Category: life

とし月が
しずけさくれて
味ふかし

With age and time,
quiet settles deeper—
flavor grows.

In your twenties, you want your life to happen all at once.
You think if you miss one train, the whole station disappears.
You stay up too late, chase too much, say yes to things that hollow you out.
You think life is a fire that needs more wood—more cities, more people, more stories.
But with time, you learn.
The fire doesn’t need more.
It needs tending.

I learned this not through philosophy or books,
but through strange, unremarkable moments—
the kind that don’t seem important until years later,
when they return in your hands like a warm bowl of something familiar.

Years ago, I made polenta for a woman I hardly knew.

She had shown up at my apartment in Ljubljana after a night of too much wine and too many people.
She sat on the edge of my sofa like a guest in her own body.
Eyes half-closed, head tilted like she was trying to stay in the room.

I remembered how my mother used to make polenta when I was sick.
She’d stir it slow, whispering about timing, about texture.
She said it wasn’t food. It was repair.

I had no medicine, no good advice.
But I had a pot and a wooden spoon.

So I made polenta. No butter, just salt and patience.
I placed it in her hands without saying anything.
She took one bite and said, “I feel like something is putting me back together.”

And maybe something was.

Here’s the lesson:
The small things you do become tools.
You don’t know when you’ll need them,
but someday, someone will walk into your life
and you’ll be ready.

Like the washing machine.

I once helped carry one down six flights of stairs in July with a stranger named Ivan.
No gloves. No warning.
We laughed at first, then sweated, then swore.
My hands were wrecked for days.

But later, when a friend asked me to help her move,
I didn’t flinch.
I showed up with gloves, straps, tape for the machine doors, and a bottle of Pocari Sweat.
We got it down in under ten minutes.

“You’ve done this before,” she said.

I nodded.
“Once badly. Now properly.”

That’s what age does:
It quietly prepares you.
You gather experience the way a tree gathers rings—slowly, invisibly, with each passing season.
You don’t even notice until you’re standing in someone else’s storm
with the exact umbrella they need.

I’ve learned how to read moods before words are spoken.
How to boil tea that makes people cry and not ask why.
How to give space instead of solutions.

A while ago, I sat in silence with someone grieving.
We didn’t talk. I just peeled an orange and handed her half.
It was all she needed.
Not answers.
Just something sweet.
Something human.

And then there are the things you learn to let go of.

Like needing to be right.
Or needing everyone to like you.
Or needing life to happen on schedule.

You stop needing closure.
You stop explaining your choices.
You begin to see that what makes something meaningful
is often what remains unspoken.

So what gets better with age?

You do.
But not louder. Not faster.
You get quieter.
You become more precise in how you love.
More fluent in presence.
More aware of when to speak and when to hold a hand and say nothing.

You learn to walk into a kitchen, boil water,
and make something that says,
I see you, and you’re safe here.

Wabi-sabi lesson:
Life doesn’t reward urgency.
It rewards presence.
What you do gently today becomes someone’s comfort tomorrow.
A pot of polenta.
A way to carry a washing machine.
An orange split in silence.

So go live.
Learn by doing.
Mess things up and remember how.

Because one day, someone will need you—
not for your perfection,
but for your preparedness.

And you’ll find that you’re ready.
Because you’ve lived.
And that makes all the difference.

—

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

He didn’t hesitate.

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

It was my last day there.

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

I don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

—

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

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

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

It’s for me.

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

—

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

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

And that is enough.

—

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

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

—

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

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

She was right.

—

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

Sometimes that’s enough.

—

And sleep. Oh, sleep.

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

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

—

There’s also this:

The quiet rituals.

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

These are not glamorous acts.

But they are acts of care. Of tending.

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

—

Wabi-sabi Lessons from the Everyday

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

You do not earn rest. You return to it.

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

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

Be tired. Be still. Be open.

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

—

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

I don’t give them a list.

I give them a memory.

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

That’s how I practice.

That’s how I stay whole.

—

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

—

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

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

I used to chase time.

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time slowed. Stretched. Softened.

And it didn’t feel wasted.

—

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

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

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

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

Spoiler: you can’t.

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

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

I laughed. Then I tried it.

He was right.

—

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

He looked at me and said:

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

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

It was the best coffee I ever had.

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

—

Wabi-sabi Lesson

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

To letting the sun touch your shoulder like a question.

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

—

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

—

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

—

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

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

The dish?
Polenta with warm milk and coffee.

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

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

—

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

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

—

So, no—
I don’t eat it often.

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

ふれるたび
ひとひら消える
記憶の雪

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the kind of legacy I respect.

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

A Walk in Basel

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

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

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

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

An Inner Pilgrimage

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

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

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

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

The Book with No Author

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

One page reads:

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

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

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

What They Don’t Teach in History Class

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

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

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

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: The Power of Being Unseen

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

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

The Real Inheritance

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

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

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

So who is my favorite historical figure?

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was the beginning.

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

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

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

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

That’s where I met her.

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

We spoke maybe ten times.

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

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

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

Years passed. There were others.

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

All of them first crushes. All of them last.

And still, they kept arriving.

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

Because eventually, something changes.

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

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

It happened to me once.

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

That was her first sentence to me.

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

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

And warmth, I learned, goes deeper.

But this isn’t about her.

This is about all the firsts.

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

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

None of it had to last to matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so, I return to the beginning.

There is no such thing as a single first crush.

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

And maybe it is.

Not because it lasts.

But because you let it happen at all.

—

Wabi-sabi lesson:

Nothing incomplete is worthless. No brief encounter is meaningless.

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

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

Even if it doesn’t become a story.

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

And a name you never said aloud.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I took a sip of my tea. Lukewarm already.

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

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

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

“Where?”

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

We were both quiet then.

The mountain shadow moved a little further across the square.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s not a bad place.”

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

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

I looked at her. Really looked.

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

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

The train would come again. But not yet.

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

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

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

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

That country? Belonging.

I want to go back.

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

It smells like basil and rain.

No capital. No flag. No anthem.

But it’s home.

Wabi-Sabi Lesson from the Borderless Map

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

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

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

And if they look confused, just smile.

They’ll get there.

Eventually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I don’t know,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That sentence still echoes.

Wabi-Sabi Lessons from the Road

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

A Final Thought

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

They’re in me. All of them.

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

We are mosaics of fleeting kindness.

A thousand quiet borrowings held together by time.

A self made of selves.

やめるより 続けるほうがいい 波の音と

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that’s true for a lot of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that’s the saddest thing of all.

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

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

I understood too late.

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

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

Even if it’s just one person reading this.

Even if it’s just me.

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

Then I’ll crawl.

But I’ll still be going.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what does this mean for you, reader?

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

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

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

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

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

Because we don’t stop.

We continue.

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

Wabi-Sabi Lessons from the Body’s Journey

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

からから道
心の奥まで
あせをかく

dusty summer path
sweat trickles into the soul
quiet endurance

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

“How do you know?”

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

—

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

It just… endures.

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

—

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

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

“Too long.”

“No, I mean… not just today.”

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

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

—

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

And I thought: This is the soul, too.

Not just the part that survives.

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

—

Notes from a Quiet Soul on a Hot Day

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

—

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

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

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

Still guiding me home.

—

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

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

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

And then, a bench.

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

I sat.

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

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

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

Just for a moment.

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

—

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

But this? This was different.

It didn’t want anything from me.

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

It just let me be.

—

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

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

Not because they changed everything.

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

And sometimes, that’s more than enough.

—

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

Sit down.

Let the wind do the talking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I looked at him, a little surprised. Nodded.

“Nice view,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

He left without saying goodbye.

And somehow, it felt complete.

—

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

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

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

—

Coming home is always a little off-tempo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I joined him in silence.

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

I smiled. “Trying to slow down.”

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

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

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

And maybe it was.

—

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

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

She pointed.

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

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

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

—

I stayed a while, just watching them.

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

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

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

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

—

Wabi-Sabi Lessons from the Quiet

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

“What about you?” she asked.

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

I asked, “Will you stay in Bern?”

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

“Long enough to learn something.”

She walked out into the wind.

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

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

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

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

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

He said something I’ve never forgotten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wabi-Sabi of the Rotating Sky

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

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

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

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

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

Because life doesn’t slow down for our favorites.

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

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

Even the rain.

Even the wind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wabi-Sabi Lessons from a Boiler:

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

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

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

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

I’ll say water. Warm. Running. Quiet.

And I’ll mean it with all I have.

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

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

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

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

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

When the Coffee Stops Tasting Right

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

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

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

Wabi-Sabi in the Long Light

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are the truths I carry now:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your turn.

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

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

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

Write it here.

“Who do you spend the most time with?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I knew the answer.
He did too.

It was me.
It’s always been me.

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

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

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

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

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

It was the question.

Who do you spend the most time with?

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons From the Rooftop

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

But then I return to mine.
Always.

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

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

But it’s held.

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

—

Not One, But Many

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

But underneath,
there was always the original.

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

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Identity That Stays

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

It needs to echo.

And mine does.

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

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

Why would I trade that for anything smoother?

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

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

Again and again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then came university.
And with it, Darwin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wabi-sabi in the Equation

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

Three Books That Changed Me:

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living Among Ants and Ashes

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

Three Flatmates, Three Stories

The Iranian Biomedical Student

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

The Indian Toast Enthusiast

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

Me, the Newcomer

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

Morning Rituals and Hidden Lessons

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

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

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

Converging Lives, Diverging Hopes

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

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

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

Wabi-Sabi in the Dorm’s Heart

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

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

Finding Light in Shared Shadows

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

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

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

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: Embracing Shared Imperfections

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

The Unremarkable Becomes the Sacred

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

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

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

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

—

From Small Things, A Rhythm

What began as nothing has become everything.

It teaches me to:

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

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

—

The Wabi-Sabi of a Toasted Life

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

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

One small joy, chosen deliberately.

—

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

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

Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just true.

And just enough.

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

It doesn’t announce itself.

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

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

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

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

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

Not bad. Not good. Just… flat.

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

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

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

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

He didn’t look up.

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

He paused.

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

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

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

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

And then the coffee goes quiet.

Wabi-Sabi Reminders for the Unplugging Kind:

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

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

Brutal Honesty is a Kindness in Disguise

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

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

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

—

A Rare and Underrated Trait: Clarity

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

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

These are not small things.

These are the foundations of real friendship.

—

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

“Still wearing onion deodorant?”

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

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Gift of Unpolished Friendship

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

And the same is true for friendship.

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

I blinked. “Whipped cream?”

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

I didn’t. But I said yes anyway.

—

The Hesitation of the Young

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

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

“You’ll ruin it,” I whispered.

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

“Better ruined and done than perfect and never.”

—

The Cream on Top

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

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

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

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

—

Wabi-Sabi Behind the Counter

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Each role shaped me, even when it scraped.

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

When Work Isn’t a Title

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

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

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

We don’t add those to our CVs.

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

But those are jobs, too.

The Summer of Dead Ends

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

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

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

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

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

She caught me staring at the clock too long.

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

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

Lessons You Don’t Get Paid To Learn

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sword You Cannot See

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

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

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

There is no perfect job.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But I’m good at waiting.

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

And sometimes I still think about that summer job.

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

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

And I’m still at it.

It began with an umbrella that wouldn’t close.

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

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

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

Then he kept walking.

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

Not wind. Not birdsong.

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

—

It was my last evening in Tōhoku.

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

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

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

“Lost how?” I asked.

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

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

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

—

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

That’s when I heard the voice.

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

I turned. No one.

“You look like the waiting type.”

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

“Did you say something?” I asked.

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

—

“Do you live here?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Sometimes.”

“And you hang around vending machines?”

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

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

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

Just a water basin. And steam from my breath.

—

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

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

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

—

A Quiet Religion

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

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

That’s my faith, I guess.

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you soon.

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

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

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

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

But it was warm.
And quiet.
And ours.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that was enough.

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

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

The Stillness Beneath the Signal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’ve changed,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She laughed. “And now?”

“Now, I think I’m good at… waiting.”

Her eyebrows went up a little.
“Waiting?”

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

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

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

I laughed. “That’s accurate.”

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

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

“And?”

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

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

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

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

“And it helped?”

“More than anything else.”

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

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

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

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

She laughed again.

—

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

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

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

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

“And be okay with that?”

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

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

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

—

What You Learn from Stillness

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

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

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

“And you’re good at that now?”

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

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

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

And neither of us spoke for a while after that.

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

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

—

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

But that I didn’t enjoy it more.

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

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

—

What “Having It All” Means

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

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

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

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

But it’s yours.

And sometimes, that’s everything.

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

Not just of coffee, but of yourself.

—

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

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

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

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

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

—

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

And then I kept going.

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

Some people post. I wrote.

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

—

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

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

—

Wabi-Sabi Between the Lines

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

But I never feel embarrassed.
Only tender.

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

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

—

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

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

And that
is enough.

Daily writing prompt

What personal belongings do you hold most dear?

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Someone once asked me if I collect anything.
We were sitting outside a laundromat in Sangenjaya, waiting for the dryer to finish its second cycle.
It was late autumn.
You could smell sweet potato from a nearby cart.
The question came out of nowhere, as such questions do.
And I didn’t know how to answer.
Not right away.

I don’t collect stamps.
Or coins.
Or vinyls, though I admire people who do.
My shelves aren’t curated. My books are dog-eared. I’ve lost more keepsakes than I’ve kept.

But later that night, walking home, it came to me—
I do collect things.
They’re just harder to see.

—

I collect small silences.
The kind that appear when you’re sitting next to someone you trust, and neither of you feels the need to fill the air.
The kind that live in early trains and late diners and bedrooms right before one of you says something that changes everything.

I collect almosts.
Almost said it.
Almost stayed.
Almost made it to the station on time.
Almost changed your life with one sentence.

I collect faces of people I never spoke to—
a girl who sat across from me in a ferry to Yakushima reading Banana Yoshimoto,
a man in a beige coat who lit a cigarette in the exact rhythm of my father,
a boy in Kyoto running after a crow like it had stolen his name.

I collect things I regret throwing away,
old letters,
a scarf from a stranger,
the sweater I wore the night I fell in love and didn’t realize it.

I collect misunderstandings,
half-heard phrases that burrowed too deep,
texts I reread too many times,
moments I thought meant nothing that turned out to be the hinge of everything.

And lately,
I’ve been collecting versions of myself I’ve outgrown.
Not to mourn them,
but to keep them close—
like faded Polaroids I don’t want to display,
but can’t bear to lose.

—

People think collections are neat things, labeled and arranged.
Mine aren’t.
They live in the back of drawers.
In playlists I never finish.
In the smell of old tea.
In photos I never took but remember clearly.
In words I haven’t said out loud yet, but whisper to myself before falling asleep.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Unsorted

Not all collections are trophies.
Some are evidence.
That you were here.
That something mattered, even if no one else saw it.

And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that’s what it means to be a person—
to keep picking up little fragments
of days,
of feelings,
of almosts,
and carry them with you quietly.

Not because they’re worth something.
But because they are yours.

So yes.
I collect things.
Even if no one would pay for them.
Even if they don’t fit on a shelf.

Especially then.

cracked teacup gleams bright
golden veins map broken past
new stories take root

There’s a moment when you hold a broken tea bowl in your hands—fragments of glaze and clay that once formed a perfect vessel, now lying in pieces. Do you discard the shards and mourn what’s lost, or do you let the fractures guide you toward something new? It was on a misty afternoon in Hasami that I discovered the answer.

Discovering the Kintsugi Workshop in Hasami

I arrived in Hasami, the Japanese town famous for its centuries-old porcelain tradition, just as a light rain began to blur the distant hills. Steam rose from the kilns like ancient spirits, and narrow lanes wound between workshops and pottery shops. Guided by the scent of earth and clay, I found her studio tucked beside the Ōyama River—a modest building with sliding doors and lanterns swaying in the breeze.

Inside, lacquered tables held hundreds of ceramic fragments: teacups splintered by time, bowls chipped at the rims, plates cracked down the center. Each piece looked abandoned—until the workshop’s master appeared, her silhouette framed by kiln smoke.

The Master and the Art of Kintsugi

At ninety-two, she moved with serene intent. Silver hair coiled into a low bun; her hands trembled only slightly as she selected a cracked tea bowl. She mixed powdered gold into a clear lacquer, the adhesive turning molten and bright in her palm.

“When something breaks,” she said, voice soft yet unwavering, “we choose how its story continues. We can hide the damage or celebrate it.”

With delicate strokes, she applied gold-laced lacquer along the fracture. Each thin line glowed like a sunrise, binding clay and memory. She set the bowl aside to dry, then turned to welcome her students—local potters and visitors eager to learn kintsugi techniques firsthand.

Learning to See Beauty in Imperfection

I settled at the workbench, where her apprentices arranged broken pieces before us. She guided our hands:

1. Cleaning the Shards: Rinse each fragment, removing dust and debris that obscure its history.
2. Mixing the Lacquer: Blend pine resin with powdered gold, silver, or platinum—metals that symbolize healing.
3. Reassembling the Pieces: Press fragments together, letting the lacquer seep into crevices.
4. Highlighting the Scars: Once set, brush excess lacquer away so only fine golden veins remain.

As I pressed two clay shards together, I felt a connection to every craftsman who had shaped Hasami ware for generations. The broken tea bowl in my hands became a bridge between past and future.

Teaching and Mentorship: A Living Legacy

I spent the afternoon watching the master teach a new generation. A schoolteacher, her apron dusted with clay, learned to steady her breath as she aligned tiny fragments. A local potter, whose kiln had once closed for lack of apprentices, found renewed purpose in preserving this heritage.

At dusk, I asked the master what legacy she hoped to leave behind.

“My legacy,” she replied, “is not a museum piece or a single masterpiece. It is every student who carries kintsugi forward—every bowl they mend, every story they pass on.”

Her words resonated like a chime in the hushed studio. Instead of seeking perfection, she celebrated imperfection as an opportunity for rebirth.

Planting Shards and Growing Futures

That evening, I carried my newly mended tea bowl to the riverbank. Under a cherry tree, I dug a small hole and pressed the bowl’s base into the soil, shards upturned like seeds. Around it, I scattered sakura petals and whispered wishes for resilience and compassion.

Each morning since, I’ve watered that spot, imagining golden veins blooming into flowers of understanding. At home, I journal daily—writing letters to future generations, folding each page into an origami crane before releasing it into a stream of memory and hope.

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: Legacy Beyond Perfection

In the heart of Hasami, I learned that legacy is woven from fractured moments and imperfect choices. Wabi-sabi teaches us:

• Healing Through Embrace: Mending what’s broken with gold reminds us that scars can become symbols of strength.
• Shared Craftsmanship: Passing on techniques and stories ensures that tradition evolves rather than ossifies.
• Impermanence as Gift: The very cracks we fear carry the potential for new beauty and deeper meaning.
• Action Over Monument: True legacy lives in small daily acts—teaching, repairing, planting—more than in grand monuments.

When you face your own broken moments, remember the golden paths that bind clay and memory. Choose to repair, to teach, and to plant seeds of possibility. In doing so, you leave behind a legacy that shines long after the last flame of the kiln has faded.

frost-laced morning air
silent breaths drift upward
embers glow within

There’s a moment when cold weather arrives—a bridge between sleep and waking—when each breath crystallizes in the air, and the world feels sharpened, as if life itself has been carved by frost. It’s the hush before dawn, when warmth is no longer a given, and every sensation belongs entirely to you.

I arrived at the mountain ryokan just after the first snow of the season. The path was glazed in white, the trees bowed under icy weight. Inside, the hearth crackled, sending waves of heat across woven rugs. I shed layers by the door—wool scarf, down jacket, gloves stiff with chill—and felt the warmth seep back into my bones.

A young innkeeper with cheeks bright as persimmons greeted me. He offered a mug of yuzu-infused tea, its citrus oil dancing on the steam. Outside, distant pines stood rigid against the pale sky; inside, the amber glow of lanterns softened every edge. I cradled the mug, noticing how the heat traced lines along my fingertips, reminding me how precious warmth can be.

Later, I ventured into the courtyard. Each step crunched in rhythm—one, two, one—like a slow drumbeat. My breath formed clouds that drifted across snowdrifts. I paused by a stone lantern half-buried in powder and ran my gloved hand along its rim. The coldness of the stone felt alive, insistent, a tangible reminder of impermanence.

