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.