—
やがてくる
まだ見ぬ嵐に
傘をたたむ
eventually
even for unseen storms
we fold our umbrellas
—
There’s a kind of heaviness that doesn’t announce itself.
It’s not panic. Not despair.
It’s the quiet worry. The one that crouches low in the chest and waits.
I don’t even know if it’s one thing.
But lately, when I lie in bed long after the world’s gone quiet—when no one needs an answer and nothing is urgent—my thoughts stretch out into a shapeless future. A field of fog I can’t quite enter.
And I feel it.
The weight.
—
Maybe it started with how fast everything moves now.
Or maybe how nothing moves unless you push it yourself.
Maybe it’s all the small moments I’ve watched vanish in the scroll of someone else’s life, until I couldn’t tell which parts of my own were real, and which were just stories I tried to fit into.
I’m worried we’re losing our rhythm.
Not the productivity rhythm.
The one that told us when to rest.
When to be still.
When to tend to the garden even if nothing was blooming yet.
I’m worried we’ve forgotten the language of slow.
—
I went for a walk last week. Just a small trail behind my grandparents’ place, that familiar field where the same pine tree leans a little more every year.
There’s a bench halfway through, carved by someone long ago.
It’s always there—weathered, cracked, stubborn.
I sat.
It wasn’t the view.
It wasn’t the silence.
It was something else—some soft ache behind the ribs.
Maybe it was the thought that we don’t build benches anymore. Not ones meant to last decades.
We build updates.
We build replacements.
But not places to rest.
—
A few years ago, in Aso, I met a couple who owned a small soba shop just off the main road.
Everything was hand-cut. The broth made from scratch every morning.
I asked them why they never expanded, never franchised, never put it online.
The woman looked at me and said,
「なくすのがこわい。」
“I’m afraid to lose what I’ve already built.”
I think about that often.
Not out of fear.
But out of care.
—
I’m worried that the future won’t leave room for care.
That everything will be optimized, but nothing will be cherished.
That we’ll have access to everything except ourselves.
That the quiet will disappear under the noise of what’s next.
—
Back when I was living in Birmingham, there was a woman in the flat next to mine who used to hum when she washed dishes.
She didn’t know I could hear her.
But I did.
Every evening around six.
No music. Just the rhythm of water, plate, voice.
It was the most human thing in the building.
And I’m scared that sound—those kind of sounds—might not make it through.
—
We’re good at fixing things now.
But not so good at tending to them.
We know how to grow fast.
But not how to grow deep.
We know how to talk.
But not always how to sit in the same room and say nothing.
—
I’m worried that the small rituals will vanish.
The slow pour of coffee in the morning.
The way someone folds a shirt before putting it away.
The way my grandfather brushes crumbs from the table with his hand, every time, like a ceremony.
The way someone lights a candle not for light, but for memory.
—
And yet—
There is a kind of faith in still being worried.
It means something matters enough to protect.
It means we still recognize the shape of what’s fragile.
—
So maybe the worry isn’t the enemy.
Maybe it’s the thread.
The one that tugs us gently back toward what matters.
The one that asks us to build not faster, but truer.
To make fewer things—and mean them more.
—
I don’t know what the future will look like.
I don’t know what we’ll lose, or what we’ll trade for convenience.
But I do know this:
I want to keep a corner of my life where nothing needs to be efficient.
Where water boils slowly.
Where letters are written by hand.
Where I still buy vegetables from someone who grew them.
Where the pine tree I planted has time to grow tall enough for birds to nest in it—
even if I won’t live long enough to see them.
—
Wabi-sabi lesson:
Not all worry is fear.
Sometimes it’s a map.
One you draw with every small thing you continue to do with care.
—
So, yes—
I’m worried.
But not without reason.
Not without hope.
Because even if everything changes,
we still have the choice to move slowly.
To listen more.
To build something that lasts, even in quiet.
And that’s something I plan to keep doing.
While I still can.
life 