The innkeeper’s grandmother emerged from the shadows, her shawl wrapped tight. At seventy-nine, she moved with deliberate grace. She pointed to the distant smoke rising from the chimney, then to the moon’s pale arc above the pines. In her eyes, I saw a welcome: cold weather is not an enemy, but a teacher.

Back inside, I sank into a floor cushion near the hearth and opened a slim travel journal. I wrote slowly, guided by the hush that only cold can bring:

Cold air sharpens senses
Silence shaped by frozen breath
Warmth glows like sunrise

The fire’s crackle punctuated each line. Outside, the wind sighed through eaves, and snowflakes drifted against paper screens, tracing slow patterns before melting.

That night, as the onsen’s steaming waters embraced me, I felt the contrast strike deeper than anywhere else. Skin that moments before had numbed to pain now tingled with vitality. My thoughts stretched out, unhurried—memories of childhood winters, first snowfall, hot cocoa shared with strangers. In that water, I discovered that cold weather does not harden the heart; it opens it, carving space for gratitude and presence.

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: Embracing the Chill

Cold weather teaches us that beauty often arrives in the harshest moments:

– Clarity in Contrast: Just as snow’s white reveals every green twig, cold air sharpens our awareness of warmth.
– Impermanence Made Visible: Frost melts at dawn; each crystal reminds us that change is the only constant.
– Resilience Through Discomfort: Enduring the chill deepens appreciation for simple comforts—a glowing hearth, a shared cup of tea.
– Stillness as Gift: In the hush of winter, we find the quiet between thoughts, the space where inspiration takes root.

When cold winds blow, don’t retreat. Lean into the frost—let each frozen breath remind you that life’s warmth is all the more precious for its fleeting glow.

Have you ever broken a bone?

People ask it casually. Like it’s a campfire story or a badge of childhood. Skateboard accident. Bike crash. Snowboard trip gone wrong. Something clean. Dramatic. Contained.

I usually just nod and say yes. I don’t tell them which one.
Because the one I broke wasn’t the kind they put in a cast.

It was my collarbone.
Winter.
Years ago.

Not from anything noble or cinematic. I wasn’t saving someone. I wasn’t on a mountain or in a fight. I slipped on a patch of ice outside a laundromat, holding a bag of oranges.

I remember how the world tilted mid-fall. How everything slowed just long enough for me to register that I was alone. That no one saw. That I would have to get up by myself.

The fracture was small. Hairline, they called it. Just a crack. But for weeks I couldn’t lie on my side, couldn’t lift my arm without that dull ache pulsing like memory under the skin.

Funny thing is, it healed. Like they said it would.

But not quite right.

To this day, when the weather shifts—when it rains in the wrong direction or the wind carries too much history—I feel it again. A ghost pain. A reminder that healing doesn’t always mean untouched. Sometimes it means changed.

And I think we all have bones like that.

Not literal ones.
But the kind you can’t point to on an x-ray.

The trust that shattered when someone didn’t come back.
The confidence that cracked under too many late-night self-doubts.
The quiet part of you that once felt safe in the world, until it didn’t.

We get up. We walk again. We smile.
But we carry the ache.
Invisible. Unspoken.
Present.

And maybe the real question isn’t have you ever broken a bone?
Maybe it’s what have you learned to live with?

The ache that teaches you to slow down.
The fracture that makes you more careful with others.
The healed part that still twinges, reminding you where you’ve been.

That day outside the laundromat, my bag split open. Oranges rolled out onto the sidewalk like coins in a rigged slot machine. I remember chasing them with one arm pressed to my ribs, laughing—not because it was funny, but because it wasn’t.

Because sometimes all you can do is laugh, gather what you can, and carry the rest differently.

Years later, I still reach for my shoulder when the sky feels off.

And I remember: healing doesn’t mean forgetting.
It means knowing your limits.
Honoring the crack.
And walking forward anyway.

Even if you carry a little more weather than before.

Are you a leader or a follower?

It was the kind of question we used to get in school, right before they handed out some color-coded personality test and told us who we were supposed to become. Red if you were bold. Blue if you were thoughtful. Yellow for the dreamers. Green if you followed the rules.

I never knew how to answer it. I still don’t.

I’ve followed people into places I didn’t belong, just to feel less alone. I’ve led people into situations I wasn’t ready for, just because I couldn’t bear to disappoint them. Some days I move like water, adjusting to every curve. Other days, I am the stone that refuses to shift.

And I’ve come to believe the question itself is flawed.

Most of us aren’t one or the other. We’re just trying to find our footing. Some seasons we lead. Some seasons we follow. Some seasons we just try to stay standing.

I was thinking about all this the day I found myself in the Mori Art Museum.

It had been one of those shapeless afternoons—too early for dinner, too late to go home. I wandered into Roppongi Hills with nothing in particular to do. The mall was pulsing with soft jazz and the gentle perfume of polished ambition. Shoppers moved like they had somewhere to be. I didn’t. So I kept walking.

Past cafés where the chairs were too elegant to sit in for long. Past boutiques filled with linen shirts folded with the kind of reverence usually reserved for scripture. Up escalators, through corridors, following signs not because I was curious, but because it was easier than deciding.

And then: the museum. Tucked into the sky like a secret only the quiet ones find.

Admission: 2,000 yen.

I hesitated. That was two meals. That was laundry money. That was more than I’d usually spend on something with no tangible return. But something inside nudged me. A quiet, unreasonable voice. Not logic. Not budget. Just… go.

So I went.

And what I found wasn’t just art. It was a recalibration.

Large-format canvases that seemed to breathe when you blinked. Sculptures suspended mid-air, defying gravity and reason. Video installations that washed over you like dreams you didn’t know you remembered. Rooms built to confuse your sense of time. Light bent in ways that made you question whether you’d ever actually seen it before.

One piece was made entirely of steel thread. Just lines and tension. But it hummed with presence. It had no meaning unless you stood still, unless you offered it your time. And I did. Not because I understood it. But because it asked nothing from me except stillness.

I thought about that question again.

Leader or follower?

But what if the better question is:

Can you be led by wonder? Can you follow beauty into places where logic says you don’t belong?

I remembered being younger, broke, anxious, always calculating. Always hungry—for certainty, for validation, for meaning. I remember passing galleries with my head down, pretending I wasn’t curious. Pretending I couldn’t care less. Because I thought beauty was something you earned. Something reserved for those who had already made it.

But there I was, high above Tokyo, standing face-to-face with art that asked nothing of me. No degree. No credentials. No invitation.

Just 2,000 yen and a willingness to be moved.

And in that moment, I realized: the doors aren’t always locked. Sometimes we just forget to knock. Or we tell ourselves it isn’t meant for us. Or we wait for someone to lead us inside.

But the truth is, we’re already allowed.

Even if we’re lost. Even if we don’t know what the piece means. Even if we feel small, or uncertain, or unworthy.

Especially then.

Because some things—some true, unforgettable things—aren’t waiting for leaders or followers.

They’re waiting for you to stop walking past. To stop saying maybe next time. To stop assuming that a masterpiece requires a map.

And sometimes, all it takes is 2,000 yen and the courage to be a little foolish. To stand still in front of something you don’t understand. To follow the part of you that doesn’t speak in logic.

And maybe that’s leadership too.

The kind that starts with admitting you don’t have the answers.
The kind that dares to follow awe.
The kind that leads you quietly back to yourself.

No spotlight. No applause. Just a long hallway, a silent room, a feeling you can’t quite name.

And a version of you—older, maybe—who finally steps in.

I was standing in the Mori Art Museum, five floors above Tokyo. Maybe more. High enough that the windows looked like they had given up trying to frame the city and instead just surrendered to it. The view stretched past Shibuya and beyond, all silver angles and blinking lights, like the inside of a machine trying to dream.

The entrance had cost me 2,000 yen.

World-class art, the sign said. And it was true.

Large-format pieces that took up entire rooms. Sculptures with their own gravitational pull. Video installations that whispered strange truths in half-languages. One wall pulsed with projected light like a living organism. Another held a canvas so quiet you could barely look at it without blinking too fast.

But what struck me wasn’t the art itself.

It was how close I was allowed to stand.

No velvet ropes. No glass. Just me and a work someone had maybe poured years into. Inches apart. I could see the cracks in the paint, the hesitation in the brushstroke. I could feel the heat of a thought made visible.

And for 2,000 yen.

A bowl of ramen cost almost the same.

I stood in front of a piece made entirely of steel and thread. The kind of thing that made no sense unless you stood very still for a very long time. And there was something so unbearably human about that—how the piece asked for your attention, not your approval. How it didn’t try to sell you anything. How it just… existed.

And I remembered a time, years ago, when I couldn’t have afforded even that.

Back then, I’d walk past galleries with my head down. Pretend I wasn’t interested. I’d eat convenience store bread in Yoyogi Park and wonder how people made it work. How they got inside the buildings with warm lighting and clean bathrooms and drinks that came with napkins.

I thought, then, that access came after success. That beauty was something reserved for later.

But now I know—sometimes, it only costs 2,000 yen.

Not everything worthwhile is behind a gate.

You just have to know when to stop walking past. When to go up. When to pay attention.

And maybe that’s the secret of it all.

You won’t always be able to afford everything.
But there will be moments—small, quiet ones—where the world opens up and says, this one’s for you.

Even if it’s just for an afternoon.
Even if you leave with nothing but a softened heart and a little less noise in your head.

Some days, that’s the masterpiece.

Watching that young couple up there—him with his onigiri, her with the custard crepe—I couldn’t help but think of a time when I stood in nearly the same spot. Different roof, different view, but the same city. Same soft hope.

I was about their age then. Maybe a little older. Living in a one-room apartment in Suginami with a view of a concrete wall and a laundry pole that squeaked in the wind. I used to eat conbini dinners on my balcony—if you could call that slab of concrete a balcony—and dream about making it. Though I didn’t quite know what “it” was yet. Just not… this. Not instant curry. Not a futon with a thin middle. Not checking my bank app before every convenience store purchase.

I remember once walking home from an interview that didn’t go anywhere. I stopped at a vending machine and bought a black coffee in a can because it felt like the kind of thing someone decisive would do. I drank it under a rusted streetlamp and thought, How do people survive this?

Life, I realized slowly, has edges. Invisible ones.
On both sides of the road you’re trying to walk, there’s a steep fall.

One side is apathy—the temptation to stop trying, to settle into the softness of giving up. It feels safe, at first. Like rest. But it’s a trap. A slow erosion of your spirit disguised as “being realistic.”

The other side is obsession—the kind of hunger that devours your present in the name of some imagined future. It promises success, meaning, freedom. But it comes at the cost of your health, your peace, your relationships. You can win, yes. But you can also burn out before the winning means anything.

You think the path forward is obvious.
But most days it’s like walking a tightrope in the fog.
There are no guardrails. No signs. Just your breath, your intention, your balance.

I’ve swayed toward both sides. Too tired to care. Too driven to rest.
I’ve lied to myself in both directions.

But here I am now. Still walking. A little slower. A little quieter. Less interested in proving anything, more curious about what it means to stay standing.

So when I saw that young man watching Shibuya race beneath him—with his girl by his side and his 100 yen rice ball in hand—I wanted to say:

Be careful with your hope. But don’t let go of it.
Stay on the road. Even when it disappears beneath you for a while.
Let love help you balance.

There’s no map. No guaranteed reward. But there’s something to be said for walking your own way and learning not to fall for the promises on either side.

Sometimes, that’s enough.
Sometimes, that’s what makes the difference.

I hadn’t meant to go up that high. I’d ducked into Hikarie mostly to use the restroom—maybe wander the basement levels and touch things I couldn’t afford, as one often does in places like that.

Hikarie, for those who haven’t been, is a glass-and-steel tower that rises like a shard of light above Shibuya. It’s sleek, modern, and designed to be many things at once—shopping complex, art gallery, office space, gourmet maze, event hall, quiet retreat, and hyper-curated lifestyle display. A vertical city for people who move fast but still want beauty in the in-between.

You enter straight from the station, and the hum of Shibuya’s chaos is swallowed almost immediately by soft jazz piped through invisible speakers. Escalators take you up like conveyor belts through different strata of intent: floors of artisan kitchen knives, minimalist home goods, niche perfumes, concept cafes with velvet chairs and matcha lattes that arrive with edible flowers balanced on top.

It’s the kind of place that wants you to believe in a more elegant version of yourself.

I wasn’t there to buy anything. Just to walk through, float a little, let my mind rest in the spaces between things.

But somehow, I kept going up. Past the department store calm, past the galleries and open atriums, until I ended up on the top floor.

And that’s where I saw it.

A Lawson. A small, quietly glowing convenience store tucked into a corner like a secret—offering the same onigiri, same plastic-wrapped sandwiches, same Vitamin C drinks and aluminum-wrapped nikuman as the one next to your neighborhood train station. It felt out of place, and yet absolutely right.

Next to it was a terrace. One of those rooftop spaces where the city falls away beneath you. The kind of view you forget you’re allowed to stand in front of without paying for a ticket.

And that’s where I saw them.

A young man and a girl. Early twenties, maybe. He wore a grey hoodie pulled slightly over his head, the kind that softens with age and holds the shape of someone trying. In one hand, a 100 yen onigiri. In the other, nothing. She stood beside him with a custard crème crepe, wrapped carefully in its paper sleeve, holding it like something she didn’t want to finish too fast.

They weren’t talking. They were just watching Shibuya move.

And there’s something about that—watching the city from above—that strips people down. They weren’t checking their phones. They weren’t posing. They were just there.

And in that stillness, I saw it: hope.

Not loud, inspirational hope. Not the kind made for motivational posters. But the kind that hums beneath your ribs when you’re trying to build a life.

He wanted to succeed. You could feel it in the way he held himself, even as he rested. The way he watched the city below like it held a future he hadn’t quite stepped into yet. Not fame. Not money. Just something better than what he had. Something he could build with his own hands. Stability. Health. A kind of freedom.

She wasn’t rushing him. She wasn’t asking for more. Her body language said: this is enough. For now.

And maybe that’s the kind of love that survives. The kind that lives in shared onigiri and rooftop silence. In being seen. In being allowed to dream quietly, together.

I stood there a while. Long enough to finish the tea I’d bought out of curiosity more than thirst. Long enough to feel that strange, aching kind of gratitude for strangers you’ll never know.

I didn’t take a photo.

I didn’t need to.

Because I knew I’d remember it—not the view, but the feeling. That moment when two people looked out at a hard, glittering world and quietly decided not to be afraid of it.

What You Learn in a Place Like That

You go into a place like Hikarie expecting design and polish. A curated experience. Something removed from the messiness of real life.

But sometimes, at the top, in the corners, where no one is really paying attention, you find something far more important.

You find two people eating convenience store food, watching a city that might never give them everything they want—but still daring to want anyway.

And in that moment, you remember:

Hope doesn’t have to be loud.
Success doesn’t have to be fast.
And the future doesn’t need to be glamorous to be worth reaching for.

Sometimes it’s enough to just keep standing beside someone with a crepe in one hand and a view in the other.

And to believe, quietly, that you’ll both find a way.

That Monday I didn’t wake up on time. Not because I was tired, or sick, or overwhelmed. I simply didn’t move when the alarm buzzed. I watched the sunlight stretch across the floorboards, let it crawl up the side of my bed like an old friend, and didn’t chase the day like I usually do.

Somewhere, meetings were starting. Emails were being written. People were rushing into subways and fumbling with their umbrellas and pretending the start of the week didn’t ache a little.

But I stayed in bed.

There was guilt at first. The kind that wears a tie and calls itself responsible. But after a while, the guilt quieted. Gave way to something gentler. The understanding that rest is not laziness. That some days are not for chasing.

I boiled water. Made tea. Ate a banana slowly. I sat by the window and watched the neighbors hang out their laundry, the fabric snapping like flags in a war I no longer felt pressed to fight.

I watched a crow land on the telephone wire, then take off again, as if the pause was enough. I listened to the faint sound of jazz coming from a second-story apartment, the trumpet notes curling like smoke above the rooftops.

There was something sacred about how little happened. And how full it still felt.

And I realized, somewhere between the second sip and the sound of someone’s radio leaking through the window:

Not every moment must be filled. Not every day must be seized. Some days ask only for presence. For noticing. For being alive enough to say no to the noise.

Freedom, I thought, is not about doing whatever you want. It’s about knowing when not to. It’s about feeling your own pulse again in a world that races past it.

That morning I missed work.

But I didn’t miss myself. I met myself again. And he was quieter than I remembered. And kinder, too.

I stepped into the sento just after noon. A weekday, late enough for the morning crowd to be gone, early enough to avoid the post-work regulars.

The tile was pale blue, worn smooth by decades of soap and water and skin. Steam curled from the baths like a sigh. The mural on the wall was a mountain—somewhere between Fuji and a dream—painted in faded pastels, the kind that only grow more beautiful once the original colors forget their names.

There were no digital clocks. No music. Just the occasional splash, the rustle of towels, the hollow sound of water dripping from ladles into tubs.

I sat on a low stool, washed slowly. The way they do here—not rushed, not distracted. Just the rhythm of soap, rinse, repeat.

When I slid into the hottest bath, the heat climbed up my spine like a long-forgotten memory. My muscles let go of something I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

There was an older man across from me. He wore a towel over his head like a crown and didn’t look up once. We didn’t speak. But his stillness mirrored mine. Not silence as in absence, but silence as in presence.

And it hit me, somewhere in that fog of heat and chlorine and mountain mural:

Freedom isn’t escape. It isn’t a plane ticket or a blank schedule. It’s the ability to be completely where you are. To stop fleeing your own mind long enough to inhabit your body.

To sit in a tub that has held a thousand bodies before yours and not feel lost among them. To be alone, and not lonely. To be bare, and not ashamed.

That was freedom.

I stayed longer than I meant to.

There was something unspoken in the air—an understanding between the tiles and the skin and the heat—that this moment did not need to be improved. It was enough, exactly as it was. The air was heavy, but not oppressive. It held you in place. As if asking you gently: where else do you need to be?

A boy came in with his grandfather. They spoke in soft Kansai dialect. The boy giggled when he poured too much water on his back. The grandfather didn’t scold him. Just smiled. Adjusted the faucet.

It felt like watching a lesson being passed on—not in words, but in repetition. In the act of doing a thing well, with presence.

Eventually, the old man across from me stood, dried off with slow, deliberate care, and stepped out. The echo of his feet against the tile followed him down the narrow hallway like a memory refusing to fade.

I watched the steam settle where he had been. Nothing dramatic. Just the ghost of warmth.

Outside, the air was cooler than I remembered. I passed a vending machine with glass so clean it reflected my face back at me like a question I wasn’t ready to answer. I bought a bottle of barley tea and drank it on the curb. The asphalt was warm beneath me. The world moved as it always did—buses sighing into stops, bicycles rattling by, a child crying somewhere in the distance—but something inside had shifted.

Not with answers. But with space. A kind of lightness that had nothing to do with flight.

I walked slowly. Past shuttered storefronts. Past the quiet hum of laundry behind windows. Past a cat asleep in a circle of sun.

And for the first time in days, I didn’t feel like I had to be anywhere else.

Not because life had changed. But because, for a brief moment, I had remembered how to live it.

I used to catch myself believing I had to have it all figured out. That by a certain age, the questions would quiet, the map would be drawn, the steps would make sense. That there’d be a moment—clear, clean, cinematic—when I’d finally feel like I’d arrived.

But life doesn’t unfold like that. It stutters. It doubles back. It asks you to choose with incomplete information and walk forward anyway.

You see the outside of other lives—finished degrees, booked flights, babies held like miracles in arms that seem so sure. But you don’t see the unraveling beneath. The nights they doubted every decision. The ache of missing someone they can’t admit they still love. The weight of being strong too long.

You don’t see the invisible repairs—stitched quietly with routine, laughter, silence. The moments they almost gave up. The slow rebuild. The daily decision to keep going.

If you feel like you’re behind, lost, late to your own becoming—pause. Look again.

Maybe you’re not off course. Maybe this is the work.

Because the truth is, nobody arrives. We just keep unfolding. One step. One heartbreak. One ordinary Tuesday at a time.

This life you’re living—its pauses, its uneven rhythm, its coffee-stained notebooks and too-late apologies—it’s not a detour. It’s the story.

And maybe, like a Murakami character drifting through strange, quiet cities, you’re not meant to reach a destination. Maybe you’re meant to notice the music in the vending machines, the poetry in the sidewalks, the strange clarity that only comes in moments of uncertainty.

