what I’ll serve. If I tell the truth, I don’t have to remember anything.”

    At first it seemed like a joke, but the more I sat in that bar, the more I realized he lived entirely in line with that rule. He didn’t promise, he didn’t exaggerate, he didn’t sell. He simply told you what was real in that moment. If he had whisky, you got whisky. If he was out, he poured you beer. If he wasn’t in the mood for conversation, he said so.

    That habit stuck with me more than any lecture. I began to see how every small lie I told — to others, to myself — created a crack I had to keep patching. When you tell the truth, even in the smallest ways, you don’t need to patch anything. The words match the world, and the world doesn’t fight back.

    It’s not always easy. Sometimes the truth comes out awkward, or heavy, or risks losing something you’d prefer to keep. But once you get used to the discipline of aligning words with reality, you can’t go back. The bar in Nishi-Ogikubo closed years ago. Sakamoto must be older now, maybe retired, maybe gone. But every time I struggle to phrase something clearly, I hear him: “If I tell the truth, I don’t have to remember anything.”

    The third habit is quieter, harder to explain. It’s the habit of taking responsibility for one thing each day. Not everything. Just one.

    I began this in Ljubljana, during a summer when I was a student and living alone for the first time. My apartment was messy, the kind of mess that accumulates when you don’t notice small things — socks in corners, dishes stacked too long in the sink, notes scattered on the desk like autumn leaves. I felt paralyzed, like I could never catch up.

    Then one evening, after a long day of lectures, I told myself: just wash the dishes. That’s all. And so I did. It took fifteen minutes. The next day, I threw out the garbage. The day after, I swept the floor. Slowly, almost without noticing, the room transformed. The mess shrank, the air felt lighter, and I realized something important: life feels impossible when you try to carry it whole. But if you pick up one piece each day, it becomes something you can manage.

    I’ve carried that habit since. Even now, on days when nothing else seems within my reach, I look for one thing. Pay a bill. Answer a letter. Fix the handle of a drawer that’s been sticking. Each act is small, but the accumulation changes everything.

    Making a bed in Basel. Listening to Sakamoto tell the truth in a bar in Nishi-Ogikubo. Washing dishes in Ljubljana. Three habits, three different lives.

    The habits themselves aren’t extraordinary. Anyone could do them. But what they gave me was something larger than the actions themselves: a rhythm, a compass, a reminder that control, clarity, and responsibility don’t arrive as grand gestures. They come as small repetitions.

    And maybe that’s the real lesson. Not to search for the perfect system or the grand routine, but to notice the modest things that align with you, and repeat them until they form the scaffolding of a life.

    When I think back on those rooms — the damp bakery apartment in Basel, the smoky bar in Tokyo, the messy student flat in Ljubljana — I realize that what I really remember isn’t the walls or the furniture or the noise outside. It’s the habits. The small victories that shaped the air inside.

  • The Shape of Consistency

    steam on window glass
    hands repeat a quiet task
    time becomes a friend

    The best book is not the one that appears in curated lists or glossy interviews. It is the one you reach for when the laundry cycle is still spinning and the floor hums beneath your shoes.

    I learned this once in Geneva. The laundromat was narrow, fluorescent lights buzzing above cracked tiles, detergent smell floating somewhere between citrus and nothing. I had brought with me a heavy book a colleague had insisted I must read, something intellectual enough to impress, but the words slid past me like rain down glass. My eyes moved but nothing stayed. Then, on the shelf where people leave behind what they no longer need, I noticed a battered crime novel, its spine bent, its cover curling at the edges. I picked it up. Two hours passed without me noticing the machines had stopped.

    That was the first lesson. Consistency doesn’t come from the things you think you should do, but from the ones that catch you almost against your will.

    I have failed enough times to know the difference. In Zurich, one summer, I bought new running shoes, shorts, and even one of those digital watches that measured everything. I decided this would be my routine: morning runs along the lake. For two weeks I forced myself into it. But each run was an argument with my body, a negotiation I never fully won. Then one afternoon a friend lent me an old road bike, handlebar tape fraying, chain a little stiff. I rode toward Kilchberg with no plan. The rhythm of pedaling, the wind in my ears, the quiet sense of covering distance without punishment — it felt like something that belonged. The next day I rode again. And again. Consistency doesn’t feel like discipline. It feels like return.

    Food teaches this as well. During my student years in Ljubljana, I tried for a time to eat what I thought counted as healthy: complicated salads, quinoa bowls, bland lentils seasoned with guilt. They never lasted. What stayed were the simple things I wanted without effort: polenta with butter, bread still warm from the bakery, burek at four in the morning after nights out. I’ve since eaten in expensive places where plates resembled museum exhibits, but the meals I return to are humble, repetitive, and alive. The best food is not the most fashionable. It’s the one you reach for again and again without thinking.

    Work follows the same thread. The most meaningful work I’ve done came in a second-floor room in Reykjavik, above a record shop where the radiator clicked all day. The sky stayed dim for weeks at a time, never quite waking. No deadlines, no money on the line, just notes I wanted to write, ideas I needed to see outside my head. I would have paid to sit there. Hours slipped and reassembled themselves. That work was consistent because it wasn’t borrowed from someone else’s ambition. It was mine.

    I have tried the other way. I’ve copied habits from books, podcasts, clever strangers. The perfect morning routine with lemon water, ice baths, affirmation journals. Those mornings felt like borrowed clothing two sizes too small. I wore them for a week, maybe two, and then the fabric tore. What stayed, in the end, were the quiet things: sharpening knives every Sunday, cycling familiar routes until they became maps in my legs, rereading books I thought I’d outgrown.

    Consistency doesn’t shout. It lives in the modest rhythms that disguise themselves as nothing.

    I once sat in a café in Porto, windows fogged in winter, the clock on the wall five minutes slow. Every morning the same man came in, ordered a coffee and a glass of water, and copied a poem by hand into a notebook. He dated the page, closed the book, sat for a moment watching the street, then left. The ritual looked like almost nothing. But one year of that is a collection. Ten years is a life with shape.

    In Oaxaca I met a printmaker who told me sharpening was most of his work. He pulled leather across the edge of a chisel again and again, holding it against the light until it glinted the way he wanted. “The print is the shadow,” he said. “The real work is the repetition with steel.” Consistency isn’t repetition of boredom. It’s repetition of attention.

    I’ve seen the opposite. A friend in Seoul forced himself into a strict schedule because a podcast told him to. Wake at five, drink bitter tea, cold showers, affirmations that read like auditions for a role in someone else’s life. In three weeks he collapsed, angry at himself for failing. Months later he joined a neighborhood swimming group that met after work. They swam laps slowly, mostly for the steam room talk afterward. He’s been going for years now. Consistency thrives when it attaches itself to joy, to community, not to self-flagellation.

    Small frictions matter too. I leave my guitar out on a stand, because if I had to unzip a case every time, I wouldn’t play. Apples stay in a bowl on the counter, because if I put them in the fridge drawer they disappear. A pen I like rests on a notebook that always sits on the kitchen table. These things aren’t about discipline. They’re about removing the small reasons not to begin.

    The fanciest version of a habit almost never survives. The perfect gym across the city fails against the small, sweaty one down the street. The expensive leather notebook gathers dust, while the cheap Moleskine fills with words. The elaborate recipe never becomes tradition, but the bread with tomatoes and oil does.

    Shame kills more habits than laziness. People abandon simple routines because they look modest compared to someone else’s grand rituals. But modest done daily is better than grand done briefly. I had a neighbor in Vienna who did pushups every evening while waiting for water to boil. He never talked about fitness. He never bought equipment. He looked the same for years, which is to say, steady.

    I think often of the small rituals that have carried me quietly: sharpening knives with the radio on, cycling familiar roads until the bends became part of my body, rereading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species slowly, not to learn new facts but to feel how patient observation builds truth. Returning to the basics doesn’t feel like progress, but it builds the deepest grooves.

    If you need a test for whether a habit belongs to you, try this: do it every day for a week in the smallest way possible. Ten minutes instead of an hour. Five pages instead of fifty. If, on the eighth day, you reach for it automatically, keep it. If relief floods you when you stop, let it go.

    Another test: ask whether you’d keep the habit if no one knew. No tracking apps, no posts, no audience. If the answer is yes, you’ve found something close to real consistency.

    The man in Geneva who left behind that crime novel never knew he started a chain for me. Since then I always carry a book I actually want to read, not one that looks good on a table. I read in train stations, on benches, in lines where time is wasted anyway. One small decision, repeated, has become the longest shelf in my life.

    And maybe that’s all consistency really is. The willingness to let modest repetitions build until they change the texture of your days. Water wearing stone. Pages turning into chapters. Beans simmering into weeks.

    Consistency isn’t discipline in a uniform. It’s attention given permission to return.

  • The Last Search

    paper spine worn thin
    old words shift in quiet rooms
    answers wait in dust

    I can’t remember the last thing I searched for online. Not because I don’t search — I do, every day, like everyone else — but because the act itself has no weight. You type, you click, you skim, you close the tab. By the end of the day, it’s all dissolved into static, like the faint hiss of a radio left on in another room.

    What I do remember are the things I’ve returned to instead.

    On my desk in Basel sits an old paperback. Its cover is frayed, the corners soft and bent, the kind of book that feels like it has lived through more than one owner. The pages are yellowed, the font a little too small, but the smell is familiar — the dry, dusty smell of paper that has soaked up years of silence.

    I’ve been rereading the basics lately. Not the modern interpretations or the glossy summaries that condense ideas into something quick, but the roots themselves. Darwin’s books, with their patient observations of pigeons and finches. The sentences move slowly, circling, repeating — but in that slowness, there’s a kind of clarity. You begin to see how science wasn’t born in bursts of genius but in long afternoons of looking closely at what was already there.

