Month: Oct 2025

あさひさす
こどものこころ
まだのこる

asahi sasu / kodomo no kokoro / mada nokoru
morning light / the child’s heart / still remains

There’s a part of me that never grew up.
It doesn’t wear a watch. It doesn’t understand the word “networking.”
It still gets excited about small, unnecessary things—like the smell of a new book, the sound of gravel under bicycle tires, or watching clouds drift into shapes that mean nothing at all.

I think we all carry that version of ourselves somewhere.
Some keep it quiet, buried beneath layers of adulthood.
Some let it breathe a little more often.
And some, like me, are still learning how to listen to it without feeling guilty.

When I was a kid, I used to draw for hours—little scenes of people who didn’t exist yet. I’d wander forests near my house and pretend they were ancient kingdoms. I’d build stories out of twigs and broken glass, convinced the world was full of secret messages if I only looked long enough.
That way of seeing—the mix of curiosity, wonder, and useless beauty—never fully left me.

Even now, when I’m supposed to be serious, I catch myself staring at patterns of light on the wall, at the way steam curls from a cup, at the accidental poetry of overheard conversations. It’s not immaturity; it’s recognition. The world hasn’t changed—it’s just that most people stopped paying attention.

I once heard someone say they still feel fourteen inside.
There’s truth in that. You grow up, you work, you build things, you take care of others—but inside there’s still that version of you who’s wide-eyed, hopeful, slightly clumsy, still asking why instead of how much.

Being a kid at heart isn’t about avoiding adulthood.
It’s about carrying curiosity through it.
It’s about refusing to let routine erase your sense of discovery.
It’s about seeing a puddle and wondering how cold it is, instead of just walking around it.

I know adults who seem allergic to joy. They rush, plan, perfect, accumulate.
And yet, the happiest people I know are the ones who kept a small piece of that early softness alive—the permission to laugh too hard, to play without a goal, to be amazed for no reason.

I’ve learned that being a kid at heart is a kind of wisdom.
It’s a way of staying flexible in a world that tries to make you rigid.
It helps you forgive faster.
It helps you remember that not everything has to be useful to be meaningful.

When I travel, I try to move like a child again—without agenda, open to being surprised.
When I cook, I make a mess, taste too early, experiment.
When I meet new people, I try to stay curious, not calculated.
And when I fail—which happens often—I remind myself that learning, too, is a game.

There’s a word I love: shoshin—“beginner’s mind.”
It means approaching everything as if for the first time.
That’s what being a kid at heart really is.
It’s not pretending you’re young; it’s staying awake to the world’s small miracles.

I sometimes think the reason life feels heavy is because we forget how light we used to be.
We forget what it’s like to run for no reason, to make things just to see what happens, to get lost and call it adventure.
But that part of us doesn’t disappear. It waits.
It waits for the moment we stop pretending to be so certain,
and start wondering again.

If there’s one thing I wish to keep alive in myself, it’s that wondering.
That small, untidy joy of not knowing yet.
Because it’s there—in that small, messy space between knowing and dreaming—
that I still feel most like myself.

And maybe that’s what being a kid at heart really means:
Not escaping life, but falling in love with it again and again,
no matter how many birthdays go by.

ゆめのなか
ひとはもどる
たいせつなものへ

yume no naka / hito wa modoru / taisetsu na mono e
in a dream / we return / to what truly matters

If I had three magic wishes, I already know what they would be.
And maybe that’s the quiet tragedy of it—how simple they are,
and how often I forget them.

The first would be to spend more time with the people I love.
I already try to, but life—life is greedy. It takes its share.
It drains you, makes you tired, makes you choose efficiency over presence.
And each time that happens, each time I choose the noise over the faces that calm me,
I regret it.

There’s no better investment than time given to your tribe.
Family, friends, those rare souls who make you feel like you can breathe deeper around them.
Everything I’ve learned that mattered came from others—
from watching, listening, sitting beside them long enough to catch the rhythm of their hearts.
The world teaches us to chase independence,
but happiness, I think, is a shared construction.
It’s built, not achieved.

The older I get, the more I understand that “love” isn’t a single emotion.
It’s attention, presence, small rituals repeated over time.
Cooking together. Long walks without purpose.
Saying “I’m here” without needing to explain why.
If I had one wish, it would be to always remember this,
especially on the days when the world makes me forget.

My second wish would be to have followed my passions earlier.
Not recklessly, not in some dramatic, cinematic way—
just earlier.
To have trusted that the things that pull at your curiosity
are not distractions but directions.

In my twenties, I played it safe.
I followed what seemed stable, predictable, respected.
And yet, the people who inspire me most never played it safe.
They wandered. They combined things that didn’t seem to fit—
craft and science, art and structure, risk and patience.
They built what some call a “talent stack,”
but really it’s just a long story of saying yes to what feels alive.

Looking back, I wish I had diversified sooner—
not just my career, but my self.
Taken more small bets. Failed more interestingly.
I know now that playing it safe slowly costs more than taking risks ever could.
Safety, when stretched too long, becomes its own kind of danger.

Still, the wish isn’t bitter.
Because it’s not too late.
The lesson came, even if it arrived on tired legs.
And maybe part of maturity is realizing that passion doesn’t expire—
it just waits for you to remember it.

The third wish is harder.
To have taken better care of my health.

This one feels almost universal.
No matter how disciplined you are,
life finds a way to wear you down.
And health isn’t something you ever finish taking care of—
it’s maintenance, not mastery.

There are the obvious things—
less alcohol, more sleep, a balanced body that doesn’t burn its candle for comfort.
And then there are the quieter ones—
protecting your energy, staying close to people who make you laugh,
not letting bitterness calcify inside you.

I’ve realized health is less about perfection
and more about not giving the wrong things too much of you.
There’s a checklist—avoid the obvious poisons, physical or otherwise.
But beyond that, it’s about small daily negotiations with your future self.
Eating well. Moving often. Feeling alive enough to keep showing up.

Each of these wishes could be written on a napkin.
They’re that simple.
Spend more time with people who matter.
Follow what makes you come alive.
Take care of the machine that carries you through it all.

No wealth, no wisdom, no accomplishment can replace these three.
They are the foundation beneath everything else.
And yet, somehow, they’re the first things I forget when life gets busy.

Maybe the real wish is not to get them—
but to remember them.
Every day.
Especially when the world tries to convince me that something else matters more.

Because it never does.

If I had three wishes,
I’d spend them reminding myself of what I already know—
that love, curiosity, and health
are the real currency of a good life.

Everything else is just the noise between breaths.

ゆうぐれに
けむりがゆれる
ちちのかげ

yūgure ni / kemuri ga yureru / chichi no kage
in the dusk / the smoke sways / my father’s shadow

My father is a quiet man.
Not the kind of quiet that feels cold or distant,
but the kind that comes from a lifetime of watching before speaking.
He inherited that silence—from his parents, from the land he grew up on,
from a culture that believed words should be earned, not spilled.

Part of it, I think, is in his genes.
The way he can sit for hours fixing something small,
a broken lock, a chair, the hinge of a door—
as if time itself waits for him to finish.
And part of it is habit, carved into him by years of repetition.
Patience, precision, quiet hands.

He smokes. Always has.
The smell of tobacco still feels like home in a strange way—
that soft blend of fire and calm.
He used to drink too, back when the world seemed heavier.
There was a certain sadness to it,
an attempt to burn away the silence from the inside out.
I watched him do it for years.
And though I didn’t inherit the bottle, I inherited the itch—
that restless need to fill the empty spaces.
Only, I learned to pour it into other things.
Writing. Moving. Fixing what’s broken before it breaks me.

I learned a lot from him.
How to fix what can be fixed,
and how to wait when it can’t.
He taught me how to take things apart carefully,
so they’d still remember how to come back together.
He taught me to measure twice,
to listen before speaking,
to let things unfold at their own pace.

But I also learned from his mistakes.
From the nights when silence turned too heavy,
when the room filled with smoke and regret,
when distance became easier than tenderness.
Those moments taught me what not to repeat—
how to speak before it’s too late,
how to sit in the same room with someone you love and still feel close.

He never told me how to live.
He just lived—and let me watch.
Sometimes I wish he’d said more,
but then again, his lessons came through differently.
Through pauses, through gestures, through small repairs.
He taught me what strength looks like when it’s quiet.
What dignity feels like when no one’s watching.

And yet, because of him, I also learned to laugh.
His humor is subtle, almost accidental.
A single raised eyebrow, a perfectly timed sigh,
a joke delivered without changing expression.
It’s the kind of laughter that slips through cracks—small but healing.

And I’ve cried because of him, too.
Not out of anger, not even sadness—
but because I could finally see how deeply human he was.
How much love hides behind restraint.
How much fear hides inside pride.
How much silence can carry if you let it.

Now, as I get older, I recognize more of him in me.
The quietness. The stubbornness. The need to fix things instead of talk about them.
But also, the capacity to change.
To let the silence soften into something that connects rather than isolates.
To learn patience without paralysis.

When I visit him, he still smokes by the window.
The ashtray fills with tiny gray mountains.
He doesn’t say much, and I don’t push it.
We just sit there, the air between us filled with faint smoke and old understanding.
Sometimes he tells a story from decades ago,
something I’ve never heard before.
Sometimes we just sit in shared quiet,
and I realize that maybe this is what love looks like in his language—
steady, wordless, warm in its own way.