Because Wabi-sabi reminds us: nothing is perfect, nothing is complete, nothing is permanent.

That person who seems at peace? They’re still finding their way too. Just in a different light.

So stay with your life. Especially when it makes no sense. Especially then.

The longer you walk beside it, the more it starts to feel like a companion instead of a puzzle.
Not something to fix.
But something to walk with. Even when it’s quiet. Especially then.

stories drift like steam
a newborn’s breath cradles hope
book spines guide the lost

I arrived at Takeo Onsen just as the earliest light braided through bamboo groves. Steam curled from hidden springs, carrying the scent of hinoki and hot earth. In the soft glow, I spotted the sign for the new youth hostel: a simple wooden board painted pale green, the name almost swallowed by morning mist. Pushing open the sliding door, I stepped into a world where warmth and stories intertwined.

First Impressions

Inside, tatami mats softened my footsteps. Lanterns hung low, their paper shades warmed by gentle bulbs. Along one wall, shelves bowed beneath well-loved books: weathered travel memoirs, dog-eared poetry collections, novels whose covers had faded to whispers of color. A hand-written sign read, “Take a book if your heart needs it, leave one when you can.” I felt a tug at my chest—this was more than hospitality; it was an invitation to belong.

Behind the reception desk, a young couple moved in easy harmony. He was folding laundry, his hands steady despite the hush of dawn; she was cradling their infant daughter, whose soft coos punctuated the silence. Their eyes met mine with a gentle welcome, as if they’d been waiting not for guests, but for companions in this quiet sanctuary.

Morning Rituals

Each day began before the onsen’s communal bath ever warmed. I watched him stoke the cast-iron stove, water hissing into readiness. She arranged green tea and homemade onigiri on low lacquered tables, then tucked a blanket around their baby, whose small fist curled around a stray page of a poetry chapbook. In that moment, I understood: they were weaving routine from the raw threads of new parenthood and fledgling business.

I browsed the shelves. A volume of Bashō’s haiku fell into my hands, a scratch along its spine guiding me to a poem about dewdrops on bamboo leaves. I carried it to a cushion by the hearth, where the steam’s warmth and the baby’s breathing formed a silent lullaby. Outside, the mist drifted through sliding windows; inside, each syllable felt like a breath of unhurried time.

Borrowed Stories

As the sun climbed, guests trickled in—backpackers with mud-spattered boots, cyclists whose tires still dripped forest damp, a lone writer chasing solitude. They moved toward the shelves with a reverence I hadn’t expected: fingertips brushing spines, eyes closing as if to drink in the weight of each story. Some slipped paperbacks into their packs; others paused, reading lines aloud to no one in particular.

A solo traveler from Osaka found a battered travel diary and shared a passage about desert skies with me. Two German cyclists discovered a novel about mountain pilgrimages and praised its loose binding—proof it had been loved on many journeys. I realized then that the books were more than decor; they were moving companions, connectors between strangers, carriers of the hostel’s quiet generosity.

Midday Conversations

By lunchtime, the lobby hummed with soft chatter. I joined the couple at a low table, steaming bowls of miso soup balanced before us. Between sips, I asked how they managed a newborn alongside a hostel. She smiled, brushing a lock of hair back. “We rest when she rests,” she said. “And when we can’t, we trust that the books will hold our guests.” His eyes shone with pride. “Every volume is a gift—and a promise that kindness travels.”

I thought of my own journeys, how a single act of generosity—offering directions, sharing a phrasebook—had once changed my path. Here, they’d amplified that gesture a hundredfold, embedding it in every corridor and cushion.

Evening Lullabies

As dusk settled, lanterns glowed like fireflies returned to earth. The baby’s first cry—a small, clear bell—echoed through the hall. A guest paused mid-step, concern flickering across her face, then smiled as the mother scooped up her daughter and hummed a lullaby that mingled with the hiss of the onsen.

In that soft cascade, visitors drifted back to the bookshelves. I watched one man tug a volume of Murakami short stories from the shelf, then settle beside me, the baby’s lullaby and page-turning the only soundtrack. Outside, the cicadas paused their evening chorus, as though to listen.

Night’s Quiet Offering

Later, when the doors were locked and only the baby’s breathing and the distant drip of baths remained, I found the couple at a low table under a single lamp. They shared a battered paperback between them, reading passages aloud in turn. The husband whispered, “We hope each story finds a home.” She nodded, tucking a bookmark into the worn spine. “And that every traveler leaves something behind—just as they take something with them.”

I lingered in the doorway, realizing that this hostel was more than a stop on my journey. It was a living poem of hospitality, each borrowed book a verse, each lullaby a refrain.

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: Stories in Motion

In the gentle cradle of Takeo Onsen, I learned that sharing impermanence can create the deepest connections. Wabi-sabi reveals that value lies not in polished perfection, but in the humble exchange of hearts and pages:

• Gifts of Impermanence: A borrowed book carries the hostel’s spirit into the wider world, returning changed.
• Quiet Generosity: A lullaby and a loaned volume hold equal power to soothe and inspire.
• Community in Small Acts: Each onigiri shared, each story passed hand to hand, weaves a tapestry of belonging.
• Embrace the Unfinished: Like each reader’s notes in the margins, our lives grow richer in the incomplete stories we carry forward.

I departed at dawn, book tucked under my arm, baby’s laughter echoing in my mind. The hostel faded into mist, but its stories—mine and theirs—continue to travel, drifting like steam across the landscapes of memory.

There’s a moment at the end of a journey—after your luggage is stowed, the onsen bath waits, and every itinerary box has been checked—when the world pauses and offers you one last choice. It doesn’t come with fanfare. It’s the stray second before you turn for the hot spring. But if you lean into it, you’ll find a sliver of freedom.

It happens when the bustle behind you softens.
When the map no longer speaks.
When every footstep feels less like a plan and more like a question.

Most of us don’t notice that instant.
We rush toward comfort.
We slip into routines.
We trade curiosity for convenience.

But real discovery lives in that breath of possibility—when no one’s watching and nothing compels you to proceed.

—

I was poised to sink into Hagi’s famous onsen—steam rising in practiced arcs, the promise of smooth stones and weightless warmth. Instead, I turned left onto a narrow alley flanked by weathered earthen walls. The mud plaster was scored with age, as if each crack whispered stories of samurai and merchants long gone.

The air smelled faintly of sugar and sea salt. A wooden sign swung overhead, its kanji worn thin: 甘味処 (kanmidokoro), “sweet spot.” Inside, lacquered counters gleamed beneath paper lanterns. Rows of yokan and daifuku sat like tiny monuments, each one polished to a soft glow.

Behind the counter stood a woman of ninety-five years: hair silver as moonlight, spine curved like an ancient cedar, yet her voice rang clear and bright—an unexpected hymn. She greeted me with a bow that seemed to carry centuries of gratitude.

I watched her hands move: wrapping a gossamer sheet of mochi around sweet bean paste, dusting it with kinako, then sliding it onto a plate as if presenting a treasure.

“Try the yuzu manju,” she said, voice bubbling like warm sap. “It’s summer’s poem in pastry form.”

Her eyes danced as she spoke, unfurling memories of citrus orchards and childhood laughter. I bit into the soft cake: citrus spark, cloud-white dough, a sweetness that spoke of patience.

We talked—her youthful cadence weaving through my questions. She told me how she opened this shop after the war, how she’d learned recipes from traveling tea masters, how each batch of sugar crystals was a lesson in impermanence. I asked why she stayed here, day after day, age after age.

“Because people come and go,” she said, “but a taste can linger. And that’s my story.”

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Unseen Path

Wabi-sabi celebrates the quiet choices no one watches. It finds beauty in the trembling hands of a nonagenarian confectioner, in the cracks of an alley wall, in the last detour before a planned ritual. It reminds us:

– True community lives in small exchanges, not grand gestures.
– Presence is the sweetest ingredient—more potent than any recipe.
– Imperfect moments, unhurried pauses, shape our memories more than polished tours.

So next time the world nudges you toward the obvious, linger in that uncharted second. Turn down the silent alley. Choose the confection over the onsen. Listen to the voices that echo long after the lanterns dim.

Don’t hurry back to the bath. Just walk.
And let the sweetness of stillness be enough.

We stepped off Nakadake’s rim as the sun dipped behind Aso’s distant peaks, stretching shadows long across the ash-dust path. Each footfall stirred faint puffs of grey—remnants of eruptions past—while the wind carried distant laughter and the low rumble of shifting earth. Descending felt like moving through layers of time, from ancient fury to present calm, each step a reminder that the mountain has witnessed more extremes than any headline could capture.

Halfway down, the journalist paused to jot in his notebook, fingers stained with ash. He frowned at his phone’s screen, where notifications flickered like restless fireflies. “Every channel feels shouting,” he muttered. “Left, right, louder, louder.” His wife—the crossword expert—traced her pencil along a weathered rock, then looked up. “It’s like a pendulum,” she said softly. “It swings so far one way we can’t see the other. Then it swings back and we forget the space in between.” The trail curved beneath us in a gentle arc, as if echoing her words.

Below, terraced fields sprawled in patchwork greens and golds. A lone tractor trundled along the horizon, its engine’s steady hum cutting through the tension of our talk. “Even this farmer,” the journalist mused, “must feel the pull of extremes—market prices, weather whims. Yet he finds rhythm in planting and harvest.” As dusk settled, the roar of global debates felt distant here. Between the ridges and rice paddies, balance seemed possible.

As twilight deepened and fireflies blinked along the path’s edges, our conversation turned inward. The journalist closed his notebook. “Tell me,” he said, “in a world of constant branding and labels, what ‘brand’ guides you?” His question hung in the air, mingling with the hush of crickets.

I answered quietly:

The Brand of Impermanence
A concept built on the beauty of fading moments—where value lives in the transient, the worn, the ever-changing.

The Brand of Resonance
Defined by echoes—stories and silences that linger, reminding us that meaning often emerges long after the first note fades.

The Brand of Open-Endedness
An identity shaped by questions, not answers—where half-finished ideas invite collaboration and unexpected discovery.

The Brand of Quiet Revelation
Centered on subtle transformations—soft glows, gentle shifts, unexpected insights that whisper rather than shout.

They exchanged a glance. She tapped her pencil on her pad and wrote:

ash drifts through the air
split worlds search for common ground
moonlight finds the seam

He read it twice, then tucked the paper into his pack as though safeguarding a new refrain.

At the timberline, stars began to pierce the violet sky. We halted on a lichen-rimed boulder, the world below absorbed in its nightly quiet. In that moment, our conceptual “brands” — impermanence, resonance, open-endedness, quiet revelation — felt less like abstract ideas and more like lanterns guiding us through an uncertain descent.

Back on the final switchback, the path narrowed and the air cooled. We boarded the waiting bus in companionable silence, each of us carrying the weight of polarized voices in our pockets—and the memory of a mountain that knows how to hold the in-between. As the engine rumbled to life, I realized that the true descent wasn’t down the slope, but into that quiet midpoint where extremes soften and new perspectives can take root.

Wabi-Sabi Lesson: Honoring the In-Between

In a world swinging between fervent extremes, true wisdom lives in the grey space where opposites meet. Like volcanic ash settling into fertile furrows, the tension between “us” and “them” can nourish deeper understanding—if only we pause to listen. Wabi-sabi shows us that beauty arises not at the peaks or valleys of opinion, but in the imperfect balance that holds us all together.

The day began in Arita, where the scent of old kilns still lingers in the streets.
Every spring, this quiet town in Saga Prefecture transforms into a slow-moving sea of footsteps and ceramic clatter—the Arita and Hirasumi Pottery Festival. Rows of stalls stretch for kilometers, spilling porcelain in all shades of white and blue, from antique Nabeshima plates to imperfect yunomi cups, glazed like clouds with cracked edges.

You go there not to shop quickly, but to wander.
To feel texture with your fingers.
To watch old potters who once fired with firewood now sell their legacy beneath plastic tents.

I walked for hours.
Arita to Hirasumi.
Back again.
Down side streets, into family-run shops with tatami mats and handwritten signs.
Some vendors offered tea. Others stories.
No rush.
No pressure.
Just clay shaped into permanence by patient hands.

When I finally checked the bus schedule, I realized I had missed the last afternoon ride back.
Typical.
I didn’t feel annoyed, just tired—bone tired.
So I walked again, slowly, to Takeo City.
And there, almost without planning it, I ended up inside the Takeo City Library.

—

It wasn’t like any library I’d been to.
A long glass wall filtered the light just enough to feel like sunset all day.
Wooden beams lined the ceilings like a temple.
Books arranged with care, not crammed.
There was a Starbucks inside, but it didn’t feel loud. Somehow, it fit.
A quiet hum of life, not distraction.

I sat for two hours without reading a single thing.
Just listening.
To paper sliding.
To children whispering.
To a student somewhere gently tapping a pencil, lost in thought.

Sometimes rest doesn’t mean stopping.
It just means stopping the need to make progress.
And that’s what the library gave me—space to stop without guilt.

—

When the sun began to slip behind the mountains, I walked to the Takeo Onsen gardens.
No plan.
Just enough light for the maple leaves to flicker like small lamps in the dusk.
There’s an old camphor tree there—one of Japan’s largest.
It looks less like a tree and more like a forgotten god, half-asleep, letting its moss grow wild and its roots split stones without asking permission.

I stood in front of it for a long time.
Didn’t pray.
Didn’t think.
Just stood.
Sometimes, being in the presence of something ancient is more nourishing than food.

But by the time I made it back to town, I realized I was starving.

—

That’s how I found the ramen place.

Tiny.
Tucked into the corner of a silent block.
One old woman slicing green onions, chop chop, with machine rhythm.
One man behind the counter. Middle-aged. Wearing an apron stained by years of broth and time.

When I walked in, he looked up.
I asked, “What do you recommend?”
He said, “Ramen.”

I smiled.
Tried again.
“What kind of ramen?”
He shrugged. “Ramen.”

So I sat.
And I waited.
And eventually, a bowl arrived.

Steam rising in soft spirals.
The smell of green onion so thick it felt like air itself had been seasoned.

The broth was clear, not showy.
The noodles—chewy, almost elastic.
No egg. No frills. Just onion, noodle, broth.
A few slices of pork curled gently at the edge.
Everything was touched by green onion.
Every bite a variation of the same sharp, earthy note.

It was perfect.

—

The Simplicity That Doesn’t Apologize

That bowl of ramen taught me something I’d forgotten:

• Don’t explain too much. Let the thing speak for itself.
• You don’t need variety to have depth. Just honesty.
• Sometimes the clearest moves are the strongest.
• When you strip away what’s unnecessary, the essence finally has space to shine.

It reminded me of a principle once taught by a man who studied more than war—he believed in cutting clean, not to impress, but to end confusion.
The way the ramen shop owner answered my question with the same word—ramen—again and again.
Because sometimes, that’s all there is.
The work.
The bowl.
The moment.

The lesson is always this:
Refinement is not addition.
It’s subtraction.
Keep removing until what’s left is undeniable.

And that night, in a near-empty shop in Takeo, with steam rising in front of me and silence outside,
what was left
was ramen.
And it was enough.

It was in Kagoshima, a night when the air smelled like warm asphalt after rain, when the neon signs hummed like insects and the ferries slept heavy against the docks.
I had wandered too far from the station, too long down streets that curled in on themselves like lazy handwriting, without any real plan except to feel the shape of a city that didn’t expect anything from me.

I stopped at one of those vending machines glowing too bright for the hour, bought a lukewarm bottle of green tea, and leaned against a stone wall, watching the mist rise from the wet pavement.

That’s when she walked by.
Small, wiry, wearing a navy skirt and a soft grey sweater two sizes too big, her bag swinging against her hip like it had been part of her since birth.
She glanced at me, curious but not suspicious, the way people do when they recognize someone who isn’t quite part of the usual scenery.

I nodded. She nodded back.
And somehow, without anyone really deciding it, we started talking.

—

Her name was Aki.
She said it like it was obvious. No last name. No explanations.

She had just finished a job—not office work, not school, something vaguer, something she didn’t dress up or apologize for.
She told me she did delivery work sometimes, different kinds, whatever was needed.
Driving. Picking up parcels. Sometimes escorting businessmen from hotels to hostess bars when they got too drunk to find their way.
“I know Kagoshima better than taxi driver,” she said, smiling like it was a small joke just for herself.

She was only twenty, but there was something in her voice that was older than that.
Not jaded. Not bitter.
Just… solid.
Like a tree that had learned not to waste energy growing too fast.

She asked me what I was doing in Kagoshima.
I shrugged.
“Looking for nothing,” I said.
She laughed—quick, soft—and said,
「いいね。なにも探さないとき、いちばんいいもの見つかるよ。」
[That’s good. When you’re not looking for anything, that’s when you find the best things.]

It didn’t feel like a line.
It felt like she meant it.

—

We sat down on the curb next to the vending machine, passing the tea bottle back and forth like we had known each other longer than fifteen minutes.
The road glistened under the streetlights, empty except for the occasional cat slinking across like it had secret business to attend to.

Aki told me about growing up here.
How most people left if they could.
How she stayed because she liked the mountains being close, liked that even when the city tried to grow loud and fast, the sea and the volcano kept it humble.

“People rush too much,” she said, staring up at the black sky.
「小さいこと、ちゃんと見たら、大きいこともわかる。」
[If you learn to really see the small things, you can understand the big things too.]

I thought about that.
The way she said it, casually, like passing on something obvious—like telling me where the nearest konbini was, not something huge and philosophical.
But it stayed with me.
Hung there between us, bigger than the mist, bigger than the neon, bigger than the whole ferry port put together.

—

Knowing Small Things First

I realized then that she lived differently than most people I knew.
She didn’t move like someone trying to win a race.
She didn’t speak like someone gathering words to sound smart.
She didn’t dream about faraway cities because she needed to prove she was too good for the one she was born in.

She just lived exactly where she was.
Paid attention to the cracks in the sidewalk.
Knew which vending machine always ran out of milk tea first.
Noticed when the stray cat that usually slept on the pachinko steps was missing.

Small things.
Quiet things.
Things most people would miss, trying too hard to find something “important.”

Maybe that’s what Musashi meant, long ago, in a language we don’t speak but still somehow understand—
to know small things is to know the big ones too.
To see the thread running through a girl’s beat-up sneakers and the whole wild history of human stubbornness braided together.

—

Wabi-Sabi at the Edge of the Docks

We didn’t exchange numbers.
Didn’t pretend we’d meet again.

When the tea bottle was empty and the night had thinned into that strange blue just before dawn,
she stood up, dusted off her skirt, and bowed slightly.

「じゃあ、がんばってね。」
[Well then… do your best, alright?]

I bowed back, awkward in my heavier way.
「あなたも。」
[You too.]

She laughed once, short and real, and walked off down a side street that bent sharply out of sight.
No looking back.
No performance.

Just moving forward the way trees lean toward the light—without thinking about it, without explaining themselves, without forgetting the ground they came from.

—

I stayed a while longer by the vending machine, feeling the city breathe slowly around me,
thinking how easy it is to chase after big things,
how hard it is to notice the small ones when they’re already right in front of you.

And when I finally walked back toward my little rented room above the izakaya,
I moved slower,
like I was practicing something I hadn’t known was important until now.

The art of seeing without rushing.
The art of knowing without needing to explain.
The art of being where you are, even if only for one soft, breathing night at the edge of a city that nobody had really noticed was still dreaming.

It started, I think, with the dishes. Not all at once—no dramatic avalanche of dirty plates, no sudden realization under fluorescent kitchen light—but with a single cup left in the sink longer than it should’ve been. Then another. Then a fork, a half-empty bowl, a pan with the quiet weight of old oil still clinging to it. I didn’t notice at first. That’s the strange thing. The unraveling was so slow, so quiet, it passed beneath my own attention.

I was still working. Still meeting deadlines, still replying to emails with just enough punctuation to appear human. Still showing up to things I said I’d show up to, laughing when it seemed appropriate, nodding when someone was making a point. But something inside me—some quieter part that usually tracked the edges of life—had gone completely silent. The rhythm had gone. That low, anchoring thrum of daily rituals that once made my life feel like it belonged to me and not some invisible, rushing thing I had to keep up with.

I began sleeping strange hours. Not out of rebellion, but erosion. I stayed up too late, scrolling past things I didn’t care about. I ate whatever was closest, rarely warm, often standing. I stopped sitting down to eat. I stopped cooking. I stopped noticing the taste of anything. My body moved, but my thoughts were static—like a radio left tuned to an empty frequency.