    The same with the first biology texts I once thought too simple. I read them now not for information, but for grounding. There’s a strange comfort in reading how life begins, how cells divide, how breath itself is exchanged. These things haven’t changed, but the act of returning changes me.

    The internet doesn’t give me that. Search engines offer answers, but answers are cheap. What I’ve come to want isn’t an answer, but a depth. And depth doesn’t come from constant searching. It comes from returning.

    In Basel, during a wet spring, I would take long walks along the Rhine. The river was always the same, and yet never the same. The water moved differently with the weather, with the light, with my own mood. I never tired of it. Every walk was a kind of rereading.

    One evening in Shinjuku I felt the same thing. I was staying in a hotel above a convenience store, a narrow room with a single lamp and a window that caught the neon from across the street. I had a book with me I’d already read twice, one of those slim novels that seems almost too simple at first. I opened it again, not because I needed to, but because the streets outside felt overwhelming. I read the first chapter, and the words were different. Or maybe I was. Either way, they slowed me down, grounded me in the way a search result never could.

    In Slovenia, the same lesson came another way. Summers there stretched endlessly when I was a child, but as an adult, I returned with less time. One afternoon, I sat under a fig tree my father had planted from a branch he once carried back from the Adriatic. I watched the way the leaves shifted in the breeze, the way the light changed shape as the day moved. Nothing extraordinary happened. But in that stillness, I understood something I had missed: peace isn’t found in novelty. It’s found in noticing what’s already here.

    When I think about the last thing I searched for online, I can’t recall it. But I can recall that fig tree, the smell of the soil, the sound of cicadas in the distance. I can recall the lines of Darwin circling the shape of an idea, or the simple biology diagrams I once skipped over as too obvious. I can recall the steady flow of the Rhine and the neon glow on a Shinjuku window. These are the searches that last — the ones that require no browser.

    Sometimes I think the internet is like a broken faucet. It gushes endlessly, spraying information in every direction, but leaves you unsatisfied, still thirsty. Returning to basics — the book, the river, the tree — is like drinking from a well. Clear. Slow. Enough.

    I don’t mean to abandon technology. Maps are useful. So are train timetables, weather forecasts, and messages from people far away. But the deeper search — the one that matters — doesn’t happen in a search bar. It happens when you circle back to the foundations, the things that have been waiting quietly all along.

    That’s why lately, instead of chasing the next answer online, I’ve been rereading old books. Cooking simple meals. Listening to records that skip slightly at the edges. Walking paths I’ve walked a hundred times before. Each return reveals something different, not because the thing has changed, but because I have.

    And that, I think, is the only real search worth making: not for more, but for enough.

  • The Sharpness of Joy

    It was one of those afternoons in Sapporo when the light seems slightly off-kilter, as though the sun had chosen to lean against a different corner of the sky. I hadn’t planned on getting a haircut. In fact, I hadn’t planned much of anything that day. But when you travel long enough, you realize that some of the most necessary things happen only by accident.

    I had walked past two barbershops already. Both were full. Their chairs occupied by men staring blankly into mirrors while clumps of dark hair fell like soft punctuation marks around their shoes. I was about to give up when I noticed a narrow shop tucked between a bakery and a place that sold second-hand jazz records. The glass door carried a hand-painted sign: Nori’s.

    I slid the door open and stepped into the scent of sandalwood and something metallic, sharp, like fresh rain against stone. A man looked up from polishing a pair of scissors. He was lean, wearing a black apron, his hair tied back in a way that was both casual and deliberate.

    “Do you have time for a cut?” I asked, half expecting him to shake his head like the others.

    He smiled, easy and warm. “You’re in luck. Everyone else seems to be busy today, but I’ve got time. Take a seat.”

    His name was Nori. I asked him once, between the quiet snips of his scissors, what it meant. He laughed softly and said, “It’s short for Noriyuki. But you can think of it like seaweed. Something simple, always there in Japanese life, holding things together.”

    There was something grounding about that explanation. Seaweed is never the main dish, but it binds, balances, gives depth without asking for attention. In a way, that was Nori himself.

    As he wrapped the cape around me, we began to talk. His English was flawless, not the cautious rhythm of someone who studied from textbooks, but alive, quick, with the easy slouch of someone who had lived inside the language.

    “I was born in Chicago,” he said, running a comb through my hair with an almost meditative precision. “Then moved to Philadelphia when I was still young. Spent most of my childhood there. But my grandmother lived here, in Hokkaido. After college, I came back to see her. And I never left.”

    I asked him why. He paused, razor glinting in his hand.

    “Because when you’re young, you think the world is measured in how far you can go. But sometimes the most meaningful thing is going back. My grandmother was getting older. She cooked miso soup every morning. She had this way of humming old songs while hanging laundry. I realized that if I didn’t return, I’d miss all of it. And missing it would be permanent.”

    He met his wife here, he said, not long after. She was from a nearby town. They had a daughter now, still small enough to think the world was no larger than the park outside their home.

    “I wanted to start a business,” Nori continued. “Something honest. Something with craft. I learned that in Japan, only Japanese citizens can hold a barber’s license. Maybe it’s protectionist, maybe it’s tradition, but it meant that I had a kind of luck. I studied, practiced, and here I am.”

    His razor moved along the curve of my neck with a calm confidence that made me think of a calligrapher’s brushstroke. He explained his philosophy as he worked.

    “A barbershop isn’t just about hair. People come in with their heads heavy. They sit down, and suddenly they have permission to let go of things they’d been holding in. I’ve heard confessions, heartbreak, joy, fear — all while cutting hair. My tools are sharp, but the space I want to create here is soft. A place where people feel lighter when they leave. Not just because their hair is shorter.”

    I thought about that as he worked. The hum of the clippers, the low music from a radio on the shelf, the faint creak of the old wooden floor beneath the chair. Everything conspired to create an atmosphere where time moved differently.

    At one point, he asked me: “What’s the emotion you feel most often?”

    The question hung there, suspended like the strands of hair drifting down around me.

    For a long time, I would have answered with something less flattering: restlessness, maybe. A constant pull to be somewhere else, to do something different, to escape the feeling of standing still. But lately, I’ve realized the emotion I return to, the one that threads itself through my days more than anything else, is joy. Not the loud kind, not fireworks or applause. The quiet joy of a warm bowl of ramen after cycling under the August sun. The joy of a 50-cent burek eaten on the streets of Ljubljana at four in the morning. The joy of listening, really listening, to a stranger’s story while the scissors whisper close to your ear.

    Joy, I’ve learned, is not about scale. It doesn’t ask for grandness. It asks for presence.

    fresh cut in the light
    strangers share unguarded words —
    joy hums like a blade

    When Nori finished, he brushed the last stray hairs from my shoulders and turned the chair toward the mirror. The cut was sharp, deliberate, balanced — but more than that, I noticed I felt lighter. Not just on my head, but in the way I carried myself.

    Maybe that’s what joy really is: not something you chase, but something you allow. A state you return to, again and again, like the simple taste of seaweed in miso soup, or the steady hand of a barber who knows that his craft is more than a craft.

    Outside, the Sapporo air was still strange with light. I carried the feeling with me as I walked, sharper than the razor, softer than the cape that had rested on my shoulders.

    And I thought — joy, the emotion I feel most often, isn’t just mine. It’s something shared, like a story told over a haircut, or a smile across the barber’s chair.

  • The Shape of a Goal

    It was late summer in Asahikawa, the kind of August where the air carries a faint heaviness, as if the mountains had exhaled and decided not to breathe in again for a while. I had been wandering for most of the day, letting the streets decide my direction. The light was slow, stretched out, and the smell of grilled corn from a street stall followed me for blocks.

    That’s when I stepped into the café. Not because I was looking for coffee — I’d already had too much — but because it was there, narrow and quiet, with just enough space between the tables to imagine that the outside world didn’t exist. Inside, an Italian man sat near the back, his table crowded with strange, unassuming objects. A rusted key, a weathered train station stamp book, a kokeshi doll with a cracked face.

    We spoke because I commented on the enamel sign leaning against his chair. He told me he was traveling through Japan, collecting what he called “objects with memory.” He didn’t buy them from antique shops. He found them in corners no one looked at anymore — abandoned fishing shacks, half-collapsed farmhouses, the back shelves of shops run by people too old to care about selling anything.

    That evening we met again, in a bar hidden behind a liquor store, the kind you’d miss unless you knew where to push the sliding door. It was dim and cool inside, the kind of place where Guinness somehow tasted as though it had been poured from a dream. Over the second round, he told me about a friend of his, another traveler, whose singular goal was to stand on the easternmost point of Japan and watch the first sunrise in the world.

    He described it like a pilgrimage — the long trains, the buses that only came twice a day, the small towns where the vending machines hummed louder than the streets. I imagined this friend standing there, the Pacific wind pushing against him, knowing he was the first person to see that day’s light. There’s a quiet seduction in being first, in believing you’ve reached something before the rest of the world can catch up.

    But I also knew, without even thinking, that I’d never want that to be my goal.

    For a long time, my own ambitions were hand-me-downs. I picked them up from people I admired, from conversations that stuck in my head long after they ended. I tried them on the way you try on clothes that look good on someone else. They almost never fit. And even when I reached them, there was an empty aftertaste, like tea brewed too long.

    These days I plan differently. I start from where I’m standing. My goals aren’t measured by how they look from a distance, but by how they feel on an ordinary Tuesday when no one’s watching. They have to match the rhythm of my days, not the imagined applause of strangers.

    The Italian man’s friend made it, eventually. I saw a photograph later — the two of them holding paper cups of coffee, the ocean behind them a sheet of hammered copper under the new light. It was beautiful, in that way certain photographs are beautiful precisely because you weren’t there.

    But I thought about the hours after. The buses back through quiet fishing villages. The convenience stores selling the same triangle sandwiches, the same bottled tea. The way achievement dissolves into routine as the day moves on. And I knew — if you don’t enjoy the road to the goal, the goal itself will never be enough.

