かこもいまも
みらいもまがりて
ひかりさす
Past, present, and future—
each bending in its own way
toward the light.
“What are you most excited about for the future?” she asked, stirring her coffee so slowly it barely made a sound.
We were sitting on the narrow terrace of a jazz bar in Shimokitazawa, half-lit by a broken lantern and the flickering screen of a vending machine across the alley. The night smelled faintly of miso and old wood.
I thought for a moment. The question caught me off guard—not because I didn’t have an answer, but because I wasn’t sure how to put it into words. Not yet.
The image that came to mind wasn’t futuristic at all. No robots or utopias or sparkling cities in the clouds. It was a tree. A very specific one.
There’s a hillside in rural Slovenia where I used to walk every summer. Years ago, when I was still in school and everything I carried fit into a single rucksack, I passed a sapling pushing out of the earth next to an old stone wall. It was fragile then—thin, straight, like a pencil pushed halfway into the soil. I remember pausing, just for a second, and thinking, You probably won’t make it.
But the next year, it was still there. And the year after that. Slowly—quietly—it twisted. The roots deepened. The trunk bent slightly eastward, leaning for the sun that had moved just a little higher in the sky. The bark grew coarse. The wall crumbled a bit beside it. And last year, when I returned after a long time away, I saw that the tree was no longer just a tree. It had become a neighborhood.
There were birds nesting in its hollows. Beetles in the shade. A fox track just below the roots. Ivy wrapped around the trunk like it had fallen in love. The whole thing was alive with things that weren’t supposed to be there, and yet there they were. Thriving.
I told her this.
She raised an eyebrow, like maybe she expected something else.
“Trees?”
“No,” I said. “Adaptation.”
Things on average are getting better.
Not in a dramatic way, not fast.
But better.
People are learning how to listen more. To each other. To the world. To themselves. Not perfectly. But more than they did a generation ago. And pain, even when it shows up uninvited, has a strange way of becoming instruction.
Nature’s been doing this forever.
Twisting toward light.
Even if it hurts.
In Tokyo, there’s a street I like near Ueno. It’s not beautiful in the traditional sense. Loud, cluttered, full of salarymen and vending machines and the stale smell of exhaust. But if you walk it often enough, you start to notice things: the sparrows that land exactly when the traffic light turns red. The neighborhood cats that sleep beneath the ramen shop vent because it’s the warmest spot on the block. The old woman who walks her tiny dog at the exact same hour every morning, nodding politely to the garbage collectors like they’re monks.
Everyone, everything, adapting.
Finding rhythm in the static.
Back in Slovenia, that tree now drops seeds of its own. The hillside changes slightly each year. Paths carved by deer. Moss growing on one side of the bark. Sometimes