And then, one morning, without deciding anything, without some new plan to be better or start over or become the version of myself I had once sketched out in notebooks and never become—I boiled water. That was it. Just water. No music. No affirmation. No productivity attached to the act. I wasn’t trying to reset. I just wanted to hold something warm.

I poured the water into the old ceramic mug with the crack that looks like a river. I didn’t check my phone. I didn’t open my laptop. I didn’t even sit down. I just stood there, barefoot on the cold floor, watching the tea steam rise into the morning air like breath I hadn’t taken in weeks.

And in that stillness—where nothing had really changed, but everything suddenly felt different—I realized I had returned. Not completely, not all at once, but enough to feel the floor under me again.

—

The next day, I made tea again. The same mug, the same water, the same unremarkable brand of loose leaf I’d forgotten I still had in the cupboard. There was something reassuring in the repetition, something deeply human in the idea that you could build your life back from something as small as a daily cup of tea. It didn’t feel like a routine, not yet. It felt like a rhythm. A heartbeat returning beneath the static.

From there, things didn’t transform dramatically, but they softened. I found myself folding laundry instead of letting it live in baskets. I started putting away the dishes before bed, not for cleanliness but because the quiet sound of plates finding their place made me feel like I was also finding mine. I began washing my face with both hands. Not hurriedly, not for outcome—just to feel the water, to return to the skin I’d been ignoring.

None of these things made me impressive. They didn’t lead to a six-step morning routine or a glowing Instagram post about mindfulness. They were invisible things. Small things. But they reminded me who I was. And more importantly, how to be myself again.

—

Discipline, I learned, isn’t about control. It isn’t about force or productivity or some harsh version of self-mastery. Discipline, in its gentlest and most honest form, is remembering. It’s remembering that there is a version of you that doesn’t need to be fixed, only tended to. A version of you that doesn’t rise early or answer every message or make brilliant work every day, but who knows how to sit in a chair, drink tea, and feel the light on their face without needing to do anything about it.

The world didn’t slow down. The pace outside stayed loud, fast, demanding. But I stopped letting it dictate how I moved. And that shift, though nearly invisible to anyone else, changed everything for me. Not all at once, not with fireworks—but in the same way you notice that winter is ending: first by the sound of melting, then by the return of birds.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Return to the Ordinary

Wabi-sabi has always taught that the beauty of life is in the imperfect, the incomplete, the quietly enduring. It teaches that broken things can still hold water, that old routines—when returned to slowly and without pressure—can feel more sacred than the most elaborate rituals. It reminds us:

– You don’t need to overhaul your life to return to it. Start where your hands already are.
– Repetition isn’t failure. It’s healing in motion.
– Slowness is not laziness. It’s trust in time.
– You do not need to be whole to begin again. You only need to be here.

—

So if you find yourself far away from yourself—if your days have blurred, if your cup has been in the sink too long, if the thought of “starting over” feels like another task you’ll fail to complete—don’t chase something bigger. Don’t plan a transformation.

Boil water.
Breathe.
Stand in your kitchen and hold something warm.

Because sometimes, the most powerful way to come home
is not to rebuild everything from scratch,
but to notice that you never really left—
you just forgot the way back.

And maybe that way begins, always,
with something as small
as tea.

There was a time in my life when I tried to explain everything.
Pain.
Distance.
Why someone left without a proper goodbye.
Why something I worked hard for didn’t unfold the way it should’ve.

I needed a narrative. A clean arc. A cause and effect.
I needed the world to behave like a novel — with tension, turning points, and a final chapter where everything clicked into place.

But life, I’ve learned, doesn’t owe us that kind of symmetry.

One autumn, not long ago, I sat at a bus stop in a town I didn’t know well. It had just rained — the kind of fine rain that makes the leaves stick to the pavement like forgotten thoughts.
I had nowhere to be, really.
Something in me had just needed to move.
To not be in the same room with the same questions I’d been looping through for weeks.

A woman sat next to me.
Maybe in her seventies.
She didn’t speak. Just watched the sky, hands folded neatly in her lap like she had all the time in the world.

At some point, she turned and said,
“There’s no need to figure everything out. Some clouds just pass.”

That was it.
She didn’t explain what she meant.
Didn’t need to.

When Letting Go of the Story Is the Only Way Forward

I had been trying to label everything.
This was a failure.
This was a lesson.
This person was good.
This one hurt me.
This moment is supposed to mean something.

But that need — to name, to sort, to wrap things in understanding — was also the thing keeping me stuck.

Because some moments… are just moments.
Some endings don’t reveal why.
Some chapters remain incomplete.

And when I stopped trying to extract meaning from every detail, I found something better than answers:
Peace.

Seeing Things As They Are (Not As You Wish They’d Be)

When you stop needing everything to make sense, you begin to see what is.

• A pause isn’t necessarily failure.
• Someone’s silence isn’t always rejection.
• A door closing might not be about you at all.

You start noticing smaller things.
How light lands on a windowsill.
How your breath evens out when you’re not rushing toward clarity.
How sometimes, the absence of something leaves more space than the thing ever could.

If You’re Looking for Closure, Consider This

Closure isn’t always given.
Sometimes it’s created — not by getting answers, but by releasing the need for them.

Let go of the old emails you keep rereading.
Let go of the question that never got a reply.
Let go of the version of yourself who thought they needed that explanation to move on.

You don’t need to know why someone changed.
You don’t need a perfect ending.
You just need to come back to where your feet are.

Here.
Now.
Alive.

Still becoming.

Final Thoughts: Meaning Isn’t Always Immediate

There are seasons when life will feel like static.
Moments will arrive that don’t fit any pattern.
Some people will leave without a final word, and some wounds will close without a scar.

You don’t have to find meaning in all of it.
Sometimes, you just have to let it pass through you.
Without gripping. Without judging. Without forcing a name.

That, in itself, is a kind of wisdom.

Not everything has to be resolved.
Some things just need to be witnessed.

It started with something small.
A canceled plan.
Then another.
Then the slow collapse of what I thought was a solid routine — the kind that gave shape to my days and made me believe I had control.

I watched as things slipped through the cracks: income streams drying up, relationships shifting into silence, goals I’d worked toward suddenly becoming irrelevant.

There was no grand crisis.
No visible wreckage.
Just this subtle unraveling — like a thread pulled slowly through the hem of a well-worn jacket.

And I didn’t know how to fight it.
Because there was nothing to fight.

That’s the thing about certain seasons of life.
They don’t announce themselves with a bang.
They just shift beneath your feet until you’re no longer sure where the ground is.

At first, I tried to fix it.
To rebuild the structure, force clarity, outrun the fog.
I signed up for online courses, wrote aggressive to-do lists, planned future projects with a desperation that felt like drowning.

None of it worked.
The more I pushed, the more brittle I became.

Until one day, I stopped.
Not out of peace. Out of exhaustion.

I let the stillness swallow me whole.

Adapting When Everything Changes

What I learned in that strange quiet is this:
Sometimes, the way forward isn’t forward.
It’s deeper.
More fluid.
Less about conquering and more about softening into what is.

Life doesn’t pause because we’re overwhelmed.
It just keeps moving.
And the only way not to break is to move with it.

How I Rebuilt My Rhythm From Chaos

Slowly, I began to live differently.

• I stopped asking, “How do I get back to normal?” and started asking, “What wants to emerge from here?”
• I allowed myself to pivot — in work, in relationships, in identity — without needing it to make sense to anyone else.
• I let go of plans that no longer felt alive and gave myself permission to improvise.

And in that letting go, I didn’t find chaos.
I found capacity.

The ability to listen.
To bend.
To respond instead of react.
To shape-shift without losing the core of who I am.

If You’re Feeling Lost, Read This

We are not built for rigidity.
We are meant to respond.
To learn from what crumbles, to shift our weight when the ground changes, to know that flexibility is not weakness — it’s wisdom.

If you’re navigating change — the slow kind, the foggy kind, the kind that leaves no clear instructions — know this:

You don’t have to hold everything together.

Let some things fall.
Let some names fade.
Let some versions of yourself dissolve.

The self that rises from that silence might surprise you.
It might be softer.
Stronger.
More rooted in truth than anything you planned.

Final Thoughts: Resilience Isn’t Toughness — It’s Adaptability

I used to think strength meant standing tall through the storm.
But now I know: real strength is knowing when to kneel.
When to shift your shape.
When to change your rhythm without losing your beat.

There will always be seasons when nothing makes sense — when the maps stop working and the signs go blank.
But if you can stay open, stay moving, stay curious — you’ll find your way.

Not because you controlled the chaos.
But because you let it change you, without letting it harden you.

That, I think, is what it means to truly grow.

I was thirty, and tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Not exhausted. Not burnt out.
Just quietly worn from too many years of trying to be legible.

I lived alone then, in a top-floor apartment with slanted ceilings and a window that caught exactly one hour of afternoon sun. If I placed the chair just right, I could sit in that warm square of light like a plant, not thinking, not speaking—just existing, gently.

Most evenings I’d make dinner without ceremony. Miso soup. Cold rice. Maybe an egg. I’d eat slowly, not because I had the time, but because I no longer felt the need to rush through the parts of life that didn’t need to impress anyone.

That year, I stopped giving long answers.
When people asked how I was, I said, “I’m okay.”
And let it be true without needing to prove or explain it.
I stopped trying to be profound in conversations.
I said “I don’t know” when I didn’t.
I let pauses stretch a little longer than comfortable,
and found that they held more honesty than words ever did.

—

The Quiet Power of Not Performing

At thirty, I realized how much of my twenties were spent performing clarity.
Sounding certain when I was unsure.
Sounding fine when I was fractured.
Sounding busy, because being still made me feel disposable.

But turning thirty felt like a soft undoing.
Like gently unraveling a knot I didn’t know I was tied into.

It wasn’t a revelation.
It was a slow exhale.
A quiet return to the parts of myself I’d set aside to seem more useful, more likable, more productive.

And I understood—
you don’t need to prove your softness is sharp.
You don’t need to defend your peace.
You don’t need to be understood by everyone to feel whole.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Letting Go

Wabi-sabi teaches us that beauty isn’t in perfection.
It’s in what survives without shouting.
It’s in what lingers after you’ve stopped trying to make it stay.

It reminds us:

• Clarity doesn’t always come with answers. Sometimes it’s just the noise falling away.
• Not all growth is visible. Some happens in the way you no longer chase what used to hurt.
• Letting go of needing to be impressive is one of the most impressive things you can do.
• There’s strength in saying less—and meaning more.

—

Now, when I sit in that same chair, in that square of afternoon sun,
I don’t think about who I used to be.
I don’t try to write the perfect sentence.
I don’t check if the world is still paying attention.

I just sit.
Quietly.
Fully.
Here.

And in that moment—
I am not unfinished.
I am not behind.
I am not too late or too much or too uncertain.

I am simply thirty.
And finally,
I do not need to explain myself to feel real.

Excerpt from my Pokémon notebook, dated November 2, 2000:

“Today I walked home alone. Didn’t tell Mom. She thinks I went with Daniel but he left early. I was scared the whole time. There was a cat on the wall and it looked like it knew something. My hands were cold but I kept going. I think I’m different now.”

—

I was ten the first time I walked home alone, and even now I can still feel the weight of that decision—not as a memory exactly, but as something more physical, something stored in the way my hands sometimes clench in cold air, or the way I instinctively scan the pavement for cracks when the world feels uncertain.

Until that afternoon, I had never gone more than a few blocks without someone beside me—an older cousin, a friend from school, or most often Daniel, who lived two floors down and always walked like he had somewhere more important to be. He was the kind of boy who kicked stones out of his way just to watch them ricochet. I admired that, though I never said it out loud.

That day, Daniel had gone home early. I don’t remember why—maybe a dentist appointment or a fever or just something unspecific and adult-sounding—but he wasn’t there when the last bell rang and the gates swung open and children scattered like birds. I stood there for a few minutes longer than I needed to, backpack straps too tight against my shoulders, wondering if I should wait for someone else or ask to join a group heading the same way.

But then something strange and unfamiliar swelled in my chest—not boldness exactly, not defiance, just the quiet realization that I could. That no one would stop me if I left right now, if I followed the route I already knew by heart. Eleven and a half minutes. That’s all it was. A left at the bakery with the cracked window, across the intersection with the lopsided stoplight, then past the row of pale houses with flower pots that were always just a little too full.

So I went.

—

The world felt louder walking alone. Each step landed heavier. I noticed the crunch of leaves underfoot, the shifting of birds on wires above me, the sound of a distant door slamming that I was sure—just for a second—was meant for me.

And then I saw the cat.

It sat on the low wall just before the underpass, the one covered in ivy and chalk scribbles that never made sense. The cat didn’t move. It didn’t blink. It just stared with the kind of gaze that made you feel like a question had been asked, and you hadn’t yet answered. I wanted to walk faster, but my legs didn’t agree. They kept their pace, stubborn and steady, like they were afraid that to hurry would admit something was wrong.

I remember thinking, If I make it past the cat, I’ll be fine.
And I did.

And I was.

—

When I got home, my mother was washing carrots. I told her I had walked back with Daniel like always, even though I hadn’t seen him since lunch. She didn’t question it. Just nodded, flicked water off her fingers, and asked if I wanted a slice of pear.

I sat at the kitchen table in my damp socks and nodded, saying nothing, feeling everything.

I wasn’t proud. I wasn’t guilty. I was something else entirely—like I’d stepped just slightly out of the version of myself everyone expected and found, to my own quiet surprise, that the world hadn’t ended.

That it had kept turning.

And so had I.

—

The Risk You Can’t Brag About

I’ve taken bigger risks since. Risks with money. With work. With people.
But none of them carried the same clean weight as that walk home.

Because that wasn’t a risk you could explain to someone who hadn’t lived inside your ten-year-old chest.
It wasn’t loud.
It didn’t come with applause or fear of failure.
It came with silence.
With the kind of fear that whispers instead of shouts.
With the realization that no one would know what you did unless you told them.

And I didn’t.
Not for years.

Because some victories don’t need to be shared to change you.
Some aren’t even victories, exactly.
Just steps into your own skin.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Unfinished Courage

Wabi-sabi reminds us that the beauty of things lies in their imperfections, in their incompleteness, in their becoming.
That walk wasn’t perfect.
It wasn’t confident or smooth.
But it was mine.

And in that imperfect journey, something essential formed:

– You don’t need to be fearless to move forward. You just need to not stop.
– A risk doesn’t have to look brave to be brave.
– Not every lie is a betrayal—sometimes it’s a bridge you build toward who you’re becoming.
– Some truths arrive later, long after the moment has passed, shaped slowly by memory and meaning.

—

Excerpt from the same notebook, written weeks later, November 20:

“I told Daniel I walked alone that day. He said, ‘Cool.’ Then we threw rocks at a can and I hit it twice. It felt different. Like I was taller, even though I wasn’t.”

—

I don’t regret it.
Not the walk.
Not the lie.
Not the fear.

Because sometimes the risk that matters most
is not the one that changes your path,
but the one that changes your sense of self.

Even just a little.
Even for eleven and a half minutes.
Even if only a cat saw it happen.

One morning, without warning, I left.
Not a city. Not a person.
But a version of myself that no longer felt real.

There was no grand announcement. No lightning bolt of clarity. Just the slow, aching realization that I had stayed too long in a life that no longer fit — a job that drained me, routines that dulled me, a daily rhythm that ran on autopilot.
It wasn’t burnout. It was something quieter. Deeper. A soft kind of suffocation.

So I took a risk.
I walked away from security, from a stable job, from the path everyone said made sense.

And at first, everything unraveled.

I lost the structure I had clung to.
Woke up at odd hours. Ate cold leftovers. Wandered neighborhoods just to feel unfamiliar.
It was disorienting — this radical shift from doing to simply being.

There were no quick wins.
No five-step plan to reinvent myself.
Just the raw honesty of uncertainty.
And still, something in me whispered: keep going.

Because even when everything felt lost, a quiet part of me knew —
this was the beginning of something real.

Why Taking Risks Is Worth It (Even When You’re Scared)

If you’re standing on the edge of a major life change — considering quitting your job, starting over, or finally listening to that voice inside that’s been growing louder — this is for you.

We are conditioned to crave certainty.
To follow the blueprint: career progression, financial stability, predictable milestones.
But that blueprint isn’t one-size-fits-all. And sometimes, following it means abandoning yourself in the process.

Taking a personal risk doesn’t always mean making headlines.
Sometimes it looks like choosing silence over noise.
Stillness over speed.
Uncertainty over soul-numbing routine.

What I Learned From Letting Go

In the messy middle of not knowing, I found clarity.
I discovered that:

• Rest is not failure — it’s a necessary recalibration.
• Not all productivity is purposeful. Sometimes, doing less creates more room for what matters.
• Being lost is not a mistake — it’s often the first step toward authenticity.

I began to rebuild my life — not around productivity or external validation — but around peace.
Around curiosity.
Around values that felt like home.

If You’re Contemplating a Life Change, Read This

The decision to change your life, quit your job, or walk away from something “safe” might not make sense to anyone else.
That’s okay.
It doesn’t have to.

You don’t need a fully-formed plan to start.
You just need to listen to what’s true.

If you’re tired of burnout culture, feeling stuck in a job that no longer aligns, or craving a slower, more intentional life — the risk might be exactly what your soul is asking for.

Final Thoughts: The Real Meaning of Risk

Risk isn’t always jumping off cliffs.
Sometimes, it’s as quiet as refusing to betray yourself for one more day.

Looking back, I don’t regret the choice I made.
Because that risk — that uncertain, lonely, unglamorous decision — gave me my life back.

And in the end, that’s the only kind of success I’m interested in

When I was twenty, I spoke too carefully. I shaped my words like furniture in someone else’s house—useful, polite, easy to move if needed. I was living in a shared flat near the train station in Bern, where the walls were thin enough to hear someone brush their teeth but thick enough to keep their loneliness in.

I had just started university, and everything felt like a test I hadn’t studied for. Every conversation, every glance across a seminar room, every pause after saying something that maybe didn’t land quite right. I read too much philosophy back then, underlined too many things, tried too hard to sound like I knew what I was doing. But I didn’t.

One night, during a literature class, the professor asked us to speak about a passage—something about silence in a story by Dazai. I raised my hand, not because I had something meaningful to say, but because I was tired of listening to myself stay quiet.

When I spoke, my voice caught. Just a little. Like it had tripped on its own shoelace. The sentence didn’t flow. It felt jagged, too soft at the end.

No one said anything.
The room stayed still.
And I thought I’d failed.

But then the professor—he was older, calm in a way you can’t fake—nodded slowly and said,
“Yes. That’s it exactly.”

That was all. No praise. No spotlight.
Just a soft affirmation that I hadn’t ruined everything by speaking.
That maybe, even the words that come out uneven
still land where they’re meant to.

—

The Quiet Terror of Being Heard

At twenty, what made me nervous wasn’t rejection.
It was the possibility of being understood.
Of saying something so close to the truth that someone else would recognize it.
And what then?
What if they saw me?
What if I could never hide again?

But nervousness, I’ve learned, is not something to outgrow.
It’s something to walk beside.
A reminder that something inside you matters enough to risk.

It doesn’t mean you’re unready.
It means you’re awake.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Half-Spoken Thought

Wabi-sabi is not just about the cracked bowl or the faded fabric.
It’s about the moment your voice falters but doesn’t fall.
It’s about the sentence that ends strangely
but still means something to someone.

It reminds us:

• You don’t need to speak perfectly to be understood.
• A trembling truth still holds weight.
• Even soft words can leave deep impressions.
• Sometimes silence is the second half of a sentence.

—

Now, when I speak—when I write—there’s still that hesitation.
That small echo of twenty-year-old me,
sitting in a too-bright classroom,
wondering if the room would forgive me for being real.

But I’ve learned to love the pause.
The unevenness.
The way some thoughts only find their shape after they’ve been spoken aloud.

Because maybe it’s not about saying it right.
Maybe it’s about saying it anyway.
And trusting that someone, somewhere,
is waiting to nod slowly and say,
“Yes. That’s it exactly.”

When I was eight, I learned what it meant to be seen. Not the kind of seeing where someone waves at you in the hallway or calls your name for attendance. But the raw, irreversible seeing that happens when you step out from behind whatever has been keeping you safe and place something delicate in the open.