    I’ve learned something that feels almost like a rule: you should only envy someone if you’d trade for their entire life, not just the part they show you. If you wouldn’t take all of it — the mundane, the lonely, the uncertain — then the envy is only static.

    My own goals are smaller now. Finishing a piece of writing that feels alive. Cycling a route until every bend feels familiar. Learning to repair something until my hands remember the movements on their own. They don’t make for impressive stories. They won’t be printed on postcards. But they make the days feel lived in.

    Once, in a damp dormitory in Basel, I wrote down every goal I thought I had. The page was crowded with things that didn’t belong to me — things I wanted only because other people seemed to want them. It took years to understand that the most valuable thing I carried wasn’t ambition, but the ability to decide which dreams were mine and which were borrowed.

    Sometimes, letting go of a goal feels like failure. But there’s a wabi-sabi kind of peace in accepting that not every sunrise is meant for you. The world is too wide, and life too short, to chase light that was never supposed to fall on your face.

    The Italian man still writes me sometimes, from places I’ve never been. And maybe his friend still talks about that morning at the edge of Japan, the way the sea looked like it could hold the sun without spilling a drop. I hope he does. For him, it was the right goal.

    And that’s the truth of it: the shape of a goal is personal. It should fit like a well-used cup in your hand — not because it’s perfect, but because it’s yours.

  • What Brings Me Peace

    the quiet settles
    in a way rain never does
    slow but permanent

    I’ve spent most of my life without knowing what peace really was. Not the absence of noise — that’s too easy — but the kind where your mind finally stops pacing the corridors of itself.

    For years, I thought the restlessness was just part of who I was. A faint hum under the surface that never left. Some days it was a quiet static. Other days it was like being trapped in a crowded train car with too many people talking at once. I never thought to question it. You learn to move through the world in the way you’ve always moved.

    It wasn’t until I started writing things down that I noticed certain places, certain moments, made that hum fade. I’d return to them without understanding why. Now, looking back, I see the pattern.

    The first time was in a small apartment in Basel, early spring. I’d cleared out most of the furniture after a move, and for weeks the only things in the room were a table, a chair, and a plant that looked half asleep. There was nothing to straighten, nothing to fix. I remember sitting there with a cup of coffee, noticing how my thoughts seemed to find their own order. The space wasn’t beautiful. It was just… absent of friction.

    I’ve found the same feeling on a long walk, when my legs find a rhythm that doesn’t need my attention anymore. Or cycling along the Rhine when the air is neither cold nor warm, just the temperature of moving water. In those moments, the mind stops scanning for what’s next and settles into what’s here.

    I’ve noticed it in small anchors, too. The way kneading clay pulls my focus through my hands. The soft thud of bread dough folding over itself. Even writing by hand in a notebook — the scratch of the pen is enough to keep the rest of me tethered.

    There was a winter in Shinjuku when I stayed in a hotel near a back street of izakayas. At night, the air smelled of grilled fish and wood smoke. My room was small enough that I could reach the desk from the bed without standing up. I had a single lamp with a warm bulb, a stack of books, and a window that caught the neon from across the street. Outside was chaos, but inside was a contained world. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was peace too — not because it was silent, but because nothing inside the room was pulling at me.

    It’s taken me most of my life to see that peace isn’t something you build in a single sweep. It’s a thousand small adjustments. Less noise. Fewer open tabs, in the mind and on the screen. Enough light to see without squinting. Objects where they belong. The right amount of movement, the kind that doesn’t demand attention.

    And maybe most important — letting go of the running commentary that plays in the background. I’ve been my own harshest critic for as long as I can remember. That voice never built anything for me. The times I’ve managed to replace it with something gentler, or with silence, are the times I’ve felt most whole.

    Some of this I learned by accident. Some I wrote down before I understood its value. And now, when I feel the static rising again, I know where to look: toward spaces that give more than they take, rhythms that carry me without effort, and people who see my edges and don’t try to sand them down.

    Maybe peace was never meant to be chased. Maybe it was always meant to be noticed.

  • The Shop That Might Exist

    cedar scent drifts in
    dust settling on an old shelf
    light moves without sound

    There’s a street in my head that I can never place on a map. It could be in Europe, or somewhere in Japan, or somewhere in between. Cobbled, narrow, the kind of street you only find after getting lost. I don’t go there often, but when I do, it’s always late afternoon. The light is low, heavy in the way it falls.

    Halfway along is a door. It’s not an interesting door. The frame leans slightly to the left. The paint is chipped. You could walk past it a hundred times and never notice. But I’ve stepped inside.

    It smells faintly of damp wood and tea that’s been steeped too long. The shelves are uneven, not by design, just from years of standing there. Nothing is arranged in order. A ceramic cup with a crack that looks like a thin bolt of lightning. A fishing knife from Kyushu, the blade dulled to the point where it’s more memory than tool. A noren from Takayama, its colors faded by more than just the sun.

    None of these things would sell for much. But I know exactly where each came from. The cup from a rainy morning in Naples, when the streets felt like they belonged to no one. The knife from a shop that only opened when the owner felt like it. The noren from a woman whose hands shook when she painted, but whose lines never wavered.

    I don’t imagine customers coming here for bargains. If they come at all, it’s because they see something they can’t quite name but recognize all the same. The object itself matters less than the path it took to arrive.

    It took me years to understand that the same rule applies outside of any shop. People spend their lives trying to be the best at something big, something crowded. But the space that’s truly yours is the one built out of the strange mix only you could have arrived at—places you’ve stood, skills you’ve stacked, moments you’ve carried without realizing.

    In Basel, I once saw a man in his seventies repair a cracked enamel bowl at a flea market. He told me it had been in his family for decades, used for holding Christmas cookies. He didn’t repair it to sell it. He repaired it because it was still useful. That’s the kind of thinking I’ve tried to keep. Not polishing things until they’re unrecognizable, but keeping the marks that prove they’ve been used.

    Shinjuku gave me another reminder. I bought a second-hand jacket there once, from a shop wedged between a bar and a shuttered video rental store. The shopkeeper didn’t say much, just wrapped it neatly and nodded. It fit perfectly, but more than that, it carried the weight of whoever had worn it before. I never learned who. I didn’t need to.

    Maybe I’ll open the shop one day. Maybe it will stay in my head. Either way, I’ve already been stocking the shelves, even if I didn’t realize it. Every place, every object, every conversation leaves something behind. The trick is noticing when it’s worth keeping.

  • The One Thing You Carry

    pockets feel lighter
    when the weight is in the mind—
    stone worn smooth by years

    It’s the kind of question that invites quick answers.
    What’s the most important thing to carry with you all the time?

    You could say your phone, your keys, your wallet. Maybe hope, courage, or some equally polished word that sits well on a coffee mug. But I’ve learned that for me, the answer isn’t an object or even a feeling. It’s something quieter, less visible, but far heavier when you don’t have it.

    It’s the pause.

    I didn’t always carry it.
    In my twenties, I moved too quickly through conversations, decisions, nights out. I said things without thinking. I agreed to things without knowing why. There was no gap between impulse and action—no space for reflection. And inevitably, the regret came trailing after, like a stray dog that always knew where to find me.

    The first time I noticed the pause was in Basel, on a day so ordinary it should have disappeared into the cracks of memory. Rain fell steady, turning the cobblestones slick and dark. I was walking back from Marktplatz with a bag of vegetables from the Saturday market. My hands were cold. I was tired. And there it was—this urge to say something sharp to someone who didn’t deserve it.

    In the space of a heartbeat, I stopped. I didn’t say it. The thought dissolved like a sugar cube in coffee, disappearing without leaving a trace. The air felt lighter. My chest felt lighter. And I realized: this wasn’t just self-control. This was a compass pointing away from the territory where regret grows.

    I carried that compass into other places—into other versions of myself.
    Years later, I found myself in Shinjuku, walking under the glowing kanji signs that blinked in the humid summer night. The air smelled like rain on asphalt, soy sauce, and cigarette smoke. I’d been in Tokyo for a week, drifting between late-night ramen counters and bars small enough that you had to duck to enter.

    One night, outside a place tucked under the railway tracks, a stranger invited me in. The beer was cold, the light golden, the kind of night where temptation walks easily through the door. A younger version of me would have gone without thinking. But somewhere in the folds of memory, I reached for that same pause I’d picked up in Basel. I let it sit in my palm, heavy and familiar. And I walked away.

    It didn’t feel like missing out. It felt like keeping something.

    The pause became a habit the way a river becomes a canyon—slowly, by wearing down the rough edges. And like any good habit, it’s not about perfection. I still fail. I still say things I wish I hadn’t. But the number of times I fail is less, and that’s enough.

    I’ve learned that flaws aren’t always meant to be fixed. Some are temporary—born from fatigue, hunger, or mood. Others are permanent, carved deep by years of habit or by forces we never controlled: genetics, accidents, sheer chance. You can’t sand away every imperfection any more than you can glue a cracked teacup into something flawless. But you can choose not to pour boiling water into it.

    That’s the wabi-sabi truth: restraint isn’t denial—it’s care. It’s the quiet decision to live alongside the crack without making it worse.

    I think often about my old mentor from Birmingham.
    We met when I was staying at Aston University, in a damp dormitory where moisture gathered at the windows like thoughts you couldn’t shake off. He was a pharmacist by training, but he’d lived many other lives before that. A former cyclist, sun-browned and wiry, the kind of man who seemed tethered to nothing but his own curiosity.

    One afternoon, we sat under a tree near the edge of campus, the kind of day when the wind carries both the smell of rain and the warmth of sun. He told me something I didn’t understand until much later: Everyone you’re sitting with right now will stay with you—some as colleagues, some as friends, and some as memories.