He gave me more than I ever knew.
A blueprint of strength and silence,
a map of mistakes and redemption,
and the permission to feel everything—
even what he never learned how to say.

I learned to laugh and to cry because of him.
And both, I think, are just different ways of saying thank you.

あさのかぜ
くつのうらまで
しみこんだ

asa no kaze / kutsu no ura made / shimikonda
morning wind / soaking through / the soles of my shoes

Walking has always felt like the most human thing I do.
It’s simple, primitive, unremarkable. But every time I walk, something inside me shifts—quietly, like a coin turning in a pocket.

I don’t walk to get fit. I walk to return to myself.
Somewhere between the first and the hundredth step, the noise begins to fade. The tangled lines of thought loosen. The world, once overwhelming, becomes manageable again—one breath, one footstep, one streetlight at a time.

I’ve always believed that the act of walking is a kind of prayer. Not the formal kind, but the kind whispered without words. A slow conversation between your body and the world that built it. The road listens, the air answers, and you just… keep going.

In the mornings, when the city still feels half-asleep, I like to walk alone. The streets are pale and quiet, the sky somewhere between silver and blue. A bakery hums to life; a cyclist passes by like a soft rush of wind. Somewhere a radio plays an old song—Japanese, maybe—and the melody trails off before I can catch the words.

Those are the best moments.
When you’re neither here nor there, not quite awake, not quite dreaming.
You don’t walk to somewhere. You just walk through.

But walking isn’t always a solitary act.
Sometimes it’s two people, maybe three, maybe four—moving through the world together, side by side, not facing each other, just drifting in the same direction.
That’s when it feels almost ancient.

There’s something profoundly comforting about walking with others. You don’t need to look at them or fill the silence. The rhythm of your steps takes care of the conversation. Sometimes one person talks for a while; the others listen. Then it flips. Sometimes no one says anything for ten minutes, and it’s fine—better than fine, actually. The quiet starts to mean something.

I’ve noticed that walking with people changes them.
Voices soften. Arguments disappear. The body calms the mind in ways words never could.
When you’re side by side, you’re equals. Not debating, not performing. Just existing.
I think that’s why some of the best talks I’ve ever had happened while walking. The pace keeps everything honest.

There’s a wordless intelligence in it—a memory that stretches back thousands of years. Before we learned to sit at desks, before we forgot what air feels like against our faces, we were a species that walked together.
We followed rivers. We crossed mountains. We searched for fire, for food, for each other.
Our happiness, I think, was simpler then—not because life was easier, but because we were still moving.
We were still part of the rhythm.

Even now, when I walk with friends, I can feel that same ancient thread pulling us forward.
Sometimes we split into two groups on narrow paths, talking in pairs, then drift back together again, like schools of fish.
No one leads. No one needs to.
It’s enough that we’re going somewhere, even if we don’t know where.

At some point, the conversation always fades.
All that’s left is the sound of shoes against pavement, a shared silence that feels older than language.
You start to realize—this is what contentment sounds like.

When I walk alone, the world becomes sharper.
I notice things I would normally ignore—the flicker of light through tree branches, the smell of bread cooling on a windowsill, the way the wind hesitates before turning a corner.
It feels like the universe showing me its small handwriting.

And when I walk with others, I notice something else:
That belonging doesn’t always mean being seen.
Sometimes it’s enough to move in rhythm with another person—to exist together in the same slice of time, quietly, without explanation.

By the time I get home, I feel lighter.
Not just in the body, but somewhere deeper.
The room feels softer, the air thicker with meaning. Even the silence has texture, as if it’s been washed clean.

I think walking works because it’s one of the few things that still connects us to our beginnings.
It’s how we learned to survive, to understand, to trust.
Every step is a reminder: this is what it means to be alive.

So yes, walking is my favorite exercise.
But it’s more than that. It’s my reset button, my small rebellion against a world that keeps rushing ahead.
It’s how I slow down enough to listen—to others, to myself, to the quiet that’s always been there waiting.

Because happiness, I think, is not found in stillness.
It’s found in motion.
In the simple act of walking, together or alone,
somewhere between nowhere and home.

しずけさに
こたえをさがす
つきのひと

shizukesa ni / kotae o sagasu / tsuki no hito
in the silence / someone searches / for an answer on the moon

The café near the station always smelled like warm milk and tired metal. The kind of place where nothing ever changed except the people aging inside it. I used to go there often—always at the same time, always to meet the same man. His name doesn’t matter. What matters is that he had the strange habit of asking questions that sounded simple but never were.

That day, as I sat down, he was already there. His coffee sat untouched, cooling beside a small notebook covered in scribbles. Outside, rain slid down the window in slow, uneven streaks.

Without looking up, he asked, “How much would you pay to go to the moon?”

I laughed, because what else do you do with a question like that?
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d want to go.”

He finally looked at me. His eyes were the color of late evening—somewhere between blue and grey.
“Of course you’d want to go,” he said. “Everyone does. They just don’t admit it. Everyone wants to escape gravity.”

He took a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket and slid it across the table. It was a magazine clipping, the glossy kind you find on airplanes. The headline read: ‘Private Companies Begin Selling Civilian Trips to the Moon.’ The picture showed a couple in white suits floating above the Earth, smiling like they had finally outrun themselves.

“Seventy million for a ticket,” he said. “What’s seventy million worth to you?”

I watched the steam rise from my cup and curl into nothing. “It’s not about the money,” I said. “It’s about where you think you’re going.”

He smiled in that small, quiet way of his—the kind of smile that doesn’t quite reach the eyes.
“The moon isn’t about destination,” he said. “It’s about distance. You think if you go far enough, you’ll finally be able to hear yourself think.”

There was something heavy about the way he said it. Like he’d already tried, in some smaller way.

“You think that’s worth paying for?” I asked.

He shrugged. “People pay for distraction all the time. Maybe silence is just the luxury version.”

For a while, neither of us spoke. The rain grew steadier outside, blurring the reflection of the streetlights until everything looked like it was melting.

Finally, he leaned forward. “Imagine it. You’re standing on the moon. There’s no sound. No chatter, no clocks, no background noise. The whole planet is there beneath you, small and blue and fragile, and for once, you can see it all without being in it. What would you feel?”

I thought about it. “Small, probably. Maybe lonely.”

He nodded slowly. “Exactly. Loneliness you can finally measure.”

The waitress came by with refills. He thanked her softly, though he didn’t touch his cup. The light from the window cast his reflection across the table—it looked faint, almost transparent, as if he were already halfway gone.

“Do you ever feel like your life is running too fast for you to catch up?” he asked.

“Every day,” I said.

He smiled again, more tired this time. “That’s why I think about the moon. Not for the view. For the slowness. Up there, nothing happens. No noise. No deadlines. Just silence and dust and time finally taking its time.”

He turned the cup in his hands, leaving faint rings of coffee on the table. “I used to think that’s what I wanted,” he said. “Silence. Escape. A place where my thoughts couldn’t find me.”

“And now?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long time before answering. “Now I’m not so sure. Maybe what I was running from was the part of myself that still wanted to stay.”

Outside, a train passed, its sound deep and rhythmic like a heartbeat under the city. The whole window trembled. He watched it go until the vibration faded.

“I think people misunderstand the moon,” he said. “They think it’s empty. But maybe it’s just quiet. Maybe it’s not what’s missing that matters, but what you bring to it.”

I didn’t know how to reply. He was right, though I didn’t want to admit it. We all dream of escape, but what we’re really trying to escape is the noise inside our own heads. The kind that follows you even into sleep.

We sat there for another hour, saying little. The rain softened. The café emptied. When he finally stood up, he left a few coins on the table and looked out the window one last time.

“You know,” he said, “we’re all already paying to go to the moon in small ways. Every time we chase something that takes us further from ourselves—work, ambition, endless motion—that’s the ticket price. The higher you climb, the quieter it gets. And then one day, you realize you’re floating, but you can’t hear anything anymore.”

He smiled gently, and I noticed for the first time how tired he looked—not physically, but like someone who’d spent too much of his life searching for a door that didn’t exist.

“Maybe,” he said, “the goal isn’t to go there. Maybe it’s to find a piece of the moon here—on Earth—without losing gravity.”

He nodded, and then he was gone, his coat brushing the chair as he passed. I sat alone, the sound of the doorbell fading behind him, watching the steam from my coffee disappear into the cold air.

The moon was still faintly visible in the window, pale and imperfect.
For the first time, I noticed how much it looked like a scar—something healed, but still there to remind you.

And I realized he was right.
We don’t need to go to the moon.
We just need to stop running long enough to notice the one already inside us—the one that glows quietly behind the noise, patient, unbothered, waiting for us to finally look up.

That night, walking home through the wet streets, I caught my reflection in a shop window. For a second, it looked like I was floating. Then I blinked, and gravity found me again.

I smiled, quietly, to no one.
I didn’t need the moon anymore.
I’d already paid for the silence, and it was worth every cent.