It was a Wednesday. I remember this because my shirt still smelled like Tuesday’s rain, and my socks had that damp stiffness they get when they’re not quite dry from the night before. I stood in front of the class gripping a sheet of paper that had grown soft in my palm—thinner by the second, like rice paper left too long in the rain.

I’d practiced the poem for days. Out by the stone wall behind our house, where the ants moved like they had somewhere quiet and important to be, and the trees listened without judgment. Out there, the words came easily. They poured. I whispered them like secrets to the wind. I believed them.

But in the classroom, everything changed.

Halfway through, I lost the line. Just—gone. Like it had never belonged to me at all. A pause opened up in the middle of the sentence. It didn’t feel like forgetting. It felt like falling through glass.

Nobody laughed.
Nobody saved me.
Time just… hovered.

And then I kept going.
Softer.
Careful.
As if I was afraid the silence might crack if I pushed too hard against it.

When it was over, no one clapped. There wasn’t applause. There wasn’t ridicule. There was just life, moving on. Except for one boy—one I never really spoke to—who walked past my desk and gently slid my pencil back beside me.

“Cool poem,” he said.
Just like that.
Like it was normal.
Like he hadn’t just witnessed me unravel and reassemble in front of twenty-four blinking faces.

—

What Makes Me Nervous

Still, to this day, it’s that moment. The stepping out. The exposure. The chance that the words won’t come, or worse, that they will—and no one will care. That I’ll say something true and be met with silence.

But nervousness, I’ve learned, isn’t weakness. It’s not failure waiting to happen.
It’s presence.
It’s proof that something inside you is real enough to risk.

We get nervous when we approach the edge of something important.
When the stakes, however small, feel connected to who we are.
And that’s not a flaw.
That’s a signal.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Voice That Quivers

Wabi-sabi reminds us to find beauty in what is not polished.
In the unedited draft.
In the trembling voice.
In the pauses we didn’t plan, but still survived.

It teaches us:

• Nervousness is a form of aliveness. A sign you’re paying attention.
• A poem remembered imperfectly can still be unforgettable.
• Cracks let the light in—but also let it out.
• What you risk sharing imperfectly might become someone else’s quiet bravery.

—

So now, when I feel that same flutter,
when the paper softens in my grip again,
when my voice shakes before it finds its footing,
I think back to that moment.

The falling.
The line forgotten.
The boy with the pencil.

And I remember:
Even the nervous stand tall for a while.
Even silence carries recognition.
And even the most imperfect offerings
can echo in someone else’s chest
long after they’re spoken.

In the quiet stretch after a demanding day, I never look for perfection.
I don’t have a five-step routine.
I don’t light scented candles or listen to curated playlists.
Most nights, I don’t even sit properly. I slump. I breathe. I let things unravel—gently, without shame.

There’s an old cushion on the floor that’s lost half its shape.
A chipped cup I keep reaching for without thinking.
A dim lamp that hums more than it glows.

This is where I unwind.
Not in the pursuit of stillness, but in the permission to stop trying so hard.

—

When Less Is Enough

In a world that pushes us to optimize every second, to monetize hobbies and biohack peace, there’s something quietly radical about doing nothing well.

Wabi-sabi, the Japanese philosophy of imperfect beauty, reminds us that the broken, the used, the simple—these are not flaws.
They are features.

And so I’ve stopped chasing the perfect end to a long day.
Instead, I find softness in the ordinary:

• A reheated bowl of soup eaten over the sink.
• A half-finished book I don’t mind reading slowly.
• A long pause in a message to a friend—not because I don’t care, but because I want to say it right.

And when I do write that message—sometimes days later—it’s honest.
Like this one:

“Just wanted to say—I always enjoy our coffees and conversations, even if they only happen once in a while. There’s something about the way we catch up that always feels easy and grounding. Looking forward to the next one, whenever it happens. Take care till then.”

That’s it.
No exclamation marks.
No performance.
Just presence.

—

What We Forget About Rest

Unwinding isn’t a reward.
It’s a return.
Not to efficiency.
But to yourself.

And the most meaningful ways to decompress often look like nothing at all:

• Sitting with someone who doesn’t need you to be interesting.
• Letting your mind wander without guilt.
• Drinking your tea before it’s the perfect temperature.
• Leaving the dishes for tomorrow.

There’s grace in the undone.
There’s healing in the half-finished.
There’s peace in not polishing the moment.

—

Wabi-Sabi Lessons in Everyday Rest

The end of the day doesn’t need to be aesthetic.
It just needs to be yours.

Let wabi-sabi guide your evening:

• Let stillness arrive when it wants. Don’t chase it.
• Not every ritual needs to look like a ritual. If it calms you, it counts.
• Messages from the heart take time. That’s a sign of care, not delay.
• Imperfection is not failure—it’s the shape of something real.

—

So if today wore you thin,
don’t pressure yourself to recover beautifully.

Sit somewhere soft—even if it’s the floor.
Drink something warm—even if it’s instant.
Message someone who makes you feel like yourself—even if it’s just to say you’re thinking of them.

And when the quiet finds you,
let it in.

You don’t need to fix this day.
Just let it end.
Softly.
Honestly.
Enough.

There’s something about the walk home after a long day that feels more honest than anything that came before it. Not the work itself. Not the conversations. Not the tasks crossed off or the mistakes quietly buried. Just the walk. The slow, in-between pace that happens when you no longer have to perform.

I don’t listen to music on those walks. I used to. But now I prefer the echo of my own footsteps. The way the streetlights flicker on one by one like tired guardians. The soft click of a stranger’s bicycle passing in the opposite direction. A cat blinking at me from a windowsill, as if to say, You again?

That’s usually when I start to exhale—genuinely, unconsciously. Not for effect. Just because the body remembers, even when I forget, that it’s okay to let go.

—

When I finally get home, I don’t chase comfort. I let it arrive on its own terms. Maybe it’s the hum of the kettle, the promise of warm tea. Maybe it’s the way I sit on the floor instead of the chair, back against the wall, feeling the coolness of the wood through my shirt.

Or maybe it’s the moment I think of you.

Not in a dramatic way.
Not like something cinematic.

Just a quiet thought, the kind that rises like steam.
I remember our last coffee.
The way the conversation didn’t need direction.
How the pauses felt full instead of empty.

We don’t meet often, but when we do, it feels like something inside me returns to the right frequency.
Like tuning a radio that had been just slightly off all week.
You say something simple, I laugh, and for a second the noise in my head dissolves.

—

That’s how I unwind.
Not with rituals.
Not with wine or yoga or scrolling until the thoughts are too tired to argue.

I unwind by remembering the soft places.
The safe ones.
The moments that didn’t demand anything of me.

I think of conversations that felt like standing in the sun just long enough to warm your bones.
Of coffee in small ceramic cups.
Of glances that didn’t look through you,
but to you.

And I look forward to the next one—whenever it happens.
No rush.
No pressure.
Just the knowledge that it will.

Somewhere down a familiar street.
In a café with too much ambient jazz.
Across a table with chipped corners.
Two voices,
easy and grounding.

The kind that reminds you you’re still human,
and somehow,
still okay.

It was a quiet evening in early spring, the kind where the wind hadn’t quite decided if it still belonged to winter. I’d come over to see a friend, but she was upstairs, still getting ready or maybe just lost in her own timing. I found myself sitting instead in the kitchen with her mother, a woman whose presence felt like a book you’d forgotten you already started—warm, familiar, just waiting for you to open to the next page. The kitchen was lit by a single amber bulb and smelled of something baking—yeasty and soft and hard to place, like memory before it fully forms. She offered me coffee in a chipped white mug, and I took it. No sugar. No milk. Just the two of us and the slow hush of the house around us.

She looked at me for a while, not in the way people usually look when they’re trying to think of something polite to say, but like she was measuring whether I was someone who could hold what she was about to share. Then she asked, out of nowhere, “Have you ever been to India?” I shook my head. “Not yet,” I said. She smiled gently and leaned back in her chair. “I went in ’65. It was different then. Not better. Just… slower. Quieter. But louder inside.”

I said nothing and just sipped the coffee, which had already gone lukewarm. And then, as if a door had creaked open somewhere deep inside her, she began to speak—not like someone performing a memory, but like someone revisiting a room she hadn’t stepped into for years. She told me about joining a Peace Choir when she was barely twenty. How they sang to raise money for the Red Cross, and how someone at some point asked if she’d be willing to go. Not for music, but for help. “They needed hands,” she said. “Not voices. Not opinions. Just hands.”

She flew to South Korea first, long before it looked anything like the place people post about now. There, she spent three months baking donuts for soldiers in a makeshift kitchen that always smelled like oil and flour and exhaustion. “We didn’t have measurements,” she said, almost laughing. “We made them by feel. You just knew when the dough was right. Like how you know when someone’s about to cry—you don’t need them to say anything.” She paused, then added, “Some of them cried anyway. The soldiers. Usually the younger ones. Said it reminded them of home. Not the donut. Just the fact that someone made something warm.”

When Korea ended, she went to India. Alone. She carried travel cheques in her bra and a notebook filled with half-written addresses of people she was supposed to meet. Delhi, Jaipur, Madurai. She learned to navigate chaos without Google Maps, to haggle in markets without words, to trust people because sometimes that’s the only way to keep moving. “Everything felt alive,” she said. “And everyone seemed to know something I didn’t—but they didn’t hold it over me. They just let me walk beside them.” She lost her shoes in a temple. Slept through a monsoon. Shared her last chocolate bar with a child who gave her a mango in return, sticky and warm and perfect.

I listened. I didn’t say much. Just nodded when it seemed like the right thing to do. Her voice was steady, but the story held weight, the kind that builds in your chest when someone shares something they almost forgot they were still carrying. She didn’t tell it like a triumph. She didn’t dress it up in nostalgia. There were no metaphors, no grand morals. Just the facts, and the feeling underneath them. A life lived, not documented. Held in muscle and memory, not in posts or pictures.

When she stopped talking, the silence between us felt full, not empty. She stared into her coffee for a moment, then said quietly, “I didn’t go to find myself. I just went because something needed doing. And I knew how to do it. That was enough.” I wanted to tell her how rare that felt. How good it was to hear something unpolished, something not built for display. But I didn’t say any of that. I just nodded again. Because some stories don’t ask for praise. They just ask to be heard.

Now, whenever I scroll through endless feeds—flashes of curated adventure, filtered meaning—I think of her. I think of the donuts made by hand. The crumpled travel cheques. The moment someone handed her a mango in exchange for kindness. I remember that not all journeys are for show. Some are for service. Some are for stillness. Some are for stepping into the unknown, not to be seen, but to bear witness. And I wonder how many stories like hers go untold—quiet, weighty things sitting in old kitchens, waiting for someone to listen long enough for them to unfold.

Because the stories that matter most don’t always shine.
They simmer.
They stay.
And if you’re lucky,
someone offers you coffee,
and they let you hold one for a while.

screen light on my face—
still, the ramen steam feels more
like being alive

—

I use social media the way you might sip from a too-sweet drink—
occasionally, cautiously,
wondering if you’re thirsty or just bored.

It’s there, in my pocket.
The little rectangle that hums with updates,
with curated lives,
with thoughts trimmed down to the size of attention spans.

And sometimes I scroll.
Not because I want to,
but because it’s late,
and the silence starts to echo too loudly through the room.
So I let someone else’s life fill the space.
A stranger’s vacation.
A recipe I won’t make.
A quote about peace,
surrounded by chaos.

But more and more, I find myself setting it down.

—

The Things That Don’t Fit in Frames

A bowl of soup on a cold morning.
The texture of worn-out denim against your skin.
The sound of someone breathing next to you,
not saying anything,
but saying everything.

These things don’t translate well.
You can post the picture,
but the smell doesn’t come with it.
The warmth.
The uneven chop of green onion floating in the broth.
The way someone laughed,
just once,
while you were chewing.

You can’t upload that.
And maybe that’s why it matters.

—

The Reluctance Is a Kind of Love

It’s not that I hate social media.
It has its uses.
It’s a way to touch,
when physical distance stretches too far.
It’s a way to say “I’m still here,”
without needing to speak.

But I don’t want to live there.
Not in the scroll.
Not in the loop of likes and reactions
and the feeling that everyone else is moving forward while you sit still.

Because stillness, when you choose it,
is not failure.
It’s a kind of presence.

And presence is what I want more of.
In the way the sun hits the floor at 3 p.m.
In the way a stranger’s voice curls around a word you’ve heard a thousand times,
but suddenly sounds new.
In the mess.
The mundane.
The parts that never get filtered.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Unposted Moment

Wabi-sabi teaches us to honor what’s incomplete,
unpolished,
quiet.
It reminds us:

• Not everything needs to be shared to be meaningful.
• What isn’t captured often stays longer.
• Attention is the truest form of intimacy.
• Life is not content. It’s contact.

—

So I use it gently.
A post now and then.
A message when I miss someone.
A story, if it feels more like a whisper than a performance.

But mostly,
I live in the smells.
In the textures.
In the long walks with no music playing.
In the taste of something I’ll never describe as well as I felt it.

And later,
if I remember it clearly enough,
I might write it down—
not to impress you,
but to remind myself
that I was there.

Fully.
Briefly.
Wonderfully
unrecorded.

Not sure why this came to mind. It is an old story. The kind buried in so much dust and memories you can only tell what it is by the shape.The house I stayed in that winter sat at the edge of a small village an hour outside Zürich—one of those places with winding roads too narrow for logic, where the fog clung low like a secret and the trees never lost their wetness. I hadn’t planned to go there. I had meant to be somewhere else. Basel, maybe. Or Lugano. But a train was delayed, and then another, and by the time I checked the time again, I was standing in front of a gray house with wooden shutters that had long forgotten how to close properly.

Ironically, just next to it—barely ten steps away—stood what used to be a psychiatric hospital. A tall, rectangular building with too many windows and a strange stillness that clung to its stone. It had been renovated into a hostel years ago, the sign said, in a font too cheerful for the history beneath it. Backpackers came and went. They laughed loudly and cooked pasta at midnight, unaware or uncaring that people used to scream inside those walls. That once, someone was probably locked away for seeing the same things I’d started seeing too.

I rented the attic apartment in the house beside it. It had a sloped ceiling, a single radiator that wheezed like it was haunted, and a window that framed the old asylum like a painting. Everything in the room was slightly off. The floorboards tilted to the left. The walls met each other at strange angles, so that no matter how I stood, I never felt entirely upright.

And I couldn’t stop thinking: There are no corners here.
Just soft bends.
As if the architecture itself had given up on sharpness.

—

I arrived with a heavy kind of silence inside me.
Not grief exactly.
More like fatigue from carrying around a shape I no longer fit into.

I was supposed to be writing.
Instead, I slept.
I walked the hills, fed birds pieces of bread that tasted like cardboard,
and stared into shop windows without seeing a thing.

The hostel kids came and went in waves. They brought guitars, dirty boots, languages I’d forgotten. Sometimes they waved. I always waved back. But I never spoke to them.

Except for one night.

—

The Girl with the Braided Hair

She was sitting on the hostel steps, her back against the wall, sketching on the back of an old receipt. Her hair was dark and braided tight, with loose strands curling like vines around her face.

She looked up and said, “You live in the house that leans, right?”

I nodded.

She grinned. “Bet the dreams are weird in there.”

I didn’t answer. But she kept talking, like we already knew each other in another version of this life. “Used to be, this place was for the ones who lost their way. People thought walls could keep the mind still.” She tapped her head. “Turns out, it’s not that simple.”

Then she handed me the drawing. It was of the house I was staying in—but twisted. Exaggerated. Melting into the hillside like it didn’t want to exist anymore.

“It’s more honest this way,” she said.

—

When the House Began to Speak

That night, something changed.
I stopped avoiding the mirror.
The one above the small writing desk, with its chipped edge and the faint outline of someone else’s fingerprint in the glass.

I looked into it longer than I meant to.
And slowly, the face staring back stopped looking tired.
It looked…
open.
Fractured, yes.
But not beyond recognition.

Something moved in my chest.
Not a thought.
Not a word.
More like a shift in gravity.
Like the darkness inside me had stretched its limbs and decided it was tired of being silent.

I sat at the desk, picked up a pen,
and wrote three pages without stopping.

Not because I had something profound to say.
But because something inside had been waiting for permission to speak.

—

The Demon Doesn’t Always Fight You

That’s when I understood.
This thing I’d been carrying—
the old ache, the brittle shame, the persistent hum of doubt—
it wasn’t trying to ruin me.

It was trying to help me lift.

It had been shadowing me not to drag me down,
but to keep me from floating away too soon.
To tether me to something real.
Something raw.
Something mine.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Tilted Room

I left that village two weeks later.
But the lean of that house stayed with me.

The softness of its crooked walls.
The mirror that stopped lying.
The girl with the receipt sketches.
The asylum-turned-hostel still echoing with a strange kind of forgiveness.

And I carry this with me now:

• Darkness is not always damage. Sometimes it’s depth.
• The places that make you feel crooked may be where your truth fits best.
• Healing doesn’t ask you to become new. It asks you to carry your old self with care.
• And sometimes, the most haunted places offer the most peace—because they’ve already held what you’re afraid to face.

—

So now, when the days feel heavy—
when the weight returns like an old song or a long train ride—
I don’t try to escape it.
I nod.
I sit at the desk.
I open the window.

And I let the darkness
not bury me,
but steady me
as I learn, again,
how to lift.

I once stayed in a house that didn’t cast shadows.
Not because the light was perfect,
but because something inside the walls refused to let them gather.

It was on the edge of a town that doesn’t appear on maps,
north of somewhere forgettable,
a place with crooked vending machines and a clock tower that didn’t tell time.
Nobody lived there permanently.
People arrived.
Stayed a while.
Left a note.
Then vanished.

I hadn’t planned to go.
But the train doors opened,
and I stepped out without asking why.

—

The room I rented was small.
Futōn on the floor.
A desk with uneven legs.
One cup, one spoon,
and a window that faced a forest that was always almost raining.

But it was the mirror I remember most.
Oval. Hanging by a wire that hummed when the wind blew.
Every morning I looked into it,
and every morning it showed me someone else—
a version of myself I’d buried quietly beneath achievement,
smiled away in polite conversation,
and buried under to-do lists that never questioned why.

The man in the mirror didn’t look sad.
Just tired.
Like he’d been waiting for me to say something honest for years.

—

The Stranger Who Knew the Weight

On my third night there,
I met a man in the hallway.
Or maybe he wasn’t a man.
He didn’t blink when I did.
Didn’t breathe when I did.
He simply stood there, hands behind his back,
watching me like I was an echo that had finally returned.

“You carry it wrong,” he said.
“Carry what?” I asked.
He tapped his chest.
Then his head.
Then his back.
“All of it,” he said. “You carry it like it’s against you.”

And just like that, he was gone.
The hallway remained.
But the shape of it shifted,
as if it had just remembered something I hadn’t.

—

How Darkness Can Push

The next morning, I wrote like my fingers belonged to someone else.
Pages poured out,
not from inspiration,
but from pressure—
like something inside had been holding back a flood
and finally cracked open under the strain.

It wasn’t beautiful writing.
It wasn’t even good.
But it was true.
And that made it holy.

I realized then:
the thing I’d been running from—
the grief, the rage, the strange fatigue that followed me like a second skin—
it wasn’t here to stop me.
It was here to fuel me.

Not to drown me,
but to deepen the water I was meant to swim in.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Bruised Vessel

I didn’t leave that house with answers.
But I left with strength.
Not the kind you show off.
The kind that hums quietly under the skin.

The kind that understands:

• Some weights aren’t meant to be dropped. They’re meant to be lifted differently.
• Demons don’t always destroy. Sometimes they steady your hand.
• Beauty lives not in the absence of pain, but in the motion it creates.
• Not everything that haunts you is here to harm you. Some things stay because they remember who you were before you forgot.

—

I still dream about that house sometimes.
The way the floorboards spoke in sighs.
The tea that tasted slightly of sleep.
The mirror that no longer lied.

And sometimes,
on days when the world feels too sharp,
and I wonder if I’ve made any progress at all,
I feel something press gently against my spine.

Not to push me down.
But to help me lift
what I could never carry alone.

And I remember—
not all darkness is empty.
Some of it
has hands.

In the winter of 2017, I stayed for a week in a small apartment above a used bookstore in Shimokitazawa. The kind of place where time collects in the corners, and the lampshades give off a light so soft it feels more like memory than electricity.