    I carry him with me still. A couple of years later, he stopped replying to emails. Only later did I learn he’d died of spinal cancer. It struck me that the pause is also a way of carrying people. When you stop before speaking, before acting, you make room for all the voices and lessons you’ve collected over the years to speak up.

    Modern life doesn’t make pausing easy. The world is engineered for speed. Instant replies, instant purchases, instant reactions. And yet, the best choices I’ve made have come from resisting that design—creating my own gap between the urge and the act.

    The pause has saved me from more than just awkward conversations or impulsive “yeses.” It has kept me from sinking into habits I knew would cost me. Some urges promise pleasure now and regret later. That pause is the one tool that lets you see past the first half of the equation.

    It’s not about self-denial. It’s about self-respect. The most important thing you can carry isn’t the thing that helps you move faster—it’s the thing that lets you decide when not to move at all.

    In Basel, I sometimes sit by the Mittlere Brücke, watching the river slip past in shades of brown and green. I think of Shinjuku’s neon, of the damp dormitory in Birmingham, of my mentor’s voice under the leaves. I think about how life is less about what we accumulate and more about what we choose to keep—and what we choose to set down.

    Keys can be lost. Phones can break. Wallets can be stolen. But the pause, once you learn to carry it, is yours alone. It weighs nothing and yet holds the shape of your entire life.

    If you ask me now what the most important thing to carry is, I won’t hand you an object. I’ll hand you a breath between the urge and the act, the stillness that lets you walk away from regret before it takes root.

    Keep it with you. Always.

    And if you forget it—well—just pause, and pick it up again.

  • The Quiet Between the Urge and the Act

    rain-streaked windows glow
    in the pause before the step—
    regret walks slower

    I used to think the biggest change I could make in the world would come from something grand.
    A book written.
    A business built.
    A movement started.

    The kinds of changes people point to in newspapers and say, “That’s what mattered.”

    But I’ve started to believe the most meaningful change might be much smaller.
    It began the first time I admitted—quietly, without excuse—that I have flaws.
    Not just the charming, harmless kind. The real ones.
    The kind that feel like they’re stitched into your nervous system, always ready to tug you off course.

    And more importantly, I learned not to engage with them when I can see—really see—that the outcome will be the same old pattern of regret.

    Basel

    Basel in late autumn has a particular stillness to it.
    The trams pass like slow-moving rivers of light, the old town smells faintly of roasted chestnuts, and the Rhine curls its green-grey body around the city as if it’s keeping a secret.
    I’d been back from Japan for only a few days, still half-jetlagged, drifting through my own city like a guest.

    One cold Tuesday evening, I stopped by a café near Wettsteinplatz. I’d been working all day, staring at the screen until my eyes stung, when the familiar itch came—the desire to take the edge off.
    Nothing dramatic. Just a drink, maybe two. The sort of thing you convince yourself you deserve.

    I almost went.
    I could picture it: walking into a warm bar, the easy hum of conversation, that first smooth swallow.
    But I’d been here before. I knew the line between taking the edge off and tipping over it.

    Instead, I walked along the Rhine until my ears burned from the cold, then went home and made tea.
    It didn’t feel noble. It felt strange.
    But the next morning, I woke without the quiet fog that used to trail me for hours after those nights.

    It struck me then: sometimes the biggest change is not what you start doing—it’s what you stop doing.

    Shinjuku

    A few months before that, I had been in Shinjuku during one of those unbearable August nights when the air feels too thick to breathe.
    I’d ducked into a bar the size of a walk-in closet, no more than four stools pressed to a narrow counter. A woman in her fifties stood behind it, pouring highballs with the precision of a surgeon.

    Outside, the city buzzed with its endless, electric urgency.
    Inside, time moved like syrup.

    I’d planned on staying for two drinks.
    That was always the plan.
    But I knew myself too well. I knew that somewhere between the second and third glass, my internal compass would shift—not toward adventure, but toward that particular brand of aimless wandering that always ends in the kind of morning where the only thing you accomplish is a slow, steady regret.

    So I left after one.
    Not because I didn’t want another, but because I’d started to recognize that moment between the urge and the act—and how much could be saved by simply sitting in it, letting the itch fade.

    Flaws You Can’t Negotiate

    It’s taken me years to understand that not all flaws are the same.

    Some are beyond our control:
    Genetics that hand you a weaker heart.
    An accident that leaves you with pain you didn’t earn.
    The slow attrition of age, joints creaking like old wood.

    You carry those differently. Not with the guilt of having chosen them, but with the quiet work of living around them.

    But the other kind—dopamine-driven, impulse-fed, pleasure-chasing flaws—are different.
    They thrive in the world we live in now, where every pocket buzz and glowing screen is a little tap on the glass of your attention.

    In Shinjuku, neon makes it feel like nothing bad can happen as long as you keep moving.
    In Basel, the quiet can trick you into thinking you’ve outgrown certain mistakes—until you’re two steps away from making them again.

    The Pause

    The older I get, the more I’ve come to value the pause.
    That narrow gap between wanting and doing.
    It’s not dramatic. No one claps for you when you choose tea over another drink, or when you turn off your phone instead of scrolling yourself numb.
    But over time, those small refusals stack into something that changes the texture of your days.

    One evening in Basel, I sat by the Mittlere Brücke and watched the current push against the bridge’s stone pillars. The river didn’t rush. It didn’t need to. It simply moved, carrying leaves, stray twigs, a plastic bottle someone had let slip.

    It felt like a lesson in itself: you don’t have to fight every current—just the ones that pull you somewhere you don’t want to go.

    Parallel Nights

    Another night in Basel, late spring, I found myself wandering back from a friend’s flat in St. Johann.
    The streets were nearly empty, the warm air holding the faint scent of wisteria from a nearby garden.
    I passed by a bar whose open windows spilled laughter into the street. For a moment, I slowed. I could almost see myself inside, leaning into the easy anonymity of strangers, riding that quick lift of alcohol-induced warmth.

    But I kept walking. I stopped at the kiosk instead, bought a cold mineral water, and drank it while leaning against the rail above the Rhine.

    Months later, in Shinjuku, I had a near-identical moment.
    It was well past midnight, and I’d been walking aimlessly after leaving Golden Gai. I stopped outside a late-night izakaya, the smell of grilled yakitori thick in the air, the sound of voices rising in waves from inside.
    I thought of Basel. I thought of how good it had felt to wake clear-headed the next morning. And I turned away, letting the street swallow me back into its maze.

    What Remains

    If I’m honest, I don’t know if this practice—of pausing, of declining—will ever change the world in any measurable way.
    It’s not the kind of thing you can photograph or write a headline about.

    But it has changed my world.

    Fewer mornings spent in that low-grade shame you can’t quite explain.
    More nights ending in quiet satisfaction instead of restless searching.
    More moments that feel lived-in, rather than consumed.

    The Wabi-Sabi of It

    Wabi-sabi teaches that imperfection is not only inevitable, but beautiful.
    You accept the cracks that can’t be mended.
    But you also take care not to make new ones with your own hands.

    Some flaws you carry.
    Some flaws you refuse to feed.

    And maybe that’s all we can hope for—that in the space between the two, there’s room for a life you can stand to live with.

  • My Life in an Alternate Universe

    — wabisabi of human life

    Other world, same eyes—
    every soul a distant star,
    each story, its own

    If my life unfolded in an alternate universe, I like to think I’d recognize it by a certain slant of afternoon light—a shade just unfamiliar enough to feel like a dream. Maybe in that world, I live in a quiet port town on a different sea. Or I teach at a windswept school perched on a cliff, the sky wider, the air saltier, the questions my students ask even stranger than the ones that kept me up at night in this world.

    But no matter where I end up, the thing I cannot unsee, after so many crossings and conversations, is this: every person lives in their own, unrepeatable universe. No two people see the same world, even if they stand side by side on the same balcony, drinking the same bitter coffee, watching the same clouds scud over the city.

    I didn’t know this as a child. Back then, I believed the world was a single, solid thing—one set of rules, one story, one sun. My universe was the sum of what I knew: the language at my dinner table, the streets I rode my bike through, the rhythms of my parents’ laughter and arguments. I thought other people’s lives were just distant variations, minor edits on my own script.

    It took years, and the slow patience of adulthood, to understand otherwise.
    It took sitting across from strangers on slow trains—old women with hands shaped by fields, men who left home at sixteen and never came back, friends whose pain lay just beneath the surface of their jokes. It took late-night talks in borrowed kitchens, hiking in unfamiliar hills, listening without interrupting as someone unspooled a memory I could never have imagined.

    Little by little, I realized: every person is a world. Every conversation is a meeting of galaxies. Each carries wounds and wonders invisible to anyone else. What is ordinary for me—a taste, a smell, the weight of a word—might be miraculous or unbearable for you. We all move through the world with maps drawn in secret, navigating by stars only we can see.

    When you finally let this truth in, everything changes. You start approaching others with radical curiosity and humility. You pause before judging, knowing their logic may have roots you’ll never fully understand. You become gentler—with others and yourself. You listen longer, realizing that connection is possible only when you accept that their universe is as strange, rich, and alive as your own.

    And somewhere in that recognition, a kind of freedom appears. You are released from the burden of always being right, or always being understood. You learn to marvel at the diversity of experience, the secret colors in every life.

    In my alternate universe, I try to hold this lesson even closer. I greet strangers as explorers from another world. I ask questions, not to confirm what I already know, but to expand the boundaries of my own reality. I accept that I will never truly grasp another’s universe—but I can honor it, even from a distance.

    Maybe that’s the real work in any universe:
    To look at the world—your world, and everyone else’s—with open eyes and open hands.
    To be curious, and humble, and grateful for the wild, impossible richness of being alive together, even if just for a moment, on this particular slant of afternoon light.

    If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in someone else’s universe, or to see your own with new eyes, subscribe. There are endless stories to share—yours, mine, and all the worlds we’ll never quite reach, but can still imagine.