ゆげのなか
じかんとかおり
まざりあう

yuge no naka / jikan to kaori / mazariau
in rising steam / time and scent / intertwine

When people ask what food I’m best at making, I never have a clean answer.
I can’t point to a single recipe, or name a dish that would impress anyone at a dinner party.
My kind of food isn’t the kind you photograph. It doesn’t come out identical twice. It’s not measured, or timed, or perfectly plated. It’s food that remembers things—hands, voices, seasons. It’s food that’s alive.

It begins quietly.
A knife on the cutting board. The low rhythm of something frying. The sound of running water hitting a pot, steady and reassuring. The moment I start cooking, the day starts to loosen its grip.

My food is slow. Not in the trendy, “slow food” sense. It’s slow because I am. Because I need time to meet the ingredients halfway. Because when I cook, I’m not trying to make something perfect—I’m trying to make something that feels like me, or the version of me that’s still learning to be gentle.

The first thing I ever learned to cook was polenta.
I was a student, broke, and living in an apartment that smelled faintly of dust and detergent. The stove took forever to heat. The pot was secondhand, uneven on the bottom, like it had survived a small war. I’d pour the cornmeal in too fast, and it would clump in golden islands before I could stir. Every single time.

But that was the beauty of it.
The patience polenta demanded.
The way it forced me to stand still.

I’d stir and stir until the air grew heavy with steam, and the kitchen walls turned soft around me. Sometimes I’d add butter if I had any. Sometimes cheese. Sometimes just salt and water, nothing else. When it was done, I’d sit by the window, bowl in my hands, the city stretching below me. Steam fogged the glass. I remember thinking, this is enough.

It wasn’t about the food—it was about the act of making it. About time becoming visible in the swirl of a wooden spoon. About turning cheap ingredients into something warm enough to quiet your thoughts.

I still make that same greasy polenta sometimes, when life feels like too much noise.
It’s not nostalgia—it’s muscle memory.
It’s a return to rhythm.

My mother taught me most of what I know about cooking, though she never called it teaching.
She had her own language in the kitchen—one made of gestures and silences, not words. She never used recipes, just intuition. She’d throw in “a bit of this” and “a handful of that,” and somehow it always tasted right.

When I was little, I’d stand beside her while she cooked—too short to see into the pot, but tall enough to watch her hands. The way she wiped them on her apron before touching anything new. The way she tilted her head when tasting, as if listening to something only she could hear.

Once, she burned the onions because she was laughing at something my father said from the next room. She tried to save them, stirring quickly, but the smell filled the air—sharp, bitter, beautiful. For some reason, that smell still means home to me.

Cooking with her wasn’t about learning recipes—it was about learning how to care. How to pay attention. How to turn ordinary ingredients into something that held memory. She used to say, “Food keeps us honest.” I didn’t understand then. Now I do.

Travel taught me the rest.
The first time I cooked in Japan, I learned to wash rice properly. The woman who showed me said, “Don’t just rinse—listen.” The grains brushed against my palms, making a soft, whispering sound. I rinsed again and again until the water ran clear, and something inside me cleared with it.

In Kyoto, I learned patience from dashi.
In Italy, I learned boldness from olive oil.
In Slovenia, I learned that food is language—that you can say more with a plate than with words.
And in Switzerland, where I live now, I learned silence—how some meals don’t need conversation, just warmth shared in a small, well-lit space.

Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve stolen a technique, a scent, a small ritual. I’ve carried them home like pebbles in my pocket. When I cook now, they all show up together—little ghosts of other kitchens.

Sometimes it’s a Japanese cut, clean and precise.
Sometimes it’s the rustic chaos of my mother’s table.
Sometimes it’s the carelessness of youth—adding too much butter because it feels like forgiveness.

My kind of food isn’t consistent, but it’s faithful.
It remembers what I was feeling when I made it.
It remembers who I was trying to feed, even if it was just myself.

When I cook, time bends.
The scent of garlic in oil will suddenly take me back to my mother’s kitchen.
The sound of a simmering sauce will remind me of a storm outside a small apartment window years ago.
The first taste will take me forward—to someone I haven’t met yet, to a table that doesn’t exist yet.

Food is the only time machine that works reliably.

Sometimes, cooking feels like writing.
You start with ingredients that don’t belong together.
You add heat, time, patience.
You let them change you while you change them.
And if you’re lucky, something true emerges—something that can’t be repeated, only remembered.

People think a recipe is a set of instructions.
But it’s really a story someone else began.
Every time you cook it, you add a chapter in your own handwriting.

That’s why I don’t have a specialty.
My food is not about perfection. It’s about presence.
It’s what happens when your hands remember something your mind has forgotten.

There’s a ritual I love.
After dinner, when the plates are still warm and the air smells faintly of rosemary and wine, I leave the dishes for later. I sit at the table in the quiet mess I’ve made, sip whatever’s left in my glass, and just watch the steam fade from the food.

It’s a small moment, but it feels sacred.
Like watching time dissolve.

Sometimes I imagine that all the meals I’ve ever cooked still exist somewhere—
in another version of the world, in rooms I’ve left behind.
The student polenta. The miso soup in a Kyoto kitchen.
The bread I baked for a friend after her breakup.
The pasta I made for someone I loved who didn’t stay.
The food doesn’t vanish—it lingers, quietly, in memory, still warm.

That’s what I want my food to do.
To linger.

My kind of food doesn’t impress anyone.
It’s too personal for that.
It belongs to evenings that stretch longer than expected, to quiet Sundays, to moments when the world outside feels too fast.

It’s the kind of food that tastes a little different every time because you do too.
The kind that teaches you how to slow down.
The kind that forgives mistakes.

If you asked me again, what’s your specialty?
I’d tell you: this.

Food where time flows into it.
Where my mother’s gestures live between each stir.
Where the scent of burnt onions still means home.
Where a wooden spoon becomes an heirloom.
Where the heat doesn’t just cook—it transforms.

Maybe that’s what I’m really cooking: time itself.
The way it folds into flavor, disappears into texture, reappears as warmth.
A lifetime in a bite.

If you ever visit, I’ll cook for you.
Nothing fancy. Maybe polenta, maybe soup, maybe bread still warm from the oven.
You’ll smell the butter before you taste it.
You’ll hear the spoon clatter against the pot.
And maybe, if the evening is kind, you’ll feel time slowing down—
just enough for both of us to notice it.

If this reached you when you needed to remember that food is more than nourishment—
stay awhile.

There’s a seat by the window,
a pot on the stove,
and a story still simmering.

こえのない
ことばがひかる
よるのすみ

koe no nai / kotoba ga hikaru / yoru no sumi
silent words / give off light / in the corner of night

Most nights I write with the window cracked open to let the city in. The radiator clicks like an old watch. A bicycle leans against the hallway wall and ticks as it cools. On the desk: a chipped mug, a fountain pen that stains my thumb blue, a notebook with a coffee ring shaped like a small eclipse. This is the workshop where my blog is being built, plank by plank, with the kind of attention you give to things that are shy.

It started quietly. A few paragraphs about the way afternoon light arrives late in winter, how a repaired bowl can hold more than soup, how certain streets smell of rain and bread at the same time. I did not intend to start a project, I only wanted to save small moments from evaporation. But the posts kept coming, and soon there was a thread. I followed it.

Somewhere along the way I began to want reach, not for applause, not for speed, but for resonance. I want these pages to travel as scent does, through cracks and under doors, until they find people who have been living with unnamed weather and need a word for it. I want the right readers to feel found, the way a misplaced glove finds its partner on a fence.

There is a map taped to the inside of the closet door. Pushpins mark places where a message arrived from a stranger. Sapporo, Novi Sad, Oaxaca, Kochi, Ghent. The notes are never long. A woman who reads during night shifts says the posts feel like a warm kitchen light. A man in a quiet town says he takes the words on walks. Someone wrote from a hospital corridor to say the haiku at the start made the waiting softer. When I doubt the point of all this, I open the closet and look at the map. The string between the pins is thin, but you can feel the tug.

My days have learned the rhythm. In the mornings I edit by hand, slow enough to hear the sentence breathe. I copy a page onto real paper, then remove everything that sounds like a trick. In the afternoon I walk a loop that crosses two bridges and a park bench with a brass plaque for someone who must have loved that view. I collect textures as I go. Wet walnut leaves. Tram bells. The sour-sweet smell that rises from the bakery vent at 16:20. In the evening I photograph simple things in black and white, the way I was taught to look in Kyoto by a man who said the shadow is the story. Later I return to the desk and try to pair a feeling with a sentence that can carry it without spilling.

There is a drawer of failed drafts. The titles are honest and a little embarrassing. “On Cutting Fruit Carefully.” “Mornings That Refuse Their Names.” “How to Sit With an Evening.” Sometimes I resurrect a line months later, the way you rescue a shard from a broken plate to repair another. The rest becomes compost for whatever needs to grow next. Nothing is wasted, only slowed.

Success, if I say the word carefully, would be this: a reader at 3 a.m. who closes the page and feels less alone. A teenager who prints a paragraph and tucks it into a subway ticket, because the words made a room inside a noisy day. A person who never leaves comments, who never subscribes, who simply returns to read and breathe and then goes on with their life a little steadier. Numbers would be useful only in the way a lighthouse is useful, to say there is a shore here, you can approach with care.