The owner of the shop was a man named Aki. Late fifties, maybe early sixties. He never said. Wore two watches but never checked either of them. I asked him once why.
“One’s for the time here,” he said. “The other’s for the time I wish it was.”
Then he smiled, like he knew how strange that sounded but had already made peace with it.

Each morning, he’d open the shop at ten, put on a jazz record no one else could name, and brew coffee that tasted slightly of regret—bitter, but warming in the right kind of way. I liked watching him from the mezzanine above, where I’d sit with a book I didn’t intend to finish and pretend I wasn’t listening to the music.

On the third morning, it happened.

He was sketching something in a thick notebook by the register—shapes that didn’t make sense, loops and half-written kanji, a pattern only he understood—when he accidentally knocked over his coffee. It fell with a soft clatter, the kind that doesn’t interrupt the jazz but suddenly becomes part of it.

The liquid spread quickly.
A dark, quiet ruin.
Over the counter, across the pages.
It soaked half the book before he even moved.

But here’s what struck me—
he didn’t flinch.
Didn’t curse or scramble for towels.
He just sat there, watching the stain grow.
And then, very slowly, he tore out the wet page, folded it once down the middle, and placed it to the side.

Then, with the same pen he’d been using, he turned to the next blank page and began again.

—

I asked him about it later.
If he was frustrated.
If the sketch had meant something.

He shrugged. “It did,” he said. “But maybe this one will mean more.”
Then he poured us both a new cup of coffee and added,
“Most people think the day is ruined when something spills.
But sometimes, that’s when it really begins.”

—

I think about that moment more than I care to admit.
How calm he was.
How certain.

It wasn’t about the mess.
It was about what he allowed it to become.

We’re so trained to brace for what might go wrong.
To predict the detour.
To armor ourselves with worst-case scenarios.

But Aki taught me that ruin isn’t always failure.
Sometimes it’s invitation.
A strange, sloshing kind of grace that breaks what was never quite working
so you can start the next page cleaner than you thought you could.

What I Learned from a Coffee-Stained Page

• The world doesn’t end when your plan dissolves. Sometimes it begins there.
• The things we try to salvage might not be worth saving. But the space they leave behind often is.
• Spilled coffee, a missed train, a closed door—they’re not just obstacles. They’re quiet directions.
• What goes wrong isn’t always wrong. It’s just different. And sometimes, that difference leads to something you wouldn’t have dared draw on your own.

—

I never saw what he sketched on the new page.
But I think that’s the point.

It wasn’t about the drawing.
It was about still drawing.

About not letting the spill stop the hand.
About trusting the next page
even when the last one drowned.

And I think, maybe,
that’s what Yhprum’s Law really is—
not a promise that everything will go right,
but a quiet faith that even when it doesn’t,
you still will.

moonlight through the can—
not much changed that night at all,
but something softened

—

It happened in Kyoto.
Late spring, just past midnight.
The city had gone quiet in the way only Japanese cities do—
still glowing, still humming,
but holding its breath like it didn’t want to wake anyone.

I had walked longer than I meant to.
That kind of wandering that doesn’t feel like getting lost,
just… drifting.
My head was heavy with the usual things—unfinished decisions,
half-formed regrets,
the kind of quiet inner commentary that sounds like worry disguised as thought.

I stopped at a vending machine,
lit up like a small shrine in the dark.
And that’s where I met him.
Older. White linen shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow.
He looked like he’d stepped out of a different time,
but he just nodded at me like we’d been passing each other on this street our whole lives.

We stood there for a moment in silence,
just the two of us and the low buzz of fluorescent light,
until he pointed at the can I’d just dropped into the tray.

“Good choice,” he said. “Not too sweet.”

I smiled. “Didn’t think much about it.”

He looked at me, really looked,
and then said something I didn’t expect.

“That’s the trick though, isn’t it?
We never think much about it—
until we do.”

—

A Stranger’s Kindness You Don’t Forget

He didn’t stay long.
Just got his coffee, bowed, and disappeared down the street,
like he’d only stepped into my life to drop off a single sentence.

But it landed.
Something about that moment…
stuck.
It wasn’t what he said, really—
but the way he said it.
Casual.
Unforced.
Like he wasn’t trying to teach me something,
but just happened to know what I needed to hear.

And I’ve thought about that sentence often since.

The choices we think are small.
The paths we don’t realize we’re already walking.
The thoughts that drift in quietly when we think no one is watching.

Most of the time, we are on autopilot.
And then, suddenly, something cracks open—
a stranger, a sentence, a silence.
And we realize:
we’re already in the middle of something important.
We just weren’t paying attention yet.

—

Floating Is Not Falling

That night, I walked home feeling different.
Not lighter, exactly—
but softer.

The world didn’t shift,
but something in me had.
A loosened grip.
A breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

It reminded me that I didn’t need to “have it all figured out.”
That I wasn’t late.
That being human isn’t about having answers—
but about carrying questions with a little more grace.

We’re all just ghosts in borrowed bodies,
drifting through constellations of memory and meaning,
trying to choose the right drink from a glowing machine at midnight.

And somehow,
that’s enough.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Unexpected Exchange

There was no profound outcome that night.
No revelation.
No life plan redrawn.
Just a soft, strange connection in the dark.

Wabi-sabi lives in these moments:

• In the crack where two strangers meet without expectation.
• In the words that weren’t planned but landed like a gift.
• In the kindness that doesn’t ask to be remembered, but is.
• In the silence that follows something real.

—

So if you’re wondering whether you’re floating or falling—
if you’re unsure whether this moment matters,
or whether you’re still “on the right path”—
stop for a second.
Take a breath.

You’re here.
The vending machine is humming.
The night is listening.
And someone—maybe a stranger, maybe you—
just said the right thing at the right time.

Let that be enough.

You’re already floating.
Just don’t forget to notice how light you’ve become.

cloudless morning sky—
still, the shutters creak closed,
someone knows what’s coming

—

In the spring of 2018, I spent a few weeks living just outside Beppu, in a borrowed room above a bakery where the walls smelled faintly of yeast and rain.
It was a quiet time, uneventful in the way that’s easy to forget but hard to recreate.
Each day followed the same rhythm:
wake, walk, write, eat, repeat.

The man who owned the bakery was in his sixties and moved with the kind of calm that made you feel like nothing urgent could ever happen in his presence.
One morning, I asked why he always closed the storm shutters on the west-facing windows even when the sky was clear.
He shrugged and said,
“Because when it rains here, it doesn’t warn you.”

That sentence stayed with me.
It felt like it wasn’t about weather at all.

—

Most Problems Don’t Arrive Loud

The truth is, most of the things that unravel us don’t come crashing through the door.
They arrive slowly, in whispers.
In small compromises.
In the email we don’t reply to.
In the conversation we avoid because “it’s not the right time.”
In the gut feeling we silence with distraction.

By the time the problem is undeniable,
it’s already grown roots.

We act surprised,
but somewhere deep down,
we saw it forming.

We just didn’t deal with it—
because we thought we had time.

—

The Wisdom of Early Attention

There is a quiet kind of strength in tending to something before it becomes a fire.
It doesn’t look heroic.
No one claps.
No one sees you close the shutter while the sky is still blue.

But that’s the point.
Real care happens before it’s convenient to call it care.

It looks like:

• Clarifying feelings before they become resentments.
• Adjusting the routine before burnout sets in.
• Reaching out to someone before the distance hardens into disconnection.
• Resting before you’re forced to.
• Listening to the small discomfort before it becomes a deep ache.

Prevention isn’t dramatic.
It’s subtle.
And that’s why it’s so easy to skip.

—

What Living Proactively Actually Means

Dealing with things before they arise doesn’t mean becoming paranoid,
or controlling every outcome,
or trying to predict every twist of the road.

It means learning to notice.
To stay present enough to sense the shift in air pressure before the storm.
To trust that small discomfort is a signal, not a nuisance.
To believe that something handled gently now won’t need to be torn out later.

Proactivity is care.
It’s presence.
It’s self-respect disguised as preparedness.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Unseen Crack

Wabi-sabi reminds us that beauty lives in the incomplete,
in the nearly broken,
in the places where decay has quietly begun.

To honor those imperfections is not weakness.
It’s wisdom.

• A crack, acknowledged early, can be mended with gold.
• A strain in the thread can be rewoven before it snaps.
• A room, aired out before mold appears, stays alive.
• What we attend to early, we rarely lose.

—

Now, when the sky is clear and everything feels still,
I ask myself—what am I pretending not to see?
What needs attention while it’s still small enough to hold in one hand?

Because when the rain comes,
it doesn’t ask if you’re ready.
And the shutters don’t close on their own.

So I close them now.
Not because I’m afraid.
But because I’ve learned
that peace is something you tend to
before the storm arrives.

old shoes by the door—
no one told them where to go,
still, they wore the road

—

In late autumn, I found myself standing in my kitchen in Bern long after midnight, surrounded by the hum of a refrigerator that had seen better years and the faint echo of rain tapping gently on the windowpane like an old friend too polite to knock. I had boiled water for tea I wasn’t going to drink and stared at the same chipped mug I’d used for years, its handle barely holding on—like me, I suppose.

It wasn’t a crisis.
It wasn’t dramatic.
There was no grand falling out, no tragic catalyst, no external force pushing me out the door.

It was something quieter, deeper, and more personal.

It was the slow realization that the life I had built—though safe, though structured, though passable in the eyes of others—no longer fit the shape of who I was becoming.
And when that truth finally landed, not like a crash but like a feather falling steadily to the floor, I knew:
I had to leave.

—

Why the First Step Is the Hardest—But the Most Transformative

We like to believe that big change begins with fireworks.
With packed bags and goodbye letters and Instagram captions that say “onto new beginnings.”
But more often, growth begins with discomfort you can no longer explain away.

It begins with a sentence you whisper to yourself in the dark:
“I can’t do this anymore.”
Not with resentment, not with anger—
just with a quiet kind of honesty that no longer asks permission.

For me, that moment of clarity didn’t arrive on a mountaintop or during a life-coaching retreat.
It arrived in the pause between boiling water and pouring it.
In that stillness, I heard my truth.

That was my first step.
The one no one saw.
The one that changed everything.

—

A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with One Honest Moment

There’s a famous saying: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
But what it doesn’t say—what it never says—is that the step doesn’t have to be physical.
It can be internal.
Invisible.
Unremarkable to anyone but you.

The journey I started wasn’t toward a specific destination.
It was toward alignment.
Toward living a life that didn’t require me to explain or defend my softness.
Toward choosing a rhythm that suited my breath, not someone else’s expectations.

And that first step—small as it was, silent as it felt—was the moment I chose not to abandon myself anymore.
And I believe that’s where all meaningful transformation begins.

—

What I’ve Learned Since Taking That Step

What followed wasn’t glamorous.
It was messy.
It was lonely, beautiful, uncertain, filled with long walks in unfamiliar cities and conversations that changed shape as I grew.
But it was mine.

And along the way, I learned a few things I return to often—especially when doubt tries to sneak back in:

• You don’t need a full map to move forward. The next right step is enough.
• Growth feels, at first, like loss. But it’s really just space being made for something more honest.
• Clarity is often the result of movement, not a prerequisite for it.
• You are allowed to outgrow a life that once fit. That’s not betrayal—it’s becoming.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Decision to Begin

There is something deeply wabi-sabi in choosing to begin again—especially when nothing is forcing you to.
In seeing the cracks in your routine not as failures, but as invitations.
In recognizing the beauty of an imperfect life trying, still, to unfold into something real.

This quiet philosophy teaches us:

• The first step doesn’t have to be confident. It just has to be real.
• There is elegance in the incomplete, the uncertain, the becoming.
• You don’t need to fix yourself to start. You need to listen. Then move.
• Peace is not in staying where you are. It’s in honoring where you’re being pulled.

—

I never finished that tea.
But I did start something else—
something that felt like coming home to a version of myself I hadn’t met yet.

Now, when someone asks me what decision changed everything,
I don’t say “quitting my job” or “moving cities” or “starting over.”
I say: The night I stood in the kitchen and told myself the truth.
The night I left a life that no longer held me with care.
The night I took the first step—quiet, honest, mine.

And if you’re standing on that edge,
wondering whether it counts if no one sees it,
let me tell you:

It counts.
It always counts.

Because the journey begins there—
not when you arrive,
but when you decide
you’re no longer willing to stay behind.

late train passing through—
windows full of other lives,
mine stays in its seat

—

In the autumn of 2011, I rented a short-term flat in a narrow building by the Limmat, just east of the city center in Zürich. It was the kind of apartment that came already furnished—mostly in muted wood, with a mattress too thin and a single cup in the cupboard that looked like it had outlived something important.

There was a clock in the hallway outside my door that ticked a little too loud. And at night, when the rest of the world had gone quiet, that ticking became its own kind of rhythm. A sound that didn’t ask anything of me. Just kept moving. Forward, always.

I had come back to the city for reasons I couldn’t fully explain. I told people it was to rest. To write. To pause between things. But the truth sat somewhere underneath that. I was circling around a place I didn’t want to enter again. A place I’d once called home. Not physically—though the apartment wasn’t far from it—but emotionally, internally. That version of home. The one where I had learned how to keep myself small and silent, like a plant growing in a dark cupboard.

And though I walked through many familiar streets that season—through Langstrasse in the early morning, where the clubs still echoed with music nobody remembered; through the stillness of Lindenhof, where pigeons always seemed to gather in odd numbers—I never walked back to that home. I never rang the bell.

—

I think we talk too casually about going back.
“Go home.”
“Reconnect.”
“Make peace with your past.”
But some places aren’t meant to be revisited.
Not because they’re evil.
But because returning to them requires you to become small again. To shapeshift.

And when you’ve worked this hard to become whole,
you learn not to volunteer for that kind of shrinking.

—

There’s a version of me that still lives in that house.
Quiet. Agreeable. Careful not to take up too much room.
The version that said yes too easily, that swallowed her own voice before it made a sound.
She knew how to keep the peace.
She knew how to explain away her discomfort until it looked like gratitude.

And some days, I can still feel her pressing at the edge of my chest—
when I’m too polite in a meeting,
when I downplay my joy,
when I write something true and almost delete it.

But I don’t let her drive anymore.
I don’t let her pick the routes.
Because I remember what she forgot:
that survival isn’t the same as living.
That not being hurt is not the same as being loved.

—

One night, while the rain turned the windows silver and the city took on that quiet, heavy stillness it gets when everyone’s inside waiting for the storm to pass, I made tea in the kitchen and sat on the floor, because I didn’t trust the chair not to collapse.

I remember looking at the steam rising from the cup and thinking:
Maybe this is it. Maybe this moment—this silence, this tea, this rented room—is more home than anywhere I’ve ever lived.

Not because it was perfect.
But because nothing in it asked me to be anything but myself.

That’s when I realized:
I don’t need to go back to forgive.
I don’t need to revisit the rooms that taught me to disappear.
I don’t need to knock on doors I once closed to prove I’m healed.

Sometimes growth looks like leaving.
Sometimes healing is the absence of the thing that once held you tight.
And sometimes the kindest thing you can do for the person you used to be is to let them stay behind—safe in memory, untouched by the present.

—

I haven’t returned to that home.
Not in all the years since.
Not even by accident.

And when people ask me what place I never want to visit,
I think of that apartment.
That old kettle.
That ticking clock.

I think of the version of me who lived in a house where her joy was too loud, where her no was negotiable, where her fear had its own room.

And I say—
Not there.

Not because I’m bitter.
Not because I hate it.
But because I don’t belong there anymore.

And maybe that’s what growing means.
Not becoming someone new,
but gently, finally,
refusing to become someone you’re not.

rain on the glass pane—
inside, the past brewing slow,
still, the kettle hums

—

There’s no country I refuse to visit.
No city I’ve blacklisted, no border I’m unwilling to cross.
I’ll sleep in stations.
Eat soup from plastic.
Get lost on roads with no names.

But there is one place I avoid—
and it’s closer than any of that.
More familiar.
More dangerous.

It’s home.
Not the one with a mailing address,
but the version of home that lives in memory.
The one where I felt like a shadow of myself
long before I had a name for what that meant.

—

The Room You Outgrow But Still Remember

I don’t want to go back to the person I was in that version of home.
Where everything was quiet, but nothing was peaceful.
Where the light never quite reached the corners.
Where I learned how to fold myself small to fit into the shape someone else expected of me.

That place taught me how to endure.
How to disappear politely.
How to smile with my hands clenched behind my back.

But endurance is not identity.
And disappearing is not love.

I left that place not with a suitcase,
but with a slow kind of grief—
the grief that comes from realizing
the walls you leaned on were never meant to support you.
They were meant to keep you in.

—

The Ghosts You Still Carry

Sometimes, even now,
a smell or a sentence will pull me back.
A train station at dusk.
The sound of slippers on tile.
A certain kind of silence in someone’s voice.

And suddenly, I’m there again—
in the house I no longer live in,
wearing a version of myself I thought I’d thrown away.
The self that apologized for wanting softness.
The self that mistook control for care.

But I don’t stay.
Not anymore.
I nod to the memory,
thank it for what it taught me,
and step forward.

Because I’ve learned that not all homes are places you’re meant to return to.
Some are just rooms you survive long enough to leave.

—

The Murmur of Growth

People talk about healing like it’s a destination.
But I think it’s more like becoming fluent in a new language
while still dreaming in the old one.

You don’t unfeel what shaped you.
You just learn to feel it with softer hands.
You learn to build something that doesn’t resemble what broke you.

And maybe that’s the real kind of home—
not a return to safety,
but a slow, deliberate creation of peace
in the shape of your own voice.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Unvisited Room

Wabi-sabi teaches us that beauty is not in the unbroken,
but in what continues despite the break.
It reminds us:

• There is no shame in leaving a place that loved you badly.
• Some things must end so that you can begin.
• Growth is not loud. Sometimes it looks like walking away.
• Even cracked foundations can become art, if you build with intention.

—

So when people ask what place I never want to visit,
I don’t name a country or a war zone or a forgotten town.
I name that version of home—
the one where I was not allowed to be whole.
The one where I learned to disappear.

And I say,
I will not go back there.

Because I have made something better.
Not perfect.
Not always steady.
But mine.

And that, I think,
is the only return that matters.

cicadas scream still—
but somewhere behind the noise,
one soft bell ringing

—

In the summer of 2015, I was staying in Zürich. Not the glittering postcard version—the lake shimmering under clean light, the banks full of pressed suits—but the quieter edges. Near the tram lines where the paint peeled from the benches, and Turkish grocers stayed open just a little later than they were supposed to.

I rented a short-term studio above a bakery that smelled like burnt sugar and sleep. The walls were thin, and every morning I’d wake to the sound of dough being kneaded below me.
I wasn’t there for work. Not exactly. I had told people I needed to “get away to focus,” which was partly true.
But the deeper truth was this: I needed to learn what happened when I stopped reaching for people who had already let go.

And in that strange quiet, I started to notice things.
What absence feels like.
What attention actually means.
And what a message left unsent can still teach you.

—

When You Don’t Hear From Someone

There’s a specific ache that arrives when someone you care about stops responding.
A slow burn.
We fill the silence with meaning—
usually the worst kind.

If a man ignores you, we say he’s on his mission. Focused.
If a woman does, we whisper she’s already gone. Entertaining someone else.

But sometimes, people are just inward.
And the silence? It’s not about you.

I learned that lesson the hard way—by assuming too much.
But also,
by receiving something I didn’t expect.

—

What My Sister Did

That summer, when I’d stopped texting, stopped replying,
when my world had narrowed to long walks by the Limmat and cheap coffee at the Coop across the street—
my sister started mailing postcards.

Not long letters.
Not confrontational “where are you”s.
Just small, quiet things.

A photo of our old cat.
A drawing she made of a vending machine she thought I’d like.
One card that just said,
“Hope Zürich is treating you gently.”

She didn’t try to fix me.
She didn’t demand I explain the silence.
She just reminded me,
in her way,
that I still belonged somewhere.

—

Presence Doesn’t Have to Be Loud

What she taught me, without meaning to, was this:
When someone you love is quiet,
you don’t need to fill the space.
You just need to stay nearby.
Leave the door unlocked.
Let your care be known in the softest, least demanding ways.

That’s what I remember most about that summer—
not the silence,
but the way her postcards turned it into something else.
Not pressure.
But presence.
Not rescue.
Just recognition.

—

Wabi-Sabi in the Waiting

Wabi-sabi teaches us to accept the incomplete.
To find beauty not in resolution,
but in attention.