  • The Price of Taste

    Summer sweat and steam—
    bowl of broth in quiet hands,
    worth more than money

    I’ve been asked, now and then, about the most money I’ve ever spent on a meal. I try to remember—there must have been a dinner somewhere, years ago, where the wine came in crystal glasses and the menu was written in a language nobody at the table could pronounce. I remember the sharp crack of a breadstick, the hush of waiters moving through a room heavy with expectation, the gentle confusion of trying to match fork to plate.

    But when I think of the best meals of my life, the ones that still live in my bones, the price is always a footnote. What comes back is the heat of the day, the ache in my legs, the quiet that follows a long journey.

    Onomichi, early summer. The sun so relentless it felt like you could taste it on your skin, the back of your shirt glued to your spine. I’d just finished cycling from Onomichi to Imabari, my bags heavy with omiyage—tiny boxes of sweets and folded paper cranes, gifts I couldn’t resist. The ferry ride over the Seto Inland Sea, the slow grind of the pedals, the bridges that stretched forever over blue water and whitecaps.

    By the time I made it back to town, I was salt-crusted, starving, delirious with that mix of exhaustion and simple happiness that only comes after a day spent moving under your own power. I wandered into a ramen joint by the station—800 yen for a bowl, cash up front. There was nothing special about the place: formica counters, faded posters, a clock that might have been broken for years.

    But the broth was hot and smoky, the noodles chewy and full of life. I sat in the shade, sweat drying on my arms, listening to the whirr of a fan and the low hum of the chef’s radio. Each bite was a miracle. Not because it was rare, or expensive, or even particularly inventive. It was perfect because I was hungry in all the right ways. The memory of it lingers—an ordinary meal, made extraordinary by the long road before it.

    It’s the same kind of memory that finds me when I think back to Ljubljana in the 2000s, when I was a student and the nights seemed longer than the days. After the bars closed and the streets emptied, there was always the burek stand by the river. Fifty cents—less than a cup of coffee now—for a warm slab of pastry stuffed with cheese, meat, or potato, wrapped in greasy paper. We’d sit on the curb, knees tucked to our chests, steam rising from the food, laughter echoing off the stone.

    It didn’t matter that we had nothing—no money, no real plans, just the easy camaraderie of being young and in-between. The best meals, I’ve learned, are always a kind of accident. They happen when you’re tired, or lost, or with people who see you clearly. Money doesn’t buy those moments. Sometimes, it gets in the way.

    There have been other meals, of course. Birthdays in quiet restaurants, a tasting menu in Paris paid for with a week’s wages, a celebratory dinner after a job offer. The food was beautiful, the plates a gallery of color and ambition. But the memory is softer, somehow, blurred by expectation and the slow churn of time.

    I think about this often, the strange arithmetic of value and pleasure. The world tells us that the best things are the rarest, the most expensive, the hardest to get. But my heart keeps returning to cheap ramen after a long ride, burek at dawn, bread and cheese on a park bench with someone you love. The flavor is memory, and memory is always seasoned by context—heat, fatigue, laughter, longing.

    The world will always tempt you with the idea that satisfaction lies just beyond your reach: a better restaurant, a higher price, something that proves you’ve made it. But real satisfaction, I’ve found, is not a matter of cost, but of presence. If you can learn to want less, to savor more, to notice the company and the moment, every meal becomes a feast.

    That’s the wabi-sabi lesson—beauty in the imperfect, the worn, the simple. A chipped bowl on a hot day can hold more happiness than any starched tablecloth or silver spoon. The memory that lingers is not of perfection, but of a moment lived fully, hunger meeting comfort in a way that feels honest.

    You don’t need to chase every new desire, or spend your way into happiness. Sometimes the most valuable thing is to stop, look around, and realize you have enough. Maybe even more than enough.

    If you’ve ever had a meal that cost nothing but meant everything, subscribe. There’s more to share in these small stories—steam, sweat, good company, and the quiet magic of enough.

  • Headlines, Dopamine, and the Quiet World

    — wabisabi of human life

    Old newsprint curling
    words pile, unused and weightless—
    the silence unfolds

    This morning I opened the news app on my phone, thumb scrolling without much purpose, and landed on an article about a new roundabout being installed on the outskirts of a small town in northern Switzerland. The photo showed four men in high-visibility vests, arms folded, squinting at a patch of gravel where the old traffic light had once stood. The story itself was breathtakingly uninteresting: construction delays, mild confusion about the signage, a quote from a local councilwoman about “increasing traffic efficiency for the next generation.”

    I stared at the photo for a long time, waiting for my brain to care. It didn’t.

    But something in the blandness of it all lingered as I drank my coffee, the bitter taste more interesting than the news itself. Why did I even open the app? Why did I read this story—why read any of them? In that moment, a memory from my teens flickered up, as if summoned by the emptiness.

    When I was sixteen, I read a self-help book that claimed the world would be better off if more people stopped reading newspapers. The author—a retired businessman, I think, who looked annoyingly content in his dust jacket photo—insisted he hadn’t read the news in decades. “I only scan the headlines,” he wrote. “If something truly matters, it will find its way to me.”

    At the time, this seemed both rebellious and deeply irresponsible. How could anyone willingly ignore the world? I was hungry for information, as most young people are, wanting to know everything, everywhere, all at once. I devoured newspapers, magazines, radio, the bottomless forums of the early internet. Each day I built my own mental mosaic of facts and outrage. I knew about airline disasters in Malaysia, election fraud in obscure provinces, a heatwave in southern France. If a starlet tripped on her dress at the Oscars, I knew that too.

    But somewhere in those years, a quiet fatigue set in. The headlines blurred together. The stories repeated: disaster, outrage, miracle, repeat. I began to notice how little control I had over any of it, how the news never seemed to resolve—only accumulate, like dust in the corners of a forgotten room.

    Looking back, I see it wasn’t just about the news. It was about my brain—our brains—not being evolved for this kind of relentless input. We are built for stories, yes, but stories with endings, characters we might meet, choices that matter. The news, as it is now, is more like weather: constant, changeable, rarely actionable. It left me restless, unable to act but unable to look away.

    Over time, I found myself taking the self-help advice, almost by accident. I stopped reading entire articles. I let most headlines drift past. Some mornings, I didn’t check the news at all. And a strange thing happened: I noticed more silence in my days. I felt lighter, less entangled in things I could not change.

    But silence, I realized, is not just an absence—it is an invitation. In the quiet, other cravings emerge. My phone became a companion, always offering something: a message, a photo, a new app. Sometimes, late at night, I would catch myself refreshing the newsfeed, searching for stimulation, even as my mind pleaded for sleep.

    It took years, and a long detour through distraction and mild compulsion, to understand what was happening. Each notification, each headline, was a hit—a small surge of interest, anticipation, disappointment. I started to see the pattern in myself, and in everyone around me. At the tram stop in Bern, ten people waiting for the Number 9, all eyes on their screens, flicking through their own private weather of news and novelty.

    Dopamine, though I didn’t know the word for it then, was the culprit. Not a villain, just a chemical—one that kept me seeking, reaching, never quite satisfied. It wasn’t just the news: it was everything. The urge to check messages, to snack, to scroll, to click. A brain built to forage in forests now lost in an endless field of easy pleasure.

    The problem, I learned, was not pleasure itself but the imbalance it creates. Too much seeking, too little stillness, and the baseline shifts. What once brought joy—a surprise letter, a meaningful article, a walk with a friend—starts to feel bland, insufficient. The brain, hungry for more, finds less and less to enjoy.

    I began to experiment, almost playfully, with small acts of deprivation. A day without news, a week without social media. A weekend where the phone stayed at home, and I wandered the city with only a notebook and the sound of my own footsteps. The discomfort at first was real, almost physical. I noticed how often my hand reached for the phantom device. I felt, for a while, like I was missing out, falling behind, untethered from the world.

    But then, after the withdrawal, something else appeared: a sense of balance. The quiet was no longer empty—it was full. Full of small details, the shape of clouds, the way people spoke in the bakery, the slow drift of afternoon sunlight on the kitchen wall. My mind felt less like a crowded train station and more like a quiet path in the woods.

    Of course, there are days when the old compulsions return. Some news stories catch me, pulling me in, and suddenly I am lost again in the endless feed. Sometimes it is a tragedy, sometimes a scandal, sometimes just the dull comfort of seeing the world spin on, as if my own stillness mattered less in the face of so much motion.

    But now, I try to greet these moments with a kind of radical honesty. I don’t pretend I am above it. I don’t shame myself for falling into the cycle. I simply notice, share the struggle with friends who understand, and let the craving pass. If anything, I am grateful for the awareness—the chance to see how even the most boring news stories can teach us something, if only about the limits of our own attention.

    The truth is, it’s not the headlines themselves that matter, but the rhythms they set in your life. I think back to my teens again, remembering the feeling of needing to know—everything, all the time. My mind was like a radio left on in the background, picking up every signal, every distant storm, static always in the air.

    In those days, I used to sit at the kitchen table with my father. He liked his coffee strong, so black it left a sheen on the cup. Sometimes he’d spread out the newspaper and just look at the front page for a long while. I noticed, after a few years, he rarely turned the page. Once, I asked him why.

    He shrugged, staring into the cup. “Most of it doesn’t change much. If something important happens, you’ll hear it before you read it.”

    At sixteen, I thought that was defeat. Now, I think it was a quiet form of wisdom. There’s only so much noise you can let in before it drowns out everything else.

    The habit stayed with me, but it didn’t come easy. I’d catch myself scanning, collecting, consuming—always reaching for one more piece of information, one more little bite of knowing. Sometimes it was the news; sometimes it was food, or a new show, or even the feeling of checking off another task on a to-do list. The brain learns to chase these small rewards, always looking for the next bright thing.