I am trying to earn the kind of reach that does not shout. That is the work. It means refusing easy sentences, letting silence remain in the places where silence carries more truth than adjectives, trimming every paragraph until what is left feels like bone. It means publishing slowly and standing by what I put into the world. It means replying to letters as if they were hand delivered, because they are.

Some nights the cursor blinks like an impatient metronome and nothing comes. The refrigerator hum grows loud. I make tea, peel a pear in one unbroken ribbon, stand in the kitchen and listen to the kettle settle, air moving inside metal, a small weather system. I remind myself that invisible work is still work. Clay rests between firings. Muscles grow while you sleep. The river clears itself by moving. I go back to the desk and change the angle of the lamp. Sometimes that is enough.

I have not said this before, but the blog has a box of objects. A coin that someone left on a windowsill in a mountain temple, a button from a coat that never fit, a page torn from a library book that says “continue on the next leaf.” When I lose the thread, I take one object out and write what it remembers. The coin smells faintly of cedar, the button of wool and cold air, the page of a hand I never met. It seems foolish, and it works.

I imagine what else it could become. A small book printed on rough paper that stains the fingers faintly grey. A circle of readers who meet once a month to practice noticing. A series of letters mailed in real envelopes to those who prefer to read at kitchen tables rather than on glass. A quiet exhibition of words and photographs in a room that smells of pine, the windows hung with thin, moving curtains. Nothing loud, nothing that needs a stage, only a set of rooms where attention is not a scarce resource.

There are practical things too. I am learning how to build the site so it feels like a walk, not a maze. The menu is simple. The type has enough air around it. Images open like windows and then close without drama. I choose colors carefully, the way you choose fruit. I keep an index of recurring motifs so I do not repeat myself by accident. Bridges. Warm bread. Cracks that behave like rivers. Trains that arrive on time, or do not. The moon when it gets stuck in a windowframe.

On Sundays I schedule nothing. I clean the lens of the camera and delete photographs that only look like photographs. I take the tram to the end of the line and walk back. People speak in fragments on Sundays. A child wants to know why pigeons always look like they are thinking. A woman says she is tired in a way that sleep will not fix. A man parks his bike and touches the seat once, the way you might thank a horse. These stray sentences become scaffolding for the week’s post, a way to leave room for other lives inside my own.

If you have arrived here, reading this, you already know more about what I am making than most. I am building a place that treats attention as sacred and time as slow, where the ordinary is allowed to be miraculous without decoration. I want it to succeed in the only way that feels honest, by reaching the people who need it and letting them keep it.

I also want to be clear about the size of my hope. It is not small. I want the blog to be a home for thousands, not to impress anyone, but because the world is crowded with hurried rooms and we need more places where a person can set down the bag they carry and sit for a while. I want a long table where readers pass good sentences the way they pass bread, still warm, still steaming in the cold air. I want the posts to outlive the screen, to be printed and folded and forgotten in a coat pocket, then found again on a day that requires a gentler kind of courage.

Tonight the city is quiet enough that I can hear a train cross the bridge by the river. The sound arrives a few seconds after the light. I think of all the apartments it passes, all the small desks, all the people sitting up late trying to make something that did not exist yesterday. We are invisible to one another, yet we are company. That thought is a kind of reach too.

I will keep writing. I will keep tending this corner until it grows edges that touch other rooms. If you are here, you are part of that growth. Read when you can. Share what moves you. Tell me what you saw on your way home. If you subscribe, you are not joining a list, you are adding a chair.

The bridge is not finished, and that is its grace. Every day another board. Every night another nail, set softly so the wood does not split. One morning soon, we will meet at the middle. We will recognize each other by the way we look at the light. And for a moment that is not small, the distance between island and island will feel like something a person can cross.

なみのうえ
みんなおなじく
ふかくゆれる

nami no ue / minna onajiku / fukaku yureru
on the waves / we all sway the same / deep beneath

---

Most people think I am fine. I have a polite smile that fits any weather. I know where to stand in a doorway and how long to hold eye contact. I answer messages on time. I ask questions at the right moments. From the outside, that looks like ease. Inside, it is a choreography I memorized to keep from falling apart in public.

Here is the part almost no one sees.

There are mornings I wake up with a brick on my chest. No reason, no story, just weight. I lie there staring at the hairline crack in the ceiling that looks like a small river losing patience. My phone buzzes in the kitchen. A tram grinds along the street. Coffee smells like a promise I cannot keep. I fold myself upright anyway and put water on to boil.

On bad days the tap runs and sounds too loud, like a crowd I cannot leave. I watch the kettle breathe and think, if I can make it to the first cup, maybe the day will soften. The kettle whistles. I pour too fast. The first sip burns my tongue. I pretend that is what I wanted.

I go outside because walls begin to tilt if I stay in. The city is a wet book. Last night’s rain left a skin on everything, a gloss that makes the street seem new and used at the same time. I walk to the bakery that keeps early hours. The woman behind the counter wears a sweater the color of moss and slides me a paper bag with a nod. The bread is still warm, sighing through the paper. I break the end off and eat it with my fingers as if it might anchor me. It helps a little.

The truth is I struggle. Most days. Not a dramatic movie kind of struggling, not a single clean arc that ends in triumph. Mine is the quiet kind that leaks into corners. I forget to answer messages because the words feel heavy as coins. I wash the same cup twice because I cannot remember if I already did. In the grocery store I stand too long in front of the tomatoes, not because I care which ones are best, but because choosing anything feels like borrowing a future that is not ready yet.

Once, I cried in the bathroom at work with the tap running hard. Not loud sobs. A slow spill. My forehead pressed to the cool mirror. I pressed my fingertip to the glass and tried to breathe exactly as long as the red light blinked on the hand dryer. In. Out. In. Out. I walked back to my desk and nobody knew. Someone said a joke about a spreadsheet and I laughed in the correct place, a little too bright, which is how the body keeps a secret.

I used to think this meant I was broken. I imagined other people as steady ships with good captains, charting clean lines across blue water. I imagined myself as a rowboat with a slow leak. Then I started paying better attention. I saw a man in a suit sitting in a parked car at lunch, both hands on the wheel, eyes closed, mouth moving to a prayer only he could hear. I saw a mother in the pharmacy touch the top of a medicine box with the tenderness you reserve for skin. I saw the barista pause halfway to the grinder and blink hard, like someone turning back from a cliff in her mind. It dawned on me that everyone is rowing. We just learned how to keep our faces dry.

There is a particular afternoon that keeps returning to me. Winter clutching the last light. I took my laundry to the basement room two streets over because my machine upstairs had given up. The room smelled like warm metal and lemon and a little like sorrow. The washers were old and honest. A sign on the wall said NO DETERGENT IN DRYERS, which felt both obvious and helpful. A boy about eight waited with his grandmother. He kept tapping the glass whenever their machine spun fastest, as if he could drum the clothes into finishing sooner. The grandmother watched me the way old people watch anyone alone, not unkindly. She said something about the weather. I said something about the weather and we both pretended we had said more.

When my machine finished, the door stuck. I pulled and it resisted. For a moment, ridiculous panic. Trapped socks. Trapped shirts. Trapped me. I put my palm flat to the glass and waited. It gave. Heat breathed out and the steam fogged my glasses. I remember that detail because it made me laugh. Small human held hostage by a door, saved by fog. Sometimes the day gives you a softness when you expect teeth.

There are other days that are all teeth. I walk home in the rain without an umbrella because the alternative is standing still, and standing still feels like thinking too loudly. I drop a plate. It breaks like it wanted to. I sweep up the pieces and find a sliver ten minutes later glinting under the chair, the way pain hides and waits. I eat ramen over the sink, the burn a clean message. I go to bed early because being horizontal is easier than being brave.

I am telling you this because I am almost sure it is also your story, just with different scenery. You look steady from far away. Up close, you have your own hairline cracks. You carry small splinters of old afternoons no one else remembers. You forget to breathe when the kettle sings. You have a certain step you take before opening the door to a room where you must be composed. You have learned which coat pocket hides the folded napkin you cry into quietly.

It took me too long to understand that struggling does not disqualify me from being human. It is the requirement. The secret curriculum. The one subject everyone is enrolled in and nobody posts about. The most common thing we do is carry ourselves through days that are heavier than they look.

Somewhere along the way I started treating struggle differently. I stopped calling it failure. Names have gravity. I started calling it weather. Weather moves through. Weather returns the sky to itself. When the heaviness comes, I make it tea. I say, sit here, but I will not let you drive. I make small food. Rice. An egg. A pear sliced thin enough to see the light through it. I hand wash a shirt to listen to the water find its own story in the basin. I walk until I forget I am walking. I count the breaths between the tram bell and the doors opening. I go to the river and watch it hold everything without asking where it came from. I sleep with the window open a little so the night can do some work while I am not watching.

I know this sounds delicate. Some days are not delicate. Some days are rough wood. I have snapped at people I love. I have ignored calls I should have answered. I have scrolled until my eyes hurt because I could not bear my own company. I have said I am fine when what I meant was I am a field that needs rain. I forgive myself slowly, the way winter forgives a stubborn branch.