That summer, my sister’s small gestures reminded me:

• You don’t need to say everything. You just need to stay connected.
• Sometimes love is a rhythm, not a response.
• What looks like distance might actually be devotion—with better boundaries.
• Let people come back in their own time. Just be there when they do.

—

Now, when someone I care about goes quiet,
I don’t panic the way I used to.
I don’t assume the worst.

Instead, I write a sentence and don’t send it.
Or I send a photo of something that made me laugh.
Or I leave a voice note that says nothing important,
except, “I was thinking of you.”

Because I remember Zürich.
I remember how much that meant.

And I remember my sister—
waiting without asking,
loving without noise.

Showing up
even when I couldn’t.

faded doorway light—
she still waits with the tea poured,
same place, different silence

—

In the early winter of 2014, I stayed in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Kumamoto, tucked between a shuttered udon shop and a shrine where no one seemed to pray anymore.
It was the kind of place you end up in by accident, or maybe by ache. I told people I was traveling, but I wasn’t really going anywhere. I just needed space.
Space to pause.
To forget how to explain myself.
To remember what still mattered.

Each morning, I passed the same shrine on the way to nowhere in particular.
And every morning, an old woman swept the stone steps with slow, circular strokes.
She nodded when I passed. I nodded back.
We never spoke.
But it felt like something important was happening anyway.

—

The Kind of Help You Don’t Ask For

It was around that time that my sister started messaging me again.
Not long messages.
Not questions or advice.
Just a photo of the cat sitting in a sunbeam.
A picture of the coffee she’d made that morning.
Once, a voice note where she said nothing for five seconds and then added,
“I hope wherever you are, it feels less heavy today.”

She didn’t ask what I was doing.
She didn’t push me to come home.
She just showed up—
softly, consistently—
like a porch light left on in case I wanted to find my way back.

And that, somehow, was exactly what I needed.
Not a solution.
Not a plan.
Just the presence of someone who had already decided not to leave.

—

The Maintenance of Small Love

We think grand gestures hold the most weight.
But they rarely do.
It’s the small, steady efforts that keep something alive.

A relationship doesn’t last because it avoids difficulty.
It lasts because someone sends the text even when they’re tired.
Because someone makes space.
Because someone doesn’t flinch when the other person pulls away.
Because someone says, “I’m still here.”
Even without words.

What my sister did wasn’t complicated.
But it was love.
And it reminded me that love doesn’t always arrive with fanfare.
Sometimes it arrives with a photo of a sleeping cat and no expectations.

—

What the Woman at the Shrine Knew

I once asked the old woman why she swept every day,
even when the wind would just undo it by morning.

She said, “Because the shrine is still here. So I am too.”

I think about that now,
when life feels heavy,
when people drift,
when words are hard to find.

She wasn’t sweeping for results.
She was sweeping for rhythm.
For presence.
For proof that care still existed, even if no one noticed.

—

Wabi-Sabi and the Love That Stays

There is wabi-sabi in a sibling’s quiet kindness.
In a relationship that doesn’t ask to be noticed to be meaningful.
In the things that remain not because they must,
but because someone chooses them,
again and again.

It teaches us:

• Love doesn’t need to be loud to be heard.
• Presence is often the most powerful form of support.
• Not fixing someone can sometimes be the greatest kindness.
• The smallest gestures, repeated with care, become a lifeline.

—

Now, when someone asks me to describe something kind a family member has done,
I don’t mention birthday gifts or big favors.
I think of my sister’s photo of a sleeping cat.
Of her messages with no pressure.
Of her way of saying, “You don’t need to explain. I’m here.”

I think of the old woman at the shrine,
sweeping steps no one asked her to sweep.
Just because the shrine was still standing.
And some things are worth tending
even when no one claps.

Because in the end,
what keeps love alive
isn’t the big moment—
it’s the decision to keep showing up
in the small,
unremarkable,
life-saving ways.

cracked teacup waits—
same table, same quiet hum,
new thoughts in old air

In the spring of 2019, I was living in a small guesthouse in Kurume, a town most people pass through without noticing. The owner was a retired teacher who brewed barley tea like it was a kind of slow ceremony. My room faced a narrow alley where cats lived like landlords and the laundry above me swayed like flags that had forgotten which country they belonged to.

I was working on a project then—a strange one. Half fiction, half tool, all built from vague conviction and late-night second guesses. I’d spend most mornings alone at my laptop, buried in drafts and diagrams, surrounded by silence so heavy it felt like a material. I didn’t mind. That was the point. I’d come to Kurume to get lost in my own work.

But every afternoon, around 2:15, I would close the lid, stretch my legs, and walk ten minutes down the street to a restaurant with no sign.

The Place That Didn’t Need To Be New

It was the kind of place you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t already know it.
Three tables.
One cook.
One old woman with hands like carved wood who took orders without writing them down.

The restaurant served only one dish, really—
a simple soba set with warm broth, crisp tempura, and pickles that always tasted slightly different depending on who had prepared them that week.
And I loved it.
Not because it was extraordinary, but because it was unchanged.

Every day, I’d sit at the same table near the window.
Every day, the tea was poured before I asked.
Every day, the food arrived exactly as it did the day before.
And yet, every day, it tasted new—because I was different.

Where the Work Lived

Back at the guesthouse, I worked in total isolation.
No meetings. No feedback. No feedback loops.
Just me and the quiet rhythm of thought.

And it was in that quiet that the real work formed.
Not the reactive kind—built from calls and shared docs and status updates—
but the deep kind.
The kind that comes from letting your own thoughts ferment for hours
before you say them out loud.

Solitude taught me things feedback never could:
how to listen longer,
how to follow a thread past the obvious,
how to sit with confusion without killing it too early.

But Then—Every Thursday

Every Thursday evening, I’d take the train to Fukuoka to meet my collaborator.
We didn’t call it that—“collaborator.”
We just said we were meeting for coffee,
but both of us knew we were there to test ideas.

We’d sit in a noisy kissaten near Tenjin Station, where the lights were too warm and the chairs too low.
And suddenly, the thing I had been shaping alone in silence
had to make sense out loud.

I’d say something I thought was fully formed,
and he’d tilt his head,
ask a question I hadn’t considered,
and suddenly the whole shape of the idea changed—
not broken,
just sharpened.
Softened at the edges where I hadn’t known I was bluffing.

Those conversations were rarely long.
But they did something the solitude never could:
they tested my honesty.
They made sure I wasn’t just building a perfect world in my own head.

The Soba Was Always the Same—But I Wasn’t

I returned to the restaurant every day after those meetings.
Sometimes to celebrate.
Sometimes to sulk.
Sometimes to just not think for an hour.

And the food?
It never changed.
But it always felt different.
Like the dish was reflecting something in me—
my progress,
my doubt,
my tiredness,
my small victories.

That’s the strange thing about routines.
The world doesn’t need to shift for us to move forward.
Sometimes it’s us who change against the stillness.

Work Alone, Share Together

There’s a reason the best work often begins in silence.
Because it’s there you ask the hard questions:
Do I actually believe in this?
Does this idea hold, even when no one is clapping?

But the work can’t end there.
It has to be spoken.
Held up to someone else’s eyes.
Let out into air that doesn’t belong to you.

Solitude is for digging deep.
Collaboration is for seeing clearly.
Both are required.
But never at the same time.

Wabi-Sabi, in a Bowl of Soba

There is wabi-sabi in that little restaurant.
In the unchanged menu.
In the chipped bowls.
In the way the woman never asked for praise,
only nodded when I said ごちそうさまでした.

It taught me:

• Routines don’t kill creativity. They protect it.
• Solitude deepens ideas. Collaboration gives them air.
• The same experience, repeated with awareness, becomes a form of practice.
• Your surroundings don’t need to change for you to grow. You change anyway.

Now, whenever I start something new—
a story, a tool, a risk—
I return to that rhythm.

I begin in silence.
I build without noise.
And then, when I’m ready—
I find someone I trust.
We meet in person.
We talk.
We tilt our heads.

And if I’m lucky,
I find a little restaurant afterward.
Something small.
Something unchanged.
Where the tea is poured before I ask.
And where the quiet, again, begins to do its work.

temple bell at dusk—
you hear it better alone,
but you echo it with others

The Two Rooms We Live In

In the winter of 2017, I spent two weeks in a cabin near Takachiho Gorge.
It wasn’t a plan—it just happened.
Someone knew someone who knew someone with a key.
No Wi-Fi, no clock, no voices except the ones that came from inside my own head.

I was supposed to be working on a project with a friend back in Tokyo—something digital, fast, meant to scale.
But every time we tried to collaborate over screens, something got lost.
We misunderstood tone.
We mistimed energy.
The momentum died somewhere between the message and the reply.

So we stopped.
Agreed to meet in person later.
And in the meantime, we’d each work alone.

Something shifted.
Not just in the project—
in me.

Why You Need Solitude for Real Work

There’s a kind of clarity that only shows up when you’re alone.
Not lonely.
Just alone—undistracted, unsignaled, unreachable by default.

It’s in that space that real ideas take form.
Not the shallow kind that rise up during meetings or brainstorms,
but the deep, slow ones.
The ones that need silence.
The ones that need to wander before they arrive.

Working in isolation means:

• No performance. Just presence.
• No consensus. Just curiosity.
• No noise. Just rhythm.

You get to ask yourself, without interruption:
What do I actually think?
What am I trying to say?
Is this even worth making?

And when no one is watching,
you’re finally free to answer honestly.

Why You Should Never Build a Life Entirely Alone

But then—
the second half of the truth:
you can’t finish the work alone.

We’re not designed to stay in isolation forever.
We shape the work in silence,
but we sharpen it in conversation.

Real collaboration doesn’t happen on shared documents.
It happens in rooms with shared air.
In kitchens and cafés and quiet corners of bookstores.
In the way someone tilts their head while you speak—
and you realize your idea isn’t quite right,
or maybe it’s better than you thought.

Collaboration in person means:

• Energy becomes real-time. You catch sparks. You adjust.
• Trust builds naturally. Through gestures. Through pauses.
• Misunderstandings dissolve faster. No lag between feeling and correction.

When you finally meet, you’re not just exchanging words—
you’re aligning frequencies.

How to Structure Your Life Like This

If you’re building something—anything—
try this rhythm:

• Retreat to create. Block off real, uninterrupted time to work alone.
  Leave the house. Leave the inbox. Leave the illusion of multitasking.
• Return to refine. Meet in person. Share drafts. Talk in circles. Let someone challenge what you thought was solid.
• Repeat. The process isn’t linear. It loops. It listens. It hums.

This model works for writing, designing, planning, thinking, even healing.
It honors both parts of you:
the monk and the musician.
The silent observer and the one who needs to be seen.

Wabi-Sabi Lessons for Modern Work

There’s deep wabi-sabi wisdom in this rhythm.
It’s about understanding what’s missing,
and choosing when to fill it.

• In isolation, you learn to accept imperfection. You sit with your flaws. You grow comfortable in the raw.
• In collaboration, you let others trace the cracks. Not to erase them—but to understand where the light gets in.
• The quiet phase gives the work soul. The shared phase gives it shape.

Perfection doesn’t come from polish.
It comes from balance—
between the time you listen to yourself,
and the time you let someone else listen too.

Final Thought

So now, when I start something new,
I begin in stillness.
I wander the forest paths of my own mind until something takes root.
Then, only when it’s ready—
I bring it to a table.
With someone I trust.
In a room that smells like coffee and old wood.
And we begin again.

Because that’s the secret, really:
Work in isolation.
Collaborate in person.
And let the space between the two
be where the real magic lives.

evening ferry hums—
no one on the upper deck,
only the wind speaks

In the autumn of 2014, I found myself somewhere between Kagoshima and Nagasaki, sitting on the upper deck of a rust-stained ferry as it drifted quietly across the inland sea. I had no real destination—just a pocketful of yen, a notebook with too many empty pages, and the kind of ache that follows you when you’ve left something behind but haven’t yet found anything to walk toward.

There were only three other passengers on board: a salaryman snoring softly under a newspaper, a girl with red headphones staring into nothing, and an old man who kept feeding crackers to invisible birds. The wind smelled faintly of engine oil and salt. I liked it.

I didn’t have a plan. I told myself I was traveling. But really, I was waiting for my life to catch up to me. Or to pass me by completely, I wasn’t sure which.

That evening, a boy on the ferry staff asked me in broken English,
“Where you see yourself… ten years from now?”

I laughed—more out of reflex than amusement.
It’s the kind of question that’s asked with good intentions but almost never met with a true answer.
Ten years?
Ten years ago, I still believed in things like clarity, strategy, permanent addresses.

Now, I was somewhere off the coast of Kyushu with a half-dead phone and no one expecting me.

I didn’t answer the boy.
Not then.
But I’ve thought about that question more times than I care to admit.

The Quiet Rule

If you want to go far in life—really far, not fast, not famous—you have to follow one rule:
Never lie to yourself.
Neverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

That’s what I’ve come to believe.
And I say it like that—with too many r’s—because it’s easy to forget how serious it is.
You can lie to others.
You can play roles, adjust to rooms, bend for moments.
But the minute you lie to yourself,
something starts to rot inside.
Not loudly.
Not suddenly.
But slowly, like fruit left in a drawer you never open.

On that trip, I told myself I was free.
I told myself I didn’t need connection.
I told myself I was above regret.

But late at night, in ryokan rooms with thin futons and paper walls,
I heard the truth knocking.
I wasn’t free.
I was floating.
I wasn’t detached.
I was afraid.
I wasn’t thriving.
I was hiding in motion.

And no amount of train transfers or convenience store onigiri would change that.

What Ten Years Actually Means

When people ask where you see yourself in ten years,
they’re really asking if you believe your future self will be more honest than your current one.

They’re asking if the person you’ll become is someone who knows when to stop,
when to leave,
when to love without pretending.

I don’t know what city I’ll live in.
I don’t know if I’ll be partnered or alone,
teaching, writing, or stacking chairs in a late-night jazz bar.
But I do know this:
I want to be the kind of man who can look himself in the mirror at 2 a.m. and say,
“Yes. This is still you.”

What Travel Taught Me

In Kyushu, I learned that the path isn’t always forward.
Sometimes it loops.
Sometimes it sits still.
Sometimes it climbs a forested slope that offers no view.
But if you’re honest—truly honest—it becomes enough.

I met a woman in a café near Aso who told me she used to be an architect in Tokyo.
Now she made ceramic cups with uneven rims.
She said,
“I like when the clay wobbles. It shows where my hand slipped. I want my work to remember me.”

That stayed with me.
Still does.

Wabi-Sabi: The Truth We Avoid

Wabi-sabi teaches us that the crack isn’t the problem—it’s the evidence.
Of time.
Of touch.
Of effort.

When we lie to ourselves, we polish over the cracks.
We pretend the structure is still sound.
We say things like “I’m fine,” “This is normal,” “It’s not that bad.”
But when we stop lying, we begin to live.

Wabi-sabi reminds us:

• Truth doesn’t need to be pretty. It needs to be real.
• A life with uneven lines has character. Depth. Soul.
• It’s better to be a cracked bowl that holds warmth than a perfect one left on a shelf.

So, Where Do I See Myself?

If I’m honest?
In ten years, I hope I’m still telling the truth.
Still building quietly.
Still leaving room for silence.
Still chasing meaning, not metrics.

Maybe I’ll own a small shop—books, tea, repaired things.
Maybe I’ll live near the sea again.
Maybe I’ll still walk each morning without headphones,
just listening to my own feet on the road.

But more than anything,
I want to be a man who never lied to himself—
not about what he wanted,
not about who he loved,
not about what he feared.

That would be enough.
That would be everything.

Someone asked me recently,
“Where do you see yourself in ten years?”
And like every time before, I hesitated.

Not because I didn’t care.
But because the shape of my life has never come from sharp plans,
only from soft persistence—
like water finding its own path through stone.

Ten years is a long time.
Ten years ago, I thought different things mattered.
I said yes to people I should’ve let go.
I said no to risks I still think about.
I thought life moved like a straight line.
It doesn’t.

It bends, folds, loses pages, finds new ones.
Sometimes it moves like jazz.
Sometimes it just sits in the corner and waits.

So I don’t answer the question anymore.
Not directly.
Instead, I ask better ones.

What If the Path Isn’t a Ladder, But a Circle?

The truth is, I don’t want to be climbing anymore.
Not if the ladder leads to rooms full of fluorescent lights and performance reviews.
I want to build things that feel like me—quiet, honest, strange in just the right way.

And I want to sell—not in the loud, shiny way.
But in the true way.
Selling, after all, is just communication.
It’s the art of saying, this is what I made, and this is why it matters.
It’s giving your work a way to walk out into the world without you.

In ten years, maybe I’m still writing.
Still restoring broken things.
Still learning how to build—systems, stories, maybe small businesses with soft edges.

Not because I want to be unstoppable.
But because I want to keep going,
gently, sustainably, with purpose.

What Building Has Taught Me

I’ve spent time creating things people never saw.
Websites that never launched.
Projects that quietly failed.
Handwritten notes that sat in drawers for years.

But every act of building—even the invisible ones—teaches you something:

• How to turn thought into form.
• How to take an idea and give it texture, structure, consequence.
• How to sit with something long enough that it starts to breathe back.

Building teaches you patience.
It teaches you how to stay with the uncomfortable middle,
when nothing makes sense
and no one claps.

If you want to shape your own life,
learn to build.
Not just products, but paths.

Why Selling Matters (Even If You Hate Selling)

Selling isn’t manipulation.
It’s clarity.
It’s empathy.
It’s standing inside your work and saying,
“I see you. I made this for someone like you. Here’s how it helps.”

If you learn to build and you learn to sell—
even softly,
even imperfectly—
you’re free.
Not immediately.
But eventually.
Free to shape your time.
Free to walk away from things that steal your soul one checkbox at a time.
Free to spend an afternoon writing, or fixing, or just staring at the rain—
without asking permission.

The Wabi-Sabi Path to Becoming Unstoppable

You won’t look unstoppable.
You’ll look quiet.
Inconsistent.
Maybe even a little lost.

But you’ll know what you’re doing.
Because the people who last aren’t the loudest—
they’re the ones who learn how to return to the work.

Wabi-sabi reminds us:

• It doesn’t need to be perfect to be valuable.
• A small, handmade life is still a life well-lived.
• Cracks in the path don’t mean you’re off-track—they are the track.
• Simplicity doesn’t mean easy. It means clear.

A Better Question

So no, I don’t know where I’ll be in ten years.
But I know I want to keep building things that matter.
I want to get better at showing them to the right people,
without apology,
without armor.

I want to live a life where each year deepens the truth,
rather than decorating it.

I want to be the kind of unstoppable
that feels like water—
quiet,
patient,
and always finding a way through.

a hill in the rain—
every day the same incline,
every day, new legs

The Hill I Never Chose

In the spring of 2004, I was living in a borrowed apartment near a late train line and a convenience store that sold nothing I ever needed but everything I always bought.
My room was spare—
a mattress on the floor,
a chipped mug,
and a secondhand fan that whirred like it was dreaming of flight.

Each morning, I followed the same path to a shop that sold broken things—record players that stuttered, cameras with jammed shutters, machines that remembered how the world used to sound.
The world, for me, was a loop of quiet routines.

And at the center of that loop—was a hill.

The Gentle Weight of Repetition

It wasn’t a steep hill.
Not dramatic.
Not something that earns you admiration or sweat-soaked pride.

But it asked something of me every day.
It made me notice my breath.
The tension in my calves.
The way the light shifted across pavement cracks that had no intention of being repaired.

I hated it at first.
Then I missed it when I was away.

Because it gave me something I couldn’t name until much later:
the joy of a struggle I already knew.

Why Predictable Challenges Make Us Happy

We often seek novelty—new goals, new highs, new identities.
But there is a quiet, reliable kind of happiness hidden inside predictable struggle:

• It grounds us – A known challenge brings rhythm, and rhythm gives shape to time.
• It builds trust – You know you can face it. You’ve done it before. You’ll do it again.
• It reflects us – Each time you return to it, you’re slightly different. And it shows you who you are.
• It offers mastery – Not perfection, but familiarity. You grow into it, rather than past it.

This kind of struggle doesn’t ask for reinvention.
It asks for return.
For presence.
For gentle effort.

What the Hill Taught Me

I didn’t climb that hill to prove anything.
No one was watching.
There was no finish line.
Just the soft repetition of trying.
Again.
And again.
And again.