    But in the background, a dull ache would form. The more I tried to fill the space, the less it seemed to hold. Joy lost its sharpness. A good meal was just another meal. Even a walk in the park, once so restorative, became a backdrop for restless thoughts: What else should I be doing? What might I be missing?

    One autumn in university, I lived in a room just above the tram stop. The trams would come and go all night, their bells marking time, calling out to the city as it slept. I’d wake in the small hours, unable to rest, feeling the urge to reach for my phone, to read or scroll or simply do something, anything, to push away the boredom.

    But that boredom—what I once thought of as emptiness—began to feel different as I leaned into it. At first, there was discomfort, the sense that I was wasting time. But slowly, quietly, other things began to happen. I started to notice the way the tram lights made patterns on my ceiling. I could hear the difference between the first and last train, the hollow clang of the late shift and the eager, high-pitched bell of the morning run.

    Sometimes I would just sit and watch the window, letting my mind drift. No agenda. No headline. In those moments, a kind of balance would return. The world seemed less hungry, and so did I.

    There is a café in Basel I visit when I need to be reminded of this. It’s on a side street, a place with yellowed walls and chipped mugs, where the menu changes but the people do not. Most mornings, the regulars come in, order the same thing they always do, and spend an hour or more simply sitting. Some read, but more often they just watch—people, the weather, the play of light through old glass. There’s an older man who keeps a notebook in front of him, but never seems to write in it. Once, I asked him about it. He said, “I bring it so I have an excuse to be here, doing nothing.”

    There is a discipline in that kind of stillness, and I am still learning it.

    The most surprising thing about less stimulation is how pain comes up—not dramatic pain, but the small aches you’ve been ignoring. You notice the restless leg, the tightness in your chest, the regrets and unsolved problems you kept at bay with distraction. At first, it feels wrong, like turning up the volume on a song you never wanted to hear.

    But, like a muscle stretched after years of neglect, the discomfort softens if you let it be. I learned this on long walks, especially after moving to Bern. Some days I would set out with no goal, just to see where the river went, to notice the city slowly uncurling into spring. The first twenty minutes were always the hardest—my mind would reach for my phone, or invent errands to interrupt the silence. But if I kept walking, something changed. Thoughts came and went, sometimes sharp, sometimes gentle. Old anxieties would surface, but if I didn’t flinch, they’d pass through, leaving a kind of bright emptiness behind.

    There were days when I’d walk for hours, come home, and find the world not smaller, but bigger. I could enjoy a cup of tea, really taste it. I could listen to music and feel the notes as they moved through me, not just as background noise. The headlines waited, of course, but they felt smaller too, more manageable, like weather patterns I could notice without stepping outside into the storm.

    I sometimes wonder what it would be like to cut away all the stimulation for good—no phone, no news, no screens. I imagine the initial relief, followed by an ache, then perhaps something like real joy. But the world does not allow for easy escapes. Instead, I practice small renunciations—an hour here, a morning there. I build pockets of quiet into my days, like hidden courtyards in the city, places only I know.

    There are friends who don’t understand this, who marvel at my “discipline.” They say, “I could never do that. I’d be bored out of my mind.” Maybe they’re right. Or maybe, beneath the boredom, they’d find something else—patience, or even peace.

    A Japanese friend once told me the story of monks who sweep the temple courtyard every morning, whether or not it needs sweeping. “It’s not about the leaves,” he said. “It’s about the habit. The discipline. The chance to notice something new every day, even if it looks the same as yesterday.”

    That’s what this feels like: a quiet habit, sweeping away the clutter so I can see the stones beneath.

    Sometimes, the news finds its way in. The other day, an article about a famous singer’s divorce. Another about a new diet craze. My mind still wants to leap, to comment, to worry. But now, more often, I let the stories go. I picture them as birds at the window: interesting, but not mine to keep.

    Instead, I talk with friends about real things—the weather, our families, the taste of bread, the struggle to stay hopeful in a difficult year. These conversations ground me. They remind me that the world is made of small, slow moments, not headlines. Meaning grows out of what we tend and care for, not what we chase.

    Sometimes I wonder if my brain misses the chaos—the flood of headlines, the endless list of stories I’ll never finish. But as the seasons pass, I notice something else growing in its place: a patient curiosity. Not the frantic hunger of my youth, but something slower, quieter. An urge to know, but only what is truly mine to know.

    One autumn morning, walking along the Aare with the leaves just starting to curl and fall, I passed an old man feeding ducks by the riverbank. He tossed crumbs with a deliberate slowness, waiting for the birds to come to him. He didn’t check his phone. He didn’t rush. I sat beside him, quietly. We watched the river move, the city waking up on the other side. For a long time, neither of us spoke. When he finally turned to me, he said, “They always find the food. You just have to be patient.”

    Afterwards, I thought of all the stories I’d missed that day—politicians arguing, celebrities breaking up, experts warning of another crisis. And I realized none of it mattered, not here, not with the river flowing on and the ducks making slow, simple work of breakfast.

    That evening, back in my apartment, I made tea and sat at the window. I thought about the pain-pleasure balance the world offers: how every moment of craving or distraction tips us a little further from ourselves, and how every act of sitting with discomfort brings us back. There is no perfect stillness, no permanent escape from wanting—but there is the choice, each day, to make room for a different kind of satisfaction.

    Sometimes it’s as easy as sitting for a few minutes before the noise begins. Sometimes it’s a walk with a friend, a cup of coffee savored without urgency, the quiet courage of turning off the screen and letting your mind wander wherever it pleases. These are not grand solutions. They will not change the world overnight. But they change the shape of your day, and in time, the shape of your life.

    The longer I live, the more convinced I am that true happiness is not a headline, but a slow accumulation of small, meaningful efforts—facing discomfort, telling the truth about our cravings, building tiny habits of presence and care. We are all, in some way, addicted to noise, but we are also capable of profound quiet.

    And so I leave you, reader, with this:
    Tomorrow, when the world tries to pull you into its current, let yourself pause. Watch the light on the wall. Listen for the birds. Notice the silence beneath the noise, and see what you find there. Maybe you’ll discover, as I have, that happiness was never about knowing everything, but about caring deeply for the few things that are truly yours.

    If this quiet feels familiar—if you, too, are learning to live gently with your own mind—subscribe. I’ll keep writing for those who know that sometimes the most interesting story is the one you’re living now, far from the headlines, in the small spaces where meaning grows.

    The news keeps coming, always. The roundabout in Switzerland will be finished, or maybe delayed again. But the world—your world—waits for you in the pause, in the breath, in the patient work of simply being here.

    Thank you for reading.

  • The Unfinished Morning

    Hot steel, rattling—
    two strangers ride the morning, pages open slow

    The day had the sticky heaviness of an August afternoon, though it was only May. I could feel the weight of the heat pressing on my forehead as I stepped out of the theater in St. Gallen. The last threads of a velvet curtain had snagged my sleeve; my hands smelled faintly of glue and dust. My friend, Marlene, was somewhere inside, still arguing with the director about a collar that was, in her words, “historically accurate, but emotionally absurd.”

    She’d left me a heap of costumes to bring back to Basel. A fox mask with a broken ear. A box of ancient shoes. Two black bags bursting with rough linen and the memory of last night’s sweat. I didn’t complain. Carrying someone else’s burden sometimes feels like the most honest thing you can do.

    The walk to the train station was short, but long enough for the sweat to gather at my collar and for my thoughts to unravel into their usual knots. St. Gallen’s old city was nearly empty at this hour—just a thin gray cat winding between bicycle racks, and the sun smudging the edges of every shadow.

    The SBB train was waiting, humming with impatience. I found a seat by the window in a half-full carriage, wedged the costumes awkwardly into the overhead rack, and collapsed against the faded upholstery. For a moment, I thought about reading. I pulled a paperback from my bag—Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the Swiss edition, a battered copy I’d found at a flea market in Bern. Its corners were soft, the spine broken in two places. I opened to a page at random, just to anchor myself. The train lurched forward.

    Across from me, two men were already deep in conversation, though their voices were low, casual. The one nearest the window wore pressed trousers and a thin blue shirt, sleeves rolled, hair combed neatly back. His shoes were the kind you buy when you want to look comfortable and wealthy at the same time. The other man—slighter, hair unruly, with a rucksack at his feet—was fidgeting with the edge of his seat.

    I pretended to read. But their conversation, at first just a hum, soon began to settle into the rhythm of my own thoughts.

    “I always thought mornings were meant to be productive,” the anxious one said. “Make a list, get ahead, check things off.”

    The calm man sipped from a water bottle. “You can start that way. But it doesn’t last. The day always finds a way to take what you give it. I prefer to begin with nothing.”

    “Nothing?”

    He nodded, looking past his own reflection into the blur of green fields. “Nothing but sitting. Maybe some tea. I don’t let my mind wander too far. I try not to think of work. I just… let myself be in the room. Sometimes I close my eyes. Sometimes I just watch the light come up the wall.”

    The anxious one glanced at his phone, as if it were a lifeline. “Don’t you feel like you’re wasting time? There’s always something I could be doing.”

    The calm man shrugged. “Time isn’t lost if you’re living inside it.”

    A pause, heavy as a held breath. I found myself rereading the same paragraph, the words slipping out of meaning and into the background music of the carriage:
    Even the deepest sleep isn’t perfect. The heart keeps watch. And in the world behind your eyes, the light never really goes out.

    I wondered if the calm man would say something about meditation, or breathing, or the kind of spiritual discipline you hear about from people who grew up in old houses with thick walls and too many clocks. But he just smiled, hands folded in his lap.

    “When I was younger,” he said, “I tried to win every morning. I’d rush, fill it with emails, calls, messages—try to trick myself into feeling accomplished. But the more I did, the emptier the day felt by the end.”

    The anxious one sighed. “Sometimes I feel like the only time I’m really myself is when I’m too tired to care what comes next.”