There is one evening I keep for courage. Early summer. Heat pressing a thumbprint into the city. I left the apartment because the walls were buzzing. I walked to the park by the river and sat on a bench that had a small brass plaque screwed into it for a man who must have loved this place. A kid was learning to ride a bicycle there, knees skinned, jaw set. He would pedal, steer badly, panic, tip, cry, get up, try again. His father stayed two steps back with open hands, not touching, just a tide ready to catch. After one fall the boy looked at his father and said, voice full of fury, I cannot do this. The father said softly, you already are. The boy got on like the sentence was a key. He wobbled toward a more honest balance and then found it. The river had the courtesy to keep moving like this was the most normal miracle in the world.

On the walk home I felt something in my chest loosen. It occurred to me that maybe success is exactly that, wobble included. Maybe the life worth trusting is not the one that keeps the bike perfectly upright but the one that forgives the tilt while carried forward anyway.

I want to end honestly and also with light. Both are possible. The truth is that I still have hard mornings. I still stand in kitchens pressing my palms into the counter as if trying to steady a small earthquake. I still think terrible little thoughts. I still check if the windows are real. I am not cured, because being human is not a sickness. I am practicing.

Here is what practice looks like.

I sweep the floor slowly enough to hear the broom. I open the window when the bread is in the oven so the warm air can kiss the cold. I text back, even if I start with I have no words, I just wanted you to know I am here. I keep a towel by the sink that is allowed to be cried into. I put a note on the fridge that says Drink water, take the walk, the sky is different today. I say no when I mean no. I say yes when I mean yes even if it scares me. I let people carry a corner of the weight when my arms are tired. I let them. That is new.

Most people do not know this about me. They do not have to. You know it now, and maybe that is enough for both of us. You have your own versions, your own brick, your own river in the ceiling. I hope you tell someone. I hope you are met with the kind of listening that does not try to fix you. I hope you eat warm bread with your fingers and let the steam fog your glasses and laugh because it makes you look like proof that softness can still happen to a person.

Here is the very good news, saved for last because it deserves its own light. The longer I live with the truth that everyone struggles, the less alone I feel, and the more possible this whole thing becomes. We are not failing. We are learning the weather. We are finding the chair inside the day where we can sit and put the brick down for a while. We are letting the bike wobble toward its own kind of grace. We are meeting in small ways. A nod in a laundromat. A pear sliced thin. A door that finally gives.

This morning I woke before the alarm. The crack in the ceiling looked less like a river and more like a map that was not finished yet. I lay there and heard the kettle even though it had not started. I felt the weight on my chest and it felt lighter, not because it was gone, but because it is not only mine to carry anymore. Somewhere, you are breathing too. Somewhere, someone is counting to ten in a parked car and then going inside and finding the day softer than feared. Somewhere, a child is pedaling toward balance.

The sun touched the corner of the window. I got up. The water boiled. The air smelled like beginning. I poured, waited, tasted. It was good. Not perfect. Good. That is enough.

If you felt yourself somewhere in this, stay. We will keep each other company. We will pass the warm bread. We will let the day do some work while we are not looking. And when the weather clears, as it always does, we will go outside, stand in that honest light, and know we did not do this alone.

あくびして
なにもせずとも
いのちうごく

akubi shite / nanimo sezutomo / inochi ugoku
yawning softly / even when I do nothing / life moves on

–––

It was a Sunday in early spring, the kind of day that feels too quiet for its own good.
Rain had passed through the city overnight, leaving the streets damp and reflective, like someone had polished them just for the light. I woke up late, made coffee, and realized I had nothing I needed to do.

No errands. No deadlines. No one waiting for me.
Just a long, open day—the kind that used to feel like freedom when I was younger, but lately makes me feel strangely adrift.

I decided to take my laundry to the small self-service place near the station. Not because it needed doing, but because I needed something to do.

It was almost empty when I arrived. Just one other person—a woman about my age, sitting cross-legged on one of the plastic chairs, reading a paperback that she wasn’t really reading. Outside, the light flickered between clouds, silver one minute and dull grey the next.

For a while, we sat in silence. The hum of the dryers filled the air—steady, hypnotic. There’s something calming about laundromats: everything spinning, doing its quiet, invisible work. It makes you feel like you can pause for a bit, and the world will keep turning without complaint.

At some point, she looked up from her book and said,
“Do lazy days make you feel rested or unproductive?”

The question caught me off guard. It wasn’t flirtation, or small talk—it felt too direct for that.

“Unproductive,” I said. “Almost always. I can’t seem to just exist without measuring it.”

She nodded. “Yeah. I used to think I was the only one who couldn’t rest properly.”

The dryer beeped, and she didn’t move to open it. We just sat there, listening to the soft tick of the timer resetting itself.

“I’ve been trying to fight that feeling,” I said. “When I have nothing to do, I try not to fill the space anymore. I let the boredom just… exist. It’s hard. But I think it’s the only way anything actually repairs itself.”

She tilted her head. “Repairs itself?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Like regeneration. You don’t see it happening, but something’s rebuilding. You just have to get out of its way.”

She smiled faintly, the kind of half-smile that says I want to believe that.

The dryers whirred in steady circles. The air smelled faintly of heat and fabric softener.
I took a sip from the canned coffee I’d bought from the vending machine outside. It was lukewarm now, but it tasted like the kind of bitterness you make peace with.

“I had one of those days today,” she said finally. “A nothing day. I woke up, sat on the floor for a while, scrolled through my phone, put it down, picked it up again. It felt like standing still while everyone else was running.”

“I know that feeling,” I said. “But I think sometimes that’s exactly what the body needs. Stillness. It’s like when the sea looks calm—beneath it, everything’s still moving.”

She leaned back in her chair, eyes half-closed. “That’s comforting. I always think something’s wrong when I feel like that. Like I should be pushing harder.”

“I used to think that too,” I said. “Now I think pushing is what breaks us. Rest isn’t doing nothing—it’s the part where things quietly start to work again.”

She laughed softly. “So you’re saying I’m healing?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Probably in more ways than you realize.”

Outside, a tram passed, its bell faint and distant. The windows of the laundromat trembled for a second, then went still again.

When the machines stopped spinning, we both stood up. The moment felt like waking from a dream—not dramatic, just gently reentering motion.

I pulled my clothes from the dryer. They were warm, folded by gravity into soft, imperfect shapes. She did the same, careful and quiet.

At the door, she turned and said,
“You really think regeneration happens in the background?”

I nodded. “Yeah. The system fixes itself if you stop trying to fix it.”

She thought for a moment, then smiled again. “That’s kind of beautiful.”

And then she was gone—just like that, slipping into the soft grey afternoon, carrying her laundry and her slow repair with her.

I stood there for a while longer, watching the machines still spin even though they were empty. Maybe it was just momentum, or maybe it was proof that rest doesn’t mean stopping completely—it means trusting that movement continues without you forcing it.

When I stepped outside, the rain had started again—gentle, almost polite. The air smelled new. I didn’t hurry. For once, I didn’t need to.

It wasn’t a remarkable day, but it was a real one. The kind of day where nothing happens, and yet something quietly resets.

And maybe that’s enough.

–––

If you’ve been feeling guilty for slowing down,
if your lazy days leave you restless—
try not to fill them.

Let the boredom sit with you.
Let the silence breathe.

Something’s working beneath the surface.
You just need to give it time.

しずかなひと
なにものももたず
ひかりをもつ

shizukana hito / nanimono mo motazu / hikari o motsu
a quiet person / owns nothing / yet carries light

–––

When I hear the word “successful,” I don’t think of billionaires, or headlines, or people who seem endlessly certain.
I think of someone quiet.
Someone who knows when to stop working, when to look at the sky, when to say “enough.”

We’re trained to measure success in straight lines—income, followers, deadlines met.
But the most successful people I’ve met move in circles.
They return to themselves again and again,
each time a little softer, a little clearer.

There was one man who lived in a small town by the sea.
He restored broken pottery, slowly, without hurry.
Some days he sold nothing. Other days he gave the bowls away.
But when you spoke to him, there was this light behind his eyes—
a steadiness that felt like home.
He had built a life out of rhythm instead of ambition.

That, to me, is success.
To be deeply in sync with your own pulse.
To live without needing to prove it.
To have your days shaped not by what the world demands,
but by what your heart can hold.

The world loves speed,
but success might be closer to slowness—
to waking without alarm,
to doing one thing at a time,
to building a life that doesn’t need escaping from.

Success isn’t the mountain peak.
It’s the quiet step you take when no one is watching.
It’s knowing that enough is not a limitation,
but a kind of freedom.

When I think of the word successful,
I think of those who have learned to stay close to what matters—
the ones who make ordinary things sacred,
who listen more than they speak,
who live as if every day were both the first and the last.

–––

If this reflection found you at the right moment—
if part of you is rethinking what success might mean—
subscribe below.

These quiet essays explore the space between ambition and stillness,
for those building lives that feel as beautiful on the inside as they look from afar.

Why Being a Beginner Changes Everything

いまはじめる
こころのうらで
かぜがわらう

ima hajimeru / kokoro no ura de / kaze ga warau
now I begin / behind the heart / the wind laughs

–––

There’s a quiet kind of magic in trying something new for the first time.
Not the loud, life-changing kind—but the kind that slips in between breath and hesitation.
That small, uncertain moment when you stop rehearsing and start living again.

