—
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.
life 