    A woman in a red coat passed through the carriage, collecting trash. The anxious man tossed his coffee cup into her bag with a muttered apology. The train rattled through a tunnel, and the world outside became a flickering film of black and gold.

    I turned a page, but found myself drifting back into their orbit.

    “So what do you do, really?” the anxious one asked.

    “I teach. Literature. I used to think the point was to fill the students with facts. Now I just try to get them to read, really read, for half an hour a day.”

    The anxious man frowned. “Half an hour doesn’t seem like much.”

    “It’s enough, if it’s real. Most people go their whole lives without ever giving a single moment their full attention. Half an hour is a lifetime if you do it right.”

    A silence settled. I thought of the book in my hand, of all the mornings I’d promised myself I’d read before the day took over, and how often I’d failed. The page before me was full of crows and a locked gate. I closed it softly.

    The fields outside had turned to forest. The sun was dipping, yellow and hot. Sweat prickled at the back of my neck. I watched as the anxious man, almost unconsciously, reached into his own bag and pulled out a slim volume—Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet. He held it as if it might vanish if he let go.

    The teacher noticed, but said nothing for a while.

    The train slowed. Cows grazed near a low wall. A pond flashed silver in the heat.

    “You know,” the teacher said, “the happiest people I know all have a habit that’s only theirs. A thing they do, no matter what the world asks of them.”

    “Like your mornings?”

    “Like my mornings,” he agreed. “But it could be anything. Some people run. Some people cook. Some people walk until their shoes fall apart. The important thing is that it’s not for anyone else. It’s a place where you can remember who you are, before the day tells you who to be.”

    The anxious man looked at the book in his hands, then back at the window. “I used to write letters to myself. Stopped when life got too busy.”

    The teacher nodded. “Maybe it’s time to start again.”

    The conversation slipped back into silence. The anxious man began to read. I watched as the words softened his face, the tightness leaving his jaw, his breath deepening. The teacher gazed out at the fields, the shadow of a smile on his lips.

    I closed my own book and just watched the world slip by, for once not worried about what came next.

    The train swayed, rocking us back into ourselves. For a while, the teacher and his companion fell quiet—one reading, the other simply watching the sun’s slow descent through the leaves. I pressed my shoulder against the window, let the city of St. Gallen recede, and focused on the present: the faint tang of sweat from my collar, the soft scratch of a pencil as the anxious man underlined a phrase, the hum of air conditioning struggling against the heat.

    I tried to summon the patience to read again, but the words on the page seemed to belong to a different afternoon, a cooler one, where the world was less insistent. Instead, I let myself drift, as if I, too, were one of those Murakami characters: observer, drifter, somehow present but not quite anchored.

    A memory surfaced, unexpected. I was a child again, lying in the back garden of my family’s house in Slovenia, summer sun soaking into my skin, listening to my mother moving quietly in the kitchen. I remembered the way she would pause at the window every morning, just watching the sparrows fight over crumbs on the terrace. She never rushed that moment, never apologized for it. It was hers, untranslatable, ordinary and holy at once.

    Back on the train, the anxious man shut his book, holding it in his lap. He tapped the cover with a thoughtful finger.

    “You ever feel like everything’s waiting for you to move, but you’d rather just… not?” he asked, not exactly to the teacher, not exactly to anyone.

    The teacher smiled, lines creasing around his mouth. “Sometimes the world wants you to keep moving because it’s afraid you’ll see how little you actually need to do.”

    The anxious man glanced sideways. “And you really just… sit? Every day?”

    “Every day I can. Some mornings, the habit gets away from me. The noise wins. But I always come back. It’s like a promise you make to yourself—one you keep or break, but it’s yours.”

    The anxious man looked as if he might laugh or cry. “I used to think happiness would come if I worked harder, set more goals. But every time I got close to something, the goal would move. The satisfaction always slipped away.”

    The teacher nodded, as if he’d heard this before, from students, friends, perhaps even himself. “The trick is not to chase the goal, but to chase the habit. Build the thing that brings you quiet, then let the rest sort itself out.”

    The train rolled through another small station—Wil, maybe, or Uzwil—where a couple with backpacks hurried onto the platform, already late for something. The teacher watched them through the window, then turned back.

    “You know,” he said, “I didn’t always have this. There was a time when my mornings belonged to everyone but me—school, emails, phone calls, all the little fires that needed putting out. I was good at it, too. Efficient. But every day felt thinner, like I was trading something precious for something urgent.”

    He paused, finding the words. “I started waking up earlier, just to steal back ten minutes. That was all I could manage. At first, I was just tired. But eventually, it became easier. I started to look forward to it. Sometimes, I’d just listen to the birds. Sometimes, I’d write a single sentence in a notebook. Sometimes, nothing at all.”

    The anxious man smiled. “Ten minutes.”

    “Ten minutes is a lifetime if you’re really present.”

    The teacher glanced at the book in the other man’s lap. “What did you underline?”

    A flush of embarrassment, but he opened the book, reading aloud softly:
    “The only journey is the one within.”

    The teacher nodded. “That’s the habit. That’s all any of us really have.”

    The train’s rhythm smoothed out. Light flickered across the ceiling, the world outside blurring as fields gave way to the first hints of Zurich’s outer neighborhoods.

    The anxious man tucked the book away, as if he’d made some small, private decision. “Maybe I’ll try it tomorrow,” he said. “Sit. Not for the news. Not for anyone. Just to see what’s left when everything else falls away.”

    The teacher’s eyes warmed. “That’s the beginning of every good thing.”

    They lapsed into silence, but it was different now—softer, more generous. I found myself wanting to thank them, though I had no part in the conversation, only the privilege of listening in. Outside, the sky had gone lavender, and in the distance, church bells counted out the hour.

    Later, as we neared Basel, the two men gathered their things, exchanged a quiet handshake—strangers who might never meet again, but who had shared something all the same. The anxious man walked a little lighter, as if the weight of his thoughts had lessened just enough to notice.

    I stood on the platform, costumes heavy in my arms, and watched the crowds dissolve into the city. I wondered what small habit I would claim for myself, what piece of the day I might save from the rush, what joy might grow if I gave it room.

    And as I walked home beneath the pale lights, I resolved to try—tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. Just a little time, just for myself, to see what emerges in the quiet.

    Basel at night is a different kind of city. The river softens its edges. Streetlights glimmer off cobblestones, painting the old facades gold and green. Even the trams move slower, wheels whispering in a language only they remember.

    As I walked home, the costumes on my shoulder no lighter but somehow easier to bear, I kept thinking about those ten minutes. What would I find, sitting with my own silence? Would my mind settle, or would it scatter—restless as a swallow at dusk?

    A light summer rain began to fall—almost invisible, soft as mist—spattering my glasses, making halos of every lamp. I let myself get a little wet, didn’t hurry. I remembered Marlene’s laugh in the theater, the way she could hold two needles and a cigarette in one hand, all the while singing out-of-tune. I remembered mornings in childhood, lying in bed long after I woke, half-listening to my parents move through the kitchen, the house slowly filling with the smell of coffee and bread.

    It struck me that joy is rarely found in the grand gestures—the wild adventure, the perfect plan. More often it’s in the pauses, the unclaimed minutes, the habits we make without realizing: the first sip of coffee, the quiet moment before the world rushes in, the act of carrying something for someone else.

    When I reached my apartment, I put the costumes on the floor and sat by the window. The city glowed below, unknowable, full of strangers and stories and small routines. I set my phone aside, closed my eyes, and let the sounds of Basel drift up—a river, a tram, a distant bell.

    I tried to do nothing. Not for productivity. Not to be better. Just to see what might bloom in the quiet. Ten minutes. No more, no less.

    Later, I wrote in my notebook, the page still warm from my hand:

    All the real benefits in life come from compound interest—money, relationships, habits… even self-reflection.

    Tomorrow, I’ll try again.

    And so might you.

    If you find yourself chasing the day, try saving just a piece of it for yourself. You might be surprised by what comes to meet you in the stillness. If this resonates, subscribe. We’ll keep searching together—one small habit at a time.

  • At the Beginning of Infinity— wabisabi of human life

    Night behind closed doors—
    strange rivers of questions flow
    where language falters

    It was late, nearly midnight, when I first found the Irish bar in Morioka. It was the kind of place you could pass a dozen times without noticing, tucked half a floor below the street, its small window fogged and humming with quiet music. Above the door, a wooden sign read “Patrick’s,” but there was no shamrock, no green neon, just a battered blue bicycle chained to a post outside.

    Maybe it was the rain, or maybe it was a kind of unnamable loneliness that follows you sometimes when you travel solo, but I pushed open the heavy door and stepped in. The place was warm, the walls crowded with faded rugby jerseys and a map of Ireland that had long since curled at the edges. At the counter, a row of empty stools. Behind them, a bartender who looked bored enough to be in two places at once.

    There was one other customer—a man in his late thirties, nursing a pint of Guinness, his jacket folded neatly over the barstool next to him. He was Japanese, hair just starting to thin at the crown, face with that healthy, outdoor glow you only see in people who spend their mornings by the sea. He nodded as I sat down a few stools away.

    The bartender slid me a menu, but I pointed at the tap. “Guinness, please.” The first sip was dark and smooth, a little too cold, but real enough to remind me of the last time I’d drunk Guinness, years ago, in some other city that now felt like a dream.

    For a while, we sat in silence. The only sounds were the muted clink of glasses and a faint hum from the speakers—Van Morrison, maybe, or a band trying to sound like him. I pulled out my book, but only half-heartedly. My thoughts kept drifting to the day—a long train ride from Hakodate, a slow walk across the bridge in the rain, the feeling that everything was new and slightly slippery, as if the city were waiting to see what I’d do next.

    It was the other man who spoke first. His English was careful, almost formal, but with a warmth that made up for its hesitations.

    “Are you… traveling?”

    I nodded. “Passing through. I’ve always wanted to see Morioka in the rain.”