We spend so much of our lives repeating the same familiar motions—
the same routes, the same conversations, the same digital scroll.
It feels safe, but slowly it flattens us.
Familiarity is comfort. But it’s also camouflage.

To try something new is to wake up from routine.
The world sharpens again; colors return.
Time stretches the way it did when you were young.
You become porous to experience, open again to awe.

And the beautiful truth is—it doesn’t have to be big.
Trying something new can be as small as walking without your phone,
cooking a recipe you can’t pronounce,
or sitting still long enough to hear your own thoughts again.

You don’t need a perfect plan.
You need curiosity.

Because every time you step into something unfamiliar,
you reintroduce yourself to the part of you that still believes in wonder.
You meet your beginner self again—
clumsy, present, alive.

Being a beginner is uncomfortable, yes.
But it’s also sacred.
It reminds you that growth doesn’t come from knowing; it comes from starting.

We often think we’re tired,
but maybe what we really are is under-experienced—
too shielded from the friction that makes us feel real.

So what could you try for the first time?
That thing you’ve postponed because it didn’t fit the plan,
because you told yourself it wasn’t practical,
because you might fail?

Do it anyway.
Not to succeed.
But to remember what it feels like to begin.

Because behind every first time,
there’s a door half open—
and a small wind laughing behind your heart.

–––

If this resonated—if you’ve been waiting for a sign to begin again—
subscribe below.

Join a growing community of readers rediscovering slow living, mindfulness, and the courage to start anew.
Every post is a quiet reminder to stay curious, stay human, and keep moving toward the edge of wonder.

いまやすむ
ひかりがとまり
じかんわらう

ima yasumu / hikari ga tomari / jikan warau
now I rest / the light stands still / time smiles

–––

Lately, I keep catching myself mid-motion—
halfway through brushing my teeth, answering a message, closing the fridge door—
and realizing I’ve forgotten what day it is.

Not in a romantic, free-spirited way,
but in the quiet panic of someone watching life move past like a train whose destination he can’t read.

There’s this strange tension in me lately: the sense that time is spilling too quickly,
and I’m too polite to interrupt it.
I keep telling myself I’ll rest after—after the work, after the noise, after I’ve earned it.
But “after” never really comes.

Maybe you know the feeling.
When the rhythm of your own life grows mechanical,
and you start mistaking momentum for meaning.
You wake up, you move, you perform the small rituals of existence—
coffee, screens, polite conversations—
and in the gaps between them, a quiet ache blooms.

I’ve been putting off stopping.
Not quitting, not escaping—just stopping.
Even for a breath long enough to notice the dust in a sunbeam,
or how the kettle hums before it boils,
or how someone laughs in another room and it feels like proof that time can still be kind.

Yesterday, I walked without headphones.
It felt like meeting an old friend.
The world was painfully beautiful in its ordinariness—
a loose flyer dancing down the street,
a child counting steps on the curb,
a man smoking in the wind, eyes half-closed like he’d forgotten what came before or after.

There’s a strange mercy in pausing, even when the world doesn’t.
It’s like letting water refill the shape of your absence.

The truth is, life doesn’t rush.
We do.
Life waits patiently for us to look up,
but it won’t slow down forever.

Sometimes I think about how many small moments I’ve missed—
the quiet ones that could have anchored me if I’d only stayed still long enough.
Maybe this is what growing older really means:
not running faster,
but finally learning how to stop without guilt.

Tonight, the room smells faintly of rain.
The city is breathing in the distance, steady and soft.
I turn off my phone, sit by the window, and watch the light fade.
There’s no revelation waiting here, no grand solution.
Just stillness.
And for the first time in a long while,
that feels like enough.

–––

If this found you at the right time—
if you’ve felt the days slipping too fast,
and the silence inside you growing thin—
you might want to stay awhile.

Subscribe below to join others learning to pause before the next page turns.
Sometimes the smallest break can save a life from quietly disappearing.

Naoshima smelled of rust and salt that afternoon—like a dream left too long in the sun. The air trembled, soft and metallic, and the sea held itself still as if waiting for something unnamed. I sat outside a small café facing the water, the kind built by someone who preferred silence over straight lines. My coffee had gone cold, and a thin crack ran along the rim of the cup like a quiet truth no one bothered to hide.

The fan above me turned slowly, a wooden whisper marking time. Beyond the glass wall, a fishing boat drifted past the pier—its wake folding the sky into ripples. The island hummed with that strange kind of stillness Japan does so well: full of sound, yet deeply empty.

He appeared without warning.

A man, neither young nor old. His shirt had the weary color of washed stone; his face, the calm geometry of someone who’d stopped counting days. He carried a small paper bag that looked as if it contained something fragile—a secret, or fruit. Without asking, he sat beside me, close enough that our shadows blended across the deck.

“You look like someone thinking about money,” he said.

I smiled. “I was thinking about the sea.”

He nodded. “Same thing, in a way. They both come and go.”

A ferry crossed the horizon, cutting the reflection of the sun into trembling shards. For a long moment, neither of us spoke. The sound of water folding over rock filled the silence like breath.

“If you had a million dollars to give away,” he said at last, “what would you do with it?”

I laughed quietly, expecting it to be a joke. But his gaze stayed fixed on the horizon. There was nothing playful in it—only stillness.

“I’d scatter it,” I said finally. “Like rain. I’d let it find its own gravity.”

He turned his head toward me. “To who?”

“To no one,” I said. “Or everyone. Maybe a fisherman fixing his net. A woman sweeping temple steps. A boy sketching stars on a napkin. Anyone the world forgot to look at.”

He smiled, a faint upward ripple across his face. “Good answer. The moment you try to choose who deserves it, you lose the point.”

A gust of wind lifted a napkin from the table and sent it spinning toward the sea. It hovered for a second in the light—half bird, half ghost—before landing softly on a rock below.

“Money,” he said, “is just frozen attention. It’s what happens when the world forgets to move. When you give it away, you remind it how to flow.”

The light turned amber, and for a second the whole island glowed. His reflection flickered in the café window beside mine—two silhouettes suspended in water and glass.

He reached into the paper bag and placed something on the table. A smooth stone, pale and round, veined with a thin golden line.

“I used to think money was weight,” he said. “That it anchored life. But it’s more like the tide—alive only when it moves. When it goes out, what’s left behind is what was true all along.”

I ran my fingers over the stone. It was warm from the sun, polished by time. “And what do you do when the tide doesn’t come back?”

He smiled gently. “Then you learn to walk on the sand.”

The cicadas began again, their hum rising like invisible heat. He closed his eyes for a moment, as if listening to something private and far away.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

He opened his eyes. “Sometimes. But living somewhere is a trick of language. The place usually lives in you.”

When he stood, his shadow folded back into itself. “Most people think giving means losing,” he said. “But the truth is, when you give until it stops hurting, you stop being separate from what you give to.”

He left the stone on the table and walked down toward the beach. The waves met him halfway.

By the time I finished my coffee, the chair beside me was empty. Only the stone remained, its golden vein catching the last trace of daylight.

Later, in my room, I found a small envelope tucked under the cup. Inside was a single note, written in slow, deliberate handwriting:

“Give until it stops feeling like loss.”

There was a 10,000 yen bill folded beneath it. Crisp. Unsigned.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I sat by the window, the stone glowing faintly in the moonlight. The sea whispered against the rocks below—soft, repetitive, patient. When morning came, the tide had risen.

I walked to the beach and saw dozens of smooth white stones scattered along the shore, half-buried in sand. Each one marked a place the sea had touched.

Some people stopped to pick them up. Others walked past without noticing.

I added my stone to the rest and watched as the waves reached for it, slow and deliberate, reclaiming what had always been theirs.

The water shimmered, then receded. I stood there, shoes soaked, heart strangely light.

The world hadn’t changed, but something subtle had shifted—like a faint current beneath still water.

And as the wind moved through the pines behind me, it carried a whisper so soft it might’ve been imagined:

Keep it moving.

That’s all.

The tide giving back what was never ours to keep.

early train window
fog folding over fields slow
heart still learning pace

There are goals that look impressive on paper—career milestones, fitness numbers, things you can track and measure. And then there are the quieter ones. The ones that have no applause built in. The hardest goal I ever set for myself belongs to the second kind.

It wasn’t to run a marathon or learn another language. It was this: to live at a pace where I could still hear myself think.

---

The Noise

For years I mistook motion for meaning. I packed my days until there was no air left in them—commutes, emails, late-night projects that blurred into early mornings. The reward was exhaustion disguised as progress.

People would say, “You’re doing great.” But I wasn’t being anything. I was just doing. My thoughts started to sound like traffic—constant, directionless, honking at itself.

So I made a promise that scared me more than any deadline: to slow down without losing momentum. To move deliberately, not reactively. To be busy only with what mattered.

That was the hardest goal because it required unlearning almost everything I’d been praised for.

---

The Reset

The first few months were brutal. Stillness felt like failure. When I didn’t fill every hour, guilt crept in. I’d wake up and feel a kind of restlessness that lived in my bones.