Over time, I began to understand that I wasn’t trying to beat the hill.
I was walking with it.
In rhythm.
In quiet agreement.
And that made all the difference.

Wabi-Sabi Teachings from a Daily Challenge

Wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic of imperfection and impermanence, lives in that hill—
and in every quiet challenge we keep returning to.

Here’s what it whispers:

• Beauty lives in the worn
  → The cracked pavement, the leaning tree, the tired breath—these are part of the story, not flaws in it.
• Repetition is not failure
  → The path doesn’t need to be new to be meaningful. The act of returning is the growth.
• Effort without recognition is enough
  → No audience is needed. No reward required. Showing up is the reward.
• Flaws are part of the form
  → The chipped mug still holds warmth. The imperfect day still holds peace. The hill that never changes still carries you forward.

A Final Step

I no longer live near that hill.
But I carry it with me—
in every quiet routine,
every imperfect ritual,
every choice to show up without the promise of applause.

Because happiness doesn’t always live in comfort or novelty.
Sometimes it lives in the soft, repetitive climb toward nothing new.
Just something real.
And real is enough.

sunlight on old wood—
no one sees it but the dust,
still, it glows like gold

Morning Rituals That Anchor Me

Most mornings unfold the same way. The light slips through the blinds at an angle I’ve memorized, landing silently on the floorboards. I rise without urgency, make my way into the kitchen, and start the coffee machine. It gurgles and breathes like an old friend. The scent of dark roast fills the room—not fancy beans, just the kind that reminds me I’m still here. That first cup of coffee isn’t about caffeine; it’s about rhythm. It’s about grounding. It’s a simple morning ritual that stabilizes the chaos and brings a small kind of joy to daily life. For a moment, the world is still, and that stillness feels like peace.

The Unexpected Power of Sunshine

There are days when the sun appears suddenly, casting light through the window like a surprise. It lands on the table, hits the corner of a glass, or warms the side of my face just enough to make me pause. Sunshine, even in brief flashes, brings a natural, effortless happiness. It’s not the dramatic kind of joy. It’s subtle. Healing. The kind of light that doesn’t demand anything from you, only that you notice it. On cold mornings or long afternoons, it reminds me of warmth, of softness, of beauty in silence. Sunshine is a free, daily source of joy—always there, even when it hides.

The Simple Happiness of Physical Touch

We underestimate how powerful physical touch can be. A hand on my shoulder. A long hug from someone I trust. Fingers brushing lightly during a shared story. These small moments of connection have the power to reset something inside me. Touch doesn’t need to be loud or dramatic to bring comfort. It reminds me that I’m not alone. That I exist in a body, and that body can be held, supported, grounded. In a world driven by digital noise and constant distraction, a warm, unspoken connection—a moment of honest human contact—can feel like coming home.

Real Conversations That Go Nowhere

I’ve come to appreciate the value of wandering conversations. The kind where no one is trying to impress anyone. The kind of small talk that unexpectedly turns into something real. Where we talk not to fix things, but just to be heard. Sometimes, nothing gets resolved. And still, something shifts. There’s a deep happiness in talking freely, without pressure, without expectations, just the sound of a voice you trust moving through the room. These everyday moments of connection create a sense of emotional intimacy that no productivity tool can replicate.

Walking Without a Destination

There is quiet magic in taking a walk for no reason at all. No goal. No destination. Just a slow movement through neighborhoods I’ve seen a hundred times and somehow still don’t know. The rhythm of walking—one step, then the next—becomes a kind of moving meditation. It clears my head. It slows time. I see things I miss when I’m rushing: a cat sleeping on a windowsill, a tree blooming earlier than expected, a crack in the pavement shaped like a question mark. Walking reconnects me to myself and the world. It’s a natural, low-effort way to improve mental health and spark joy.

Embracing the Unknown

Every so often, I do something that I know I might fail at. I try a new project. Say something I’ve been avoiding. Take a small risk. Not for glory or success—but because I need to remember what it feels like to not know. That flutter of uncertainty? That’s aliveness. There’s a strange kind of joy in doing something where the outcome isn’t guaranteed. It makes the air taste different. It resets the heartbeat. Uncertainty, when embraced gently, becomes one of the purest ways to grow.

Wabi-Sabi Joy in Imperfection

There’s a quiet, powerful happiness in accepting things exactly as they are. A chipped mug that still holds warmth. A messy day that ends better than expected. A plan that falls apart, revealing something better in its place. Wabi-sabi teaches me that nothing needs to be perfect to be meaningful. Joy doesn’t come from polished surfaces or flawless execution. It comes from the beauty of the unfinished, the broken, the gently worn. It’s in the texture of daily life, where nothing is quite right, and everything is somehow enough.

Everyday Things That Make Life Beautiful

Coffee that warms my hands. Sunshine on a quiet street. The comfort of a hug. A late-night talk that goes nowhere. A walk that leads to nothing. A challenge I might not finish. These are the everyday things that make life beautiful.

They’re not loud.
They’re not trending.
They’re not even shared.

But they are mine.

And every time I notice them, I return to something essential.
Something human.
Something soft.
Something real.

I used to think happiness was a goal. Now I know it’s a practice. A noticing.
A willingness to see beauty in what’s already here.

And in that, I find peace.

a coin in the dirt—
half-buried, never quite lost,
glinting when you move

In the summer of 2006, I lived for a while in a bland apartment near the harbor.
It wasn’t scenic.
There were no postcards of that part of town.
Cargo crates stacked like children’s blocks, gulls arguing in circles, and the thick, stubborn smell of diesel and old water.
The building itself had peeling green paint, and the elevator made a sound like it was considering not working that day.
But the rent was cheap, and from the tiny balcony, you could see the cranes move at sunrise like mechanical insects waking from dreams.

I was doing freelance translation work back then—manuals, mostly.
Microwaves. Fax machines. One memorable project on the proper maintenance of industrial ice makers.
I could finish my work by noon and then wander the rest of the day,
which is exactly what I did.

I got into the habit of walking along the edge of the dockyards.
There was a vending machine there that only accepted coins and only sold barley tea, no matter how many buttons it had.
I liked that.
Something about its refusal to change.

One afternoon, I noticed a rusted sign outside a closed-down hardware store.
It said, “If something doesn’t make sense, keep looking.”
The letters were faded, like the sign was embarrassed by its own insistence.
But it stuck with me.
It felt like a message left for anyone who needed it.
And I needed it more than I thought.

When I was a kid, I used to think adults knew things.
Big things.
Definite, unshakeable truths.
But then I got older and realized most people just pick a version of the truth that makes them comfortable,
then stop looking.

There was a girl I met during that time—
she worked at a laundromat three blocks away.
Always reading thick novels behind the counter, always barefoot.
She told me once,
“People only ask questions they already have answers to. It’s the questions with no answers that scare them.”

I didn’t understand it fully at the time.
But she said it so plainly, I wrote it down in the margin of a notebook meant for invoices.

The thing is—
the surface explanation is always easier.
It’s comforting to accept the first answer that sounds right.
But real understanding—the kind that changes you—lives deeper down.
And to reach it, you have to keep moving.
You have to stay curious, even when the answers stop being simple.
Even when you wish they were.

I’ve learned that the world is full of half-truths dressed up as facts.
We build entire lives around them—
about what love is supposed to feel like,
what success should look like,
what kind of person we’re meant to be.
But sometimes the explanation doesn’t fit.
It rubs at the edges.
It leaves too much unsaid.

And in those moments,
you can choose to settle.
Or you can choose to go further.

The truth doesn’t always arrive dressed in clarity.
Sometimes it’s a feeling you get when a stranger says something that shouldn’t matter but does.
Sometimes it’s a contradiction that refuses to untangle.
Sometimes it’s just a question that won’t go quiet.

But if you follow it—
if you keep asking,
keep walking,
keep noticing what doesn’t sit right—
the world unfolds in strange and beautiful ways.

Now, years later, I don’t work with microwaves anymore.
I live in a different city, where the cranes don’t move at sunrise and the vending machines take credit cards.
But I still don’t trust simple answers.
I still write questions in the margins.
And I still remember that rusted sign by the dock.

If something doesn’t make sense, keep looking.

It probably means you’re close.

spring fog drifts slowly—
what was a mountain yesterday,
today is just mist

In the spring of 2002, I was renting a small second-floor apartment above an internet café that stayed open 24 hours.
You could hear the soft hum of computers and the occasional thud of someone losing at Counter-Strike.
Downstairs smelled like instant ramen, sweat, and pixelated ambition.
My place was nothing special—a futon on the floor, a chipped desk I found on the street, a cheap lamp that flickered when the fridge turned on.
But it was mine, and back then, that seemed like enough.

At the time, I believed I understood life.
I had routines: instant coffee in the morning, scrambled eggs if I remembered to buy them, radio turned low while I checked my email on a chunky silver laptop that wheezed like an old man.
I worked part-time at a CD rental shop—back when people still rented music.
You could browse for hours, picking albums based on cover art alone.
I liked that.
There was something democratic about it.
Everyone was just guessing.

One day, I stepped onto the balcony with damp laundry clinging to my arms, and I froze.
It wasn’t dramatic.
No thunderclap.
Just this flat, persistent realization sliding into my head like a pop-up ad I couldn’t close:
I don’t actually know anything.

In high school, I once had a philosophy teacher who wore the same beige windbreaker every day.
He told us on the first day of class that the only useful thing he could teach us was to doubt what we think we know.
Most of us ignored him—too busy memorizing Nietzsche quotes to sound profound at parties.
But one day, he drew a triangle on the blackboard and said, “You can call this a triangle. That’s a label. But what if, in your next life, this exact shape means something else—like hunger or love or god?”
We laughed at him.
But I’ve never forgotten it.

And that morning on the balcony, two decades later, the triangle came back.
Everything we think we know rests on labels.
And labels shift.
They evolve.
Sometimes overnight.

I had called myself independent.
But maybe I was just afraid of needing anyone.
I called my quiet “peace,”
but maybe it was just loneliness I’d dressed in better words.
I thought I was disciplined,
but I was just afraid of what would happen if I stopped moving.

At night, I’d take long walks with no destination.
Just the sound of vending machines whirring beside me,
the flicker of CRT monitors in dark windows,
and the distant bass of a club that only played R&B from five years ago.
Everything felt like it was in-between—
like the city itself hadn’t decided what it was yet.
And I liked it that way.

Once, I passed a girl sitting alone at a bus stop at 1 a.m.,
holding a Walkman and nodding along to a song no one else could hear.
She looked up, saw me watching her, and smiled.
Not the kind of smile that invites conversation.
The kind that says, I know you don’t know me, but we’re both real right now.

Years have passed.
The CD shop is gone.
The internet café is now a vape store.
That silver laptop gave up sometime during the Obama administration.

But every so often—folding laundry, burning rice, staring at the wall while the kettle hums—I remember how little I know.
And how freeing that actually is.

Because once you stop pretending everything means something fixed,
you get to ask better questions.
Not what is this supposed to be?
but what is this, right now?

And that’s enough.
Maybe more than enough.

autumn wind again—
leaves don’t ask where they’re falling,
they just let it go

The morning I missed the train, the sky was the color of lukewarm dishwater.
A color you wouldn’t bother to name.
I’d slept badly again—woke up three times for no good reason, just the usual low-humming worry pulling at the edges of sleep like a loose thread in an old sweater. I got out of bed late, made instant coffee I didn’t even want, and wandered into the station like someone rehearsing being awake.

When I saw the train doors close, I didn’t run.
I just stood there, hands in my pockets, watching it pull away like it was taking something with it I didn’t quite need anymore.
There wasn’t much left to do after that. So I sat on the cold metal bench, drank the coffee that had already gone bitter, and stared at the empty track like it might open up and tell me a secret.

That’s when it hit me—
not like an epiphany, more like someone whispering from the next room:
you’ll be dead soon.

It wasn’t dark.
It wasn’t heavy.
It was strangely clean.
Almost peaceful, like wind threading through tall grass, bending everything just slightly.

Most people hear that and flinch.
But I’ve been carrying it around lately,
not like a warning—more like a pocket stone.
A reminder. A little weight that keeps things honest.

Because knowing I’ll be gone has done something weird to time.
It’s slowed things down and pulled everything closer.
The way strangers’ voices blend in cafés.
The exact moment sunlight hits the water glass on my table at 3:14 p.m.
The fact that pigeons never seem to be in a hurry, and yet they always get where they’re going.

Before, I used to worry about what I was doing with my life.
Whether I was late.
Falling behind.
Wasting potential.
Now, I mostly just want to feel the water when I wash the dishes.
To answer messages when I want to, not out of some twitching sense of obligation.
To go to bed when I’m tired,
not when I’ve finally earned it.

It sounds simple. It is simple.
That’s the scary part.
We build entire lives around complexity to avoid that truth.

Someone once wrote that death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.
I didn’t understand that the first time I read it.
I was too young. Too busy chasing things.

But now I see it in everything.
In my plants, slowly dying and coming back in new shapes.
In relationships that change form but don’t entirely vanish.
In the way even silence carries something—
a memory, maybe, or a faint echo of laughter from another room.

Sometimes I walk through the city and look at people and think,
you’ll be gone too.
And for a second, it makes me ache in that soft, stupid way you ache
when you realize everything you love is temporary.
But then it lifts.

Because the flip side of knowing we’ll all vanish
is knowing this—this tiny, forgettable now—
is all we ever really get.

And suddenly, I’m not in such a rush.
Suddenly, it’s okay if I don’t write the book.
If I never fix whatever it is people think needs fixing.
If I don’t reply right away.
If I forget the names of stars.
If I burn the rice.
If I miss the train.

Because I’ll be dead soon.
And so will everything that ever felt like it mattered too much.
And somehow,
that makes this lukewarm coffee,
this quiet bench,
this hour where nothing is happening—
feel like everything.

cracked bowl on the shelf
once held storms, now gathers dust—
still, it has its place

One night I found myself in the kitchen at 2:37 a.m., barefoot, eating cereal straight from the box.
No bowl. No milk. Just the dim fridge light and the sound of my own chewing,
like static in the silence.

It wasn’t hunger.
It was something else.
Something softer, harder to name.
Like loneliness wearing socks.

For years, I called this a bad habit.
Evidence of failure, of being undisciplined, of living wrong.

But now I wonder—
what if the habits we hate aren’t flaws,
but signals?
Morse code from the parts of ourselves we’ve forgotten how to hear.

Mindless snacking?
Maybe it was never about food.
Maybe it was my body asking for rest,
a pause I didn’t think I deserved.

Scrolling at 2 a.m.?
Not procrastination—
a quiet rebellion,
my attempt to reclaim time that didn’t feel like mine.

Overplanning?
Not a love of structure,
but a way to build fences around chaos
so I didn’t drown in it.

I started tracing my bad habits like constellations.

Procrastination wasn’t laziness.
It was fear in slow motion.
People-pleasing wasn’t kindness.
It was safety in disguise.
Perfectionism wasn’t ambition.
It was a shield I built as a kid and forgot how to put down.

These weren’t character flaws.
They were survival tools.
Crude. Unrefined.
But brilliant in their own time.

They got me through the noise.
They carried me here.

There’s a wabi-sabi truth in that—
a quiet kind of reverence for things imperfect,
worn, misfitted, and still somehow whole.

Like a cracked teacup that still holds warmth.
Like an old habit that once held your fear
so you wouldn’t have to.

Wabi-sabi doesn’t ask for perfection.
It asks for intimacy with the broken.
It teaches that beauty and usefulness
can still live in things that no longer serve their original purpose.

So now, instead of fighting my habits,
I study them.

What are you trying to protect me from?
What wound are you still guarding?
What need did you once meet so well, and why haven’t I said thank you?

Because maybe healing doesn’t come through discipline.
Maybe it comes through curiosity.
Through compassion.

Maybe our so-called bad habits
are just love letters
from who we used to be—
written in smoke and repetition,
asking not to be erased,
but understood.

There was a time I envied people I didn’t know.
Not in a loud, bitter way—more like a quiet leaning,
like standing at the edge of someone else’s window
just long enough to see their coffee cup steaming in the light
and imagine what it would be like
to be them, just for a moment,
just for the part where the light hits right.

I envied the man on the train with his sleeves perfectly rolled,
reading a book in Italian like it was written just for him.
I envied the woman at the intersection who crossed the street
like she had always known where she was going.
I envied friends who never paused before speaking,
who laughed without checking the room,
who always knew what to do with their hands
at parties where the music was too loud and the lighting too low.

But then one night, around 2:30 a.m.,
I found myself sitting alone at the kitchen table,
listening to the refrigerator hum like an old monk meditating,
and I asked myself,
not out loud, but in that strange, deep-down voice that only shows up when you’re too tired to pretend—
Would you really trade all of you for all of them?

Not just the way they carry themselves through sunlight,
but the way they crumble when the door closes.
Not just their laughter,
but the shape of their silence.
Not just their grace,
but the grief that lives in their bones,
the fears that dress like logic,
the moments they can’t forgive themselves for,
even if no one else remembers.

Because the truth is,
you don’t get to take someone’s beauty
without carrying their weight.
You don’t get their confidence
without the father they never reconciled with,
or the night they almost gave up but didn’t tell a soul.

Every life comes as one piece.
Seams, scars, stitched-up dreams and all.
No swaps.
No samples.
No trying things on just to see how they feel.

And maybe that’s the point.
Maybe envy is just the echo of our own shape,
calling us back home.

For years I thought exercise had to be punishment. Something loud. Something measured. Something that looked like effort and sweat and soreness in all the right places. I tried the gyms. The routines. The classes with names that sounded like they came from action movies.

But none of it stayed.

What did stay were the long walks after dinner, music in my ears and no destination. The bike rides that turned into races with the wind. The hikes that ended in silence and sun on my shoulders. The dancing in the kitchen when no one was watching.

That was movement too.

No reps. No rules. Just joy.

The most sustainable exercise is the one that feels like play. The kind that reminds you you’re alive, not being tested.

So if it makes you laugh, if it helps you breathe easier, if it makes time disappear—

That counts.

Call it training. Call it therapy. Call it coming home to your body.

Whatever it is—if it moves you and you love it, keep doing it.

Because the best kind of strong is the kind that stays.

A misted mirror—
Not to reflect, but to dissolve into.

There are days I imagine being a character from a novel, someone written with enough space between the words to let the wind pass through. Not someone heroic. Not someone tragic. Just someone real in a way most people forget to be.

And if I had to choose, I wouldn’t reach for fiction.

I’d choose the narrator of the Tao Te Ching.
The man who says nothing, but says everything.
The one who walks away from the crowd, not in bitterness but in quiet understanding.

He is not a character in the way novels usually need them to be.
He has no arc.
No rising tension.
No grand lesson that fits neatly in a Hollywood ending.

But he sees the world.
And somehow, it’s enough.

To Be the Stream, Not the Stone

When I first read the Tao, I didn’t understand it.
I was too busy defining myself—ambitious, intense, full of fire.
I needed to be someone.

But the Tao doesn’t care about names.
It says: “He who defines himself can’t know who he really is.”
And that hit me like a whisper in a crowded room.

There is no reward for being loud in the silence.
There is no prize for outrunning your own shadow.
There is just the way.
And the way cannot be forced.

Wabi-Sabi and the Tao

The Tao does not promise success.
It does not encourage hustle.
It doesn’t ask you to be anything more than you already are.

And that is what makes it radical.
You are allowed to just be.

You are the chipped bowl that still holds water.
The crooked pine on the mountain slope.
The tea that tastes better on the third sip.

Wabi-sabi says: Imperfection is not a flaw.
The Tao says: Stop clinging, and everything will fall into place.

Together, they offer an answer to a question most people never ask:
What if becoming more meant doing less?

Lessons from a Character Without a Name

• Let the river choose the path. You only need to float.
• A full cup cannot receive. Stay empty. Stay open.
• Don’t try to be extraordinary. Be like water—soft, slow, and undefeated.
• Those who know do not speak. Those who speak do not know. So breathe. Listen. Watch.
• You don’t need to change the world. Just stop trying to own it.

If I could be anyone, I’d be the unnamed wanderer from the Tao Te Ching.
Not a sage. Not a master. Just someone who stopped asking where the path leads, and simply walked.

Not to become something.
But to return to what I never left.

If you’ve ever read a line that made you stop and exhale, share this.
Maybe the Way is closer than you think.