    He smiled, as if that was the most reasonable thing in the world. “I came here from Hachinohe. I am… volleyball coach. My team played match today.”

    “Did you win?”

    He shrugged, then laughed. “No. But it was good match. Good to travel.” He took a long sip of his pint, then studied the foam. “I come to this bar when I am in Morioka. To practice English. Usually, I meet foreigners. Tonight, only you.”

    I grinned. “Tonight, only us.”

    We talked, as strangers do, at first about the safe things: where we’d been, how the city felt at night, whether the Guinness here tasted different from Tokyo. I learned he was a teacher by trade—middle school, mostly science—and that he’d built his own house on a bluff above the sea, so every morning he could wake and watch the sun rise. “Not many people like to live so close to ocean,” he said, voice softening. “Typhoons, salt in the air. But I like the sound. Reminds me to start again each day.”

    We drifted from one subject to the next—Japanese whisky, Irish music, the best ramen in Aomori. The bar filled, emptied, filled again. Sometimes we switched to Japanese, then back to English when he wanted to practice. There was no hurry, no pressure. Just two people sharing a small, warm space on a night when the world outside seemed endless and wet.

    At some point, after a third Guinness, he leaned in and said, “Can I ask you a question?”

    “Of course.”

    “What is it… you are most curious about?” His eyes were serious, and for a moment, I thought he might be asking for himself, not just for me.

    I paused, feeling the weight of the question settle on my tongue. I could have said anything: the mind, the body, why people fall in love, why they drift apart. Instead, I looked around the room—the battered jerseys, the handwritten notes pinned behind the bar, the map with its faded lines—and said, “I’m curious about why things change. Why we keep finding new questions, even when we think we’ve answered the old ones. Why there never seems to be a final answer.”

    He considered this, nodding slowly, as if tasting the words. “When I was young, I wanted to know everything. But now, I think… it is better to be curious than to be finished.” He smiled, the lines at the corners of his eyes deepening. “My students ask questions every day. Sometimes I don’t know answer. But I tell them, that is not a problem. The problem is when we stop asking.”

    I thought about that, about how so much of my life felt like standing at the edge of something infinite. “Do you ever feel like… no matter how much you learn, there’s always more?”

    He nodded, grinning. “Always more. That is why I like sunrise. Every day, the same sun, but never the same sky.”

    We sat in comfortable silence for a while, each of us turning the idea over like a smooth stone.

    After a while, he pulled a small notebook from his jacket pocket. The pages were crammed with English phrases, half-remembered volleyball scores, sketches of houses, and, tucked into the back, a poem about the sea written in careful, looping characters.

    He handed it to me. “I write to remember what I am still learning. I make mistakes, but that is good. Mistakes show me where to look next.”

    I leafed through the pages, careful not to smudge the ink. “I think mistakes are how we move forward. Every time we get something wrong, we’re one step closer to something right.”

    He tapped his glass to mine. “To mistakes, then. And to questions.”

    “To questions,” I echoed.

    We finished our pints. Outside, the rain had stopped, and the city was washed clean, gleaming in the quiet light of the midnight streetlamps.

    Before I left, he said, “If you ever come to Hachinohe, you must visit my house. You can see sunrise. We will ask more questions.”

    I promised I would. I haven’t been yet. But sometimes, in the early morning, when the sky over Bern is just beginning to brighten, I think of that small Irish bar in Morioka, of strangers turning into friends, of mistakes and questions and the beginning of infinity.

  • The Kindest Advice Is the Truest

    A friend’s restless mind
    ripples in a Basel café—
    the cup never cools

    I remember the autumns in Basel as a kind of golden gray. The city always seemed half-awake, its medieval stone bridges draped in the slow mist that rose from the Rhine. The old city was a tangle of tight alleys and secret gardens, places I’d disappear into after a long day in the biology building. Back then, my life was simple: a scholarship, a room overlooking a noisy courtyard, lectures and lab work, and the steady company of books and too much black coffee.

    But it wasn’t the quiet of those days that sticks with me—it’s the noise of other people’s questions. Especially Lucas. He was the kind of friend who never really belonged anywhere, who filled a room with a different idea every week and the nervous energy of someone searching for a door that fit any key.

    We met, as so many friendships begin, by accident. A seminar on stem cells, a shared cigarette in the rain, a joke about biochemistry that somehow survived translation. He wore the same faded brown jacket all autumn, and his notebook was a chaos of business plans, sketches, passwords, grocery lists, and bits of song lyrics he insisted were fragments of genius.

    Our meetings followed no pattern. Sometimes I’d spot him in the library after midnight, eyes red, grinning with that look that meant he’d had a breakthrough or a breakdown—often both. Sometimes we’d end up on the banks of the Rhine, feet dangling above the slow current, watching the lights of Kleinbasel flicker like patient stars.

    But the moment I remember most clearly happened in late October, at a café hidden behind the Marktplatz. The place was always half-empty, with cracked tile floors and tables crowded with chess players and Turkish pensioners. It smelled of burnt sugar and spent espresso grounds.

    Lucas was already there when I arrived, hunched over his laptop, surrounded by scraps of paper and a single, untouched croissant.

    “Let me guess,” I said, setting down my bag. “You’ve started a new thing.”

    He smiled, sheepish. “Three things, actually. But only one’s any good.”

    I looked at the croissant, then at him. “You ever finish a croissant, Lucas?”

    He laughed. “I get distracted.”

    I ordered us coffees. For a while, we sat in companionable silence, listening to the hum of the espresso machine and the soft clack of chess pieces at the next table. Outside, the leaves dragged in the gutter, a slow, swirling dance.

    We talked, as we always did, about everything and nothing. He wanted to build an app for student discounts, launch an online magazine, open a science-themed pop-up bar. He wanted to write a book about the philosophy of the mitochondria, but also maybe just drop out and become a full-time street musician. “I’ve got too many ideas and not enough time,” he confessed.

    I sipped my coffee. “Or maybe you’ve just got too many ideas that aren’t really yours.”

    He blinked. “What do you mean?”

    “Look,” I said, “there’s this thing people don’t talk about enough. Marketing isn’t a puzzle you solve once. It’s not about finding the magic thing that makes everyone pay attention. Marketing is an open problem. The trick isn’t finding the right answer—it’s finding the right answer for you.”

    He shook his head, but there was a pause in his breathing. I pressed on, gently. “Think about it. Some people are born to talk, to make podcasts, to host live events, to fill rooms with stories and jokes. Others are writers—they’d rather disappear into words for days. Some people want to build communities from scratch. Some people want to be left alone with a whiteboard. If you’re going to succeed at anything—if you’re going to build something that lasts—you have to be a little crazy about it. You have to want to do it even when nobody’s watching.”

    Lucas picked at the croissant, finally taking a bite. “So you’re saying I should only start something if I’d do it even if it failed?”

    “Something like that. You have to enjoy the grind. The boring bits, the repetition, the weird moments where you’re alone with your idea and there’s nobody cheering. If you don’t love the work, you won’t last long enough for anyone else to love it either.”

    He nodded, looking out at the drizzle. “I wish someone had told me that sooner.”

    I shrugged. “Maybe someone did. You just weren’t ready to hear it.”

    I told him about my own failures—the blog I’d launched and abandoned, the science communication club that fizzled after three awkward meetings, the talks I gave that left me hollow and self-conscious. I told him about the day I realized I could spend my life chasing the next big thing, or I could just dig deep into what I already loved: biology, the small details of life, the puzzle of how things fit together.

    “You want to be a marketer?” I said. “Market what you can’t help but talk about. If you love writing, write. If you love teaching, teach. If you love arguing, argue. But don’t try to force yourself into someone else’s shoes. They’ll never fit.”

    We finished our coffees, and the sky cleared just enough for a square of light to fall on the chessboard. For a long time, we watched the old men play, neither of us needing to fill the silence.

    That conversation didn’t transform Lucas overnight. He still bounced from idea to idea, but I noticed he began to look for fit rather than novelty. A few weeks later, he found work at the Natural History Museum, designing workshops for kids and families. He wrote me an email: “It’s not glamorous, but I could do this for a decade and not get bored.” I believed him.

    Years passed, but we stayed in touch—short notes, photos of the Rhine in winter, a new business card every other year. Each time, I saw a little more patience in him, a little less of that hungry, nervous energy.

    Looking back, I know the real act of kindness wasn’t advice, but attention. I listened, and in listening I held up a mirror. I reminded him that the world isn’t looking for another copy of what already works; it’s waiting for the thing only you can do. I offered him permission—not to chase what was popular, but to chase what was real for him.

    But there’s another truth that I only realized later: Sometimes, the advice you give others is the lesson you most need for yourself.

    For a long time, I thought I needed to be more than I was—smarter, bolder, more ambitious, less anxious. I thought the world wanted grand gestures. It took years, and a hundred quiet moments like that café afternoon, to see that what matters isn’t how big your idea is, but how honestly you can live inside it.

    I learned, slowly, to choose the path that felt most like home: the steady, curious work of science, the patient act of explaining, the quiet rhythm of writing. Sometimes I still get distracted, chasing someone else’s definition of success. But when I catch myself, I remember that rainy day in Basel, the chess players, the cold croissant, and the kindness of attention.

    The world is full of open problems, endless ways to market, sell, persuade. The only real mistake is to forget that the solution starts with you: what you love, what you’d do if no one paid you, what you’d wake up wanting to do even if every last person had stopped watching.

    Lucas taught me that. Or maybe, together, we taught each other.

    If you ever find yourself bouncing from project to project, uncertain where to dig in, pause. Ask yourself: Where do I lose track of time? What work feels like play? Where does effort become joy? That’s your sign. That’s where you belong.

    And if this story finds you, subscribe. I’ll keep writing—about friends, failures, half-finished croissants, and the small, quiet ways we help each other find the work that’s ours alone.