But little by little, I began to notice things I’d lost touch with: the texture of bread crust in the morning, the way sunlight wandered across my desk, the sound of rain becoming percussion on my window.

At first, these details felt trivial. Then they became anchors.

Slowing down wasn’t laziness—it was calibration.

---

The Discipline of Presence

We like to think discipline means grinding harder. But I’ve learned that real discipline is restraint—the courage to protect your focus.

When I began guarding my first hour each day, everything shifted. Before messages, before noise, I would write. Or stretch. Or simply sit by the window watching the fog lift off the Aare River.

That small ritual became a boundary line between chaos and clarity. It taught me that attention is a resource, not a reflex. Once you spend it on the wrong things, you don’t get it back.

So the goal wasn’t just to slow down. It was to choose my speed consciously.

---

The Mirror

Hard goals always hold up a mirror. Slowing down forced me to see how much of my ambition was built on fear—fear of missing out, fear of being invisible, fear of not doing enough to matter.

When you strip away the noise, what’s left is just you and the question: what’s worth your energy?

The honest answers are rarely glamorous. They’re simple. Family. Health. Craft. Long walks. A cup of coffee with someone who doesn’t need to fill the silence.

That simplicity is easy to name, hard to live.

---

The Setbacks

Even now, I fail at it. Some weeks I rush again. I check messages before sunlight. I say yes when I mean maybe.

But the difference is awareness. I can feel when I’ve slipped—my breath shortens, my thoughts scatter, my body tenses as if bracing for an invisible storm. That’s when I stop, take a long walk by the river, and start again.

This kind of goal has no finish line. It resets every morning.

---

What I’ve Learned

I used to think hard goals were about endurance. Now I think they’re about alignment. The challenge isn’t to go faster, or longer, but truer.

To align your days with your values. To make your work echo your inner voice instead of drown it. To let your actions match what you quietly believe.

That’s not a one-time achievement—it’s a lifelong correction.

---

A Small Story

A few winters ago, in a small inn outside Asahikawa, I met an elderly man who used to be a carpenter. He told me, “When I was young, I built fast to prove myself. Now I build slow so the wood can answer back.”

I wrote that line in my notebook and underlined it three times. Because that’s the whole thing, really. To live in a way that the world can answer back.

---

The Practice

The hardest personal goal isn’t something you cross off a list. It’s something you return to, again and again, until it becomes a kind of rhythm:

Wake before the world does.
Move slowly enough to notice light changing.
Do the real work before you touch the noise.
Say no to most things, yes to the few that make you feel alive.
End the day knowing you paid attention.

That’s it. That’s the goal.

rain on the tram glass
neon dissolves into veins
the city exhales

There’s a small café in Bern I sometimes write in when the world feels too sharp. It’s hidden between an antique shop and a tailor who always leaves his door half open, no matter the season. The tables are uneven, the chairs mismatched. But the light — the light is perfect.

Last week, as I sat there with a chipped cup of coffee, I thought about my favorite artists. Not the ones who hang in museums or headline festivals. The ones who shape the invisible. The ones who teach me how to see again.

---

The Architects of Stillness

If I close my eyes, I can still see Miyazaki’s worlds moving in slow motion. Steam rising from a pot, wind threading through tall grass, rain washing a street that smells of soy and metal. His films breathe. They remind me that motion doesn’t have to mean rush — it can mean rhythm.

Kubrick, in contrast, taught me the discipline of vision. His worlds are maps drawn in light and geometry. The silence in his films isn’t empty — it hums, precise as a heartbeat. Every object, every pause, is deliberate. He didn’t tell you what to feel; he built the space where you could feel it yourself.

Both men built universes that made the ordinary infinite. A teapot. A shadow. A sigh. They turned details into devotion.

---

The Listeners

Then there are artists who work in silence, who listen more than they speak.

Brian Eno calls his music “gardening.” He plants sounds and waits for them to grow. His songs breathe — soft loops, accidental echoes, light spilling through reverb. They don’t rush to impress. They linger.

Agnes Martin painted patience. I saw one of her pieces once in Basel. At first it looked like nothing. Faint graphite lines, almost invisible. But if you stay long enough, the canvas begins to hum. The silence grows muscles.

The world gets louder every year, but these artists remind me: attention is the last form of rebellion.

---

The Honest Makers

A few years ago, in Kurashiki, I met a potter with clay permanently under his fingernails. He sold me a small cup with a gold line running through its side. “The break,” he told me, “is the truth. The repair is the story.”

Kintsugi isn’t just about pottery. It’s a way of seeing. Cracks don’t ruin things — they reveal the life inside them.

When I look at that cup on my shelf, I see his hands, steady but rough, turning the imperfect into something holy. And I think: maybe that’s what all good art does. It tells you that the wound was worth surviving.

---

The Connectors

Some artists move like translators between worlds. Björk, for instance. David Byrne. They turn architecture into sound, technology into tenderness. They mix moss and machinery, concrete and rhythm.

They remind me that creativity is a kind of compost. Everything we experience — heartbreak, laughter, failure — breaks down into material for the next thing. If you feed curiosity enough, it eventually sprouts wonder.

---

The Everyday Artists

The man who cleans the brass rail in Bern Hauptbahnhof at dawn — he’s an artist. The barista who pours a perfect leaf into foam, even when no one’s watching. The woman at the market who stacks oranges like planets, precise and bright.

They create beauty without a name for it. Their reward is the act itself — the small rightness of doing something well.

Art isn’t just what we hang on walls. It’s what we do when no one’s grading us.

---

The Thread That Connects Them

All my favorite artists share one trait: they know how to stay.

Kubrick stayed with light until it confessed its geometry.
Miyazaki stayed with air until it began to breathe.
Eno stayed with sound until silence grew texture.
Martin stayed with lines until they started singing.
The potter stayed with clay until it remembered its form.

And the unnamed ones — the janitor, the vendor, the busker — stay with their small rituals until the world feels whole again, if only for a minute.

---

What They’ve Taught Me

Light. After Kubrick, I see the color temperature of every café. Morning blue. Noon white. Evening gold.
Air. After Miyazaki, I read the wind. The flags, the trees, the kettle steam — all messages from a slower world.
Sound. After Eno, I hear stairwells differently. Doors closing, rain tapping metal — it’s all rhythm.
Patience. After Martin, I trust stillness to speak.
Forgiveness. After kintsugi, I understand that repair is its own art form.

Art changed how I move through the day. It trained my senses to notice what most people scroll past.

---

The Field Guide

Art isn’t an escape from reality. It’s a return to it.
You don’t need talent. You need to look.

Start by fixing one broken thing — even if it’s just gluing a plate or stitching a sleeve.
Watch a movie with the sound off. Listen to a record in the dark.
Write one sentence that feels heavier than it should.
Arrange fruit like a constellation. Sweep a floor with intention.

Creation begins the moment you pay attention.

---

TL;DR

My favorite artists don’t chase perfection — they reveal presence.
They remind me that beauty isn’t rare. It’s everywhere: in cracks, in silence, in small acts of care.

Art isn’t a product. It’s a way of walking through the world.
And if you slow down enough, you’ll realize —
you’ve been surrounded by it all along.

The rain had been falling since morning—thin, deliberate, the kind that doesn’t ask for permission. Bern looked washed clean, its cobblestones slick with reflections of bicycles and yellow trams. You could smell the river from the bridge: cold, mineral, alive. Two people sat outside a café that hadn’t opened yet. The chairs were metal, the kind that keep the chill even after you sit.

A sign on the window said Kaffee ab 10:00, but the lights were already on. Inside, a barista moved like a ghost between cups. The man on the bench wore a wool coat, frayed at the sleeves. The woman beside him had her hands tucked into her pockets, fingers curling against the fabric for warmth.

---

“You walk a lot,” she said, watching a leaf circle the drain. “Is that your hobby?”

The man smiled, the way people smile when they’ve already heard the question before.
“Walking, yes,” he said. “But not the kind with destinations. I walk the way some people meditate. Step after step until the noise in my head quiets down.”

“So not exercise,” she said.

“No. More like—maintenance.”

A tram passed, and the sound dissolved into the rain. The air smelled faintly of roasted coffee and wet concrete.

“What do you think about?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Everything. Nothing. Sometimes it’s a sentence that won’t leave me alone. Sometimes it’s the way puddles hold the sky like a memory.”

“Doesn’t that get boring?”

“That’s when it starts working,” he said. “Boredom is the door you walk through before the world starts talking again.”

---

The café door clicked open. Warm air spilled out, carrying the scent of espresso and cardamom. They went inside. The windows fogged quickly, turning the world outside into watercolor.

The man ordered a black coffee. The woman asked for something with milk. They sat by the window, where the glass trembled each time a bus went by.

“You always do this alone?” she asked.

“Mostly. It’s easier to listen when I’m alone.”

“To what?”

“The city,” he said. “People’s footsteps. The sound of rain on roofs. The way light shifts when clouds move. It’s like the world’s heartbeat—soft, steady, always there if you stop long enough to notice.”

She traced a circle on her cup with one finger. “You sound like someone who’s afraid to stop moving.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But walking isn’t escape. It’s return.”

---

The café filled slowly. A student typing on a laptop. A delivery driver reading the sports section. A woman with a dog small enough to fit in her coat. Steam clung to the lamps. Somewhere behind the counter, a radio played an old jazz record, the saxophone threading through the air like smoke.

“Do you ever write about it?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” he said. “But I never finish. The walks are the writing. The world edits as I go.”

“That’s poetic.”

“It’s survival,” he said.

“And when you’re not walking?”

He smiled. “I cook.”

“Cooking?”

“Simple things,” he said. “Soup, rice, vegetables. Food that forgives you when you get it wrong. Cooking is like walking in place—you move through sound and smell instead of streets.”

---

Outside, the rain softened into mist. Cars left trails of reflected red light on the wet asphalt. A man crossed the bridge carrying an umbrella shaped like a crow’s wing. The city hummed quietly, alive but unhurried.

“I don’t really have a hobby,” she said. “Work takes up most of it. And when I stop, I just… scroll.”

“That’s not resting,” he said gently. “That’s drowning slowly in other people’s noise.”

She laughed, embarrassed. “You make walking sound like enlightenment.”

“Not enlightenment,” he said. “Maintenance, remember? The mind rusts if you don’t move it.”

“So what do you get from it?”

“Perspective,” he said. “When I walk, I move at the speed of ideas. When I run, I move at the speed of my breath. Both are ways of thinking. But walking gives the world time to answer.”

---

The café owner turned off the lights above the counter. It was near closing. The last customers zipped their coats, their chairs scraping softly against the floor.

The woman looked at him. “You make everything sound like it matters.”

“It does,” he said. “That’s the trick. The world’s full of miracles disguised as errands.”

“That’s a nice line.”

“It’s not a line,” he said. “It’s observation.”

They stepped outside. The rain had stopped, but the air still shimmered. Water dripped from the awning like seconds passing. The man took a deep breath.

“You smell that?” he asked.

“Rain?”

“No,” he said. “Clean slate.”

They crossed the street. Their reflections followed, rippling in the shallow puddles.

---

As they reached the bridge, the woman paused. “Do you ever get tired of it?”

“Of walking?”

“Of noticing. Of paying attention to everything.”

He thought for a moment. The river below carried a sheet of light, the kind that looks almost solid. “Sometimes,” he said. “But then I stop. I look around. And something—a bird, a shadow, the smell of wet stone—reminds me that the world doesn’t owe me beauty. It just offers it. My only job is to be awake enough to see it.”

She nodded, eyes on the water. “You make me want to walk more.”

“Then you should.”

“Where would I start?”

He smiled. “Anywhere. The moment your feet touch the ground, you’re already there.”

---

They walked together in silence, their steps syncing naturally. Behind them, the café turned off its lights. The reflection of the city danced in the wet street like a broken mirror reassembling itself.

As they reached the end of the bridge, a gust of wind passed between them, sharp and clean. It carried the scent of pine from the hills and something else—something almost metallic, like the first breath before snow.

The woman closed her eyes. “That smell—what is it?”

“That,” he said, “is the world remembering it’s still alive.”

ink on my fingers
letters sleep inside envelopes
time exhales slowly

---

Life without a computer would feel at first like losing a limb. My hands would reach for keys that no longer exist, my eyes searching for a glow that never arrives. Panic, then silence.

In that silence, mornings would widen. I’d wake not to a screen but to the smell of bread, the sound of a crow shifting on a wire. My work would live inside notebooks stacked like quiet bricks. Ink stains would betray my moods, and every mistake would stay, permanent and honest.

Answers would come slower. I’d learn the season by touching soil, the news by listening at the café, the weather by watching the cat hesitate at the doorway. Curiosity would grow legs and walk me places.

Friends would drift. Some would fade into absence, others would deepen through letters that smelled faintly of rain, or through long pauses on the phone when neither of us had much to say but stayed anyway.

There would be more boredom, but boredom has a way of cracking open into wonder. I’d sand wood, mend jackets, hum half-remembered songs into the evening. The world would shrink in reach but grow in texture.

Life without a computer wouldn’t erase me. It would simply return me. To paper, to silence, to the unpolished rhythm of days moving like rivers without maps.

morning light drifts in
hands clumsy with the first notes
silence hums along

---

If you ask me what skill I’d like to learn, I could give you a tidy answer—piano, sewing, maybe gardening—but the truth is less clean. The skill I want has less to do with the surface of things and more with the undercurrent. It’s about patience, about returning, about staying inside the rhythm of something until it reveals what it was always trying to say.

Still, it helps to begin with the tangible.

---

The Piano in the Station

There is a piano in the Zürich train station. It stands near the corner where light falls from the high glass ceiling, a little scuffed, always slightly out of tune. Anyone can sit and play. Sometimes it’s children banging with sticky hands, sometimes a man in a suit loosening his tie, sometimes an old woman whose fingers move like moths across the keys.

I often stop to watch. The station clock above performs its ritual pause at the 59th second, and while time hesitates, someone plays a fragment of Chopin or a pop song that refuses to die. People walk past without looking, dragging luggage, balancing coffee, whispering into phones. But every so often, one person slows down, caught by a phrase, and stands very still.

If I could learn a skill, I would learn to play the piano like that—not to entertain, not to perform, but to drop a stone into the current of the day and watch the ripples move outward. To sit down at a public piano with nothing planned, press one key, then another, until a small truth appears.

But I know myself. My fingers would stumble. My rhythm would betray me. I would hear the wrong notes echo too loudly. And yet—if I stayed, if I returned, if I practiced long enough—the wrongness would turn into honesty. That’s what practice really is: living with wrong notes until they become familiar enough to guide you somewhere else.

What I want to learn is not piano exactly. It is the willingness to stay with a sound until it teaches me.

---

The Jacket with Scars

In a small shop in Ljubljana, I once saw a jacket with a torn elbow. The owner had repaired it with red thread, deliberately visible, stitches wide enough to look almost careless. It looked like a wound that had chosen to heal loudly.

I asked about it. The shopkeeper shrugged and said, “Better than throwing away. Clothes should carry their history.”

That sentence followed me out the door. Clothes should carry their history. I thought of all the shirts I had abandoned at the first rip, the sweaters I’d left in donation bins with loose cuffs, the jeans gone thin at the knees. What if instead of discarding, I had learned the language of repair?

If I could learn a skill, I would learn to mend properly. To sit at the end of the day with a needle and thread while the kettle hums. To give a garment another chapter. To see a scar not as failure but as character.

But more than stitches, what I want is the patience behind them. The willingness to slow down, to care for what is already mine instead of reaching for something new.

---

The Garden That Refused to Hurry

A few years ago, I tried planting tomatoes on a balcony in Bern. I bought soil, pots, seeds. I watered, adjusted for sun, read online advice. Days passed. Then weeks. Nothing. The pots looked back at me with the same blank face.

One morning, when I had almost given up, I found a thin green thread poking from the soil, fragile and ordinary. I remember laughing out loud, surprised at how much joy a stem no longer than my fingernail could bring.

The tomatoes grew crooked. Some split open. Some never ripened. But I learned that growth has its own tempo, and impatience doesn’t make the stem push faster toward the sky.

If I could learn a skill, it would be gardening, yes—but more than that, it would be the ability to live inside a rhythm I do not control. To accept that nothing unfolds on my schedule.

---

The Deeper Skill

Piano keys, mended clothes, a garden row—these are just doorways. The deeper skill I want is patience. The patience to show up again, and again, and again, even when the result hides itself. The patience to live with questions that stretch across years. The patience to let silence be silence until it decides to speak.

I think patience is the parent of all other skills. Without it, nothing survives the long middle—the hours when progress is invisible, when boredom sharpens its teeth, when doubt starts whispering that you should quit.

The skill I want is to stay. To stay when the melody falters. To stay when the needle slips. To stay when the soil refuses. To stay until the silence opens.

---

The Places That Taught Me

Once, in a laundromat in Lisbon, I heard a man humming to himself while folding towels. Same three notes, over and over. It wasn’t a song I recognized. Maybe it wasn’t a song at all. But as the washers spun and the fluorescent lights flickered, the notes turned the room into something else. Ordinary things do that when repeated with care.

In Nagasaki, I saw a craftsman carving a mask. His hand moved so slowly I thought he wasn’t working. But when I blinked, the curve of the cheekbone had changed, subtle as a breath. Hours later, I realized he had never once checked a clock.

In Berlin, a woman at a flea market sold spoons she had carved herself. Each one slightly different, each one flawed in its own direction. She told me she carved when she couldn’t sleep. “The wood teaches you what it wants,” she said, as if the spoons were her teachers and she was only translating.

---

What It Would Mean

If I learned the piano, I would sit in the station and play until one stranger paused. If I learned to mend, I would wear my jacket with red thread at the elbow and not apologize. If I learned gardening, I would measure progress in leaves and failures and the taste of one imperfect tomato.

But really, what I want is to learn the kind of patience that keeps me there, in the middle of it, when nothing yet looks like success.

That is the skill I would like to learn: the art of staying.

---

TL;DR

If you asked me what skill I’d like to learn, I might say piano, or mending clothes, or gardening. But really, what I want is patience—the patience to stay, to return, to keep showing up until the silence teaches me something.

Because the real skill is not in the hands. It’s in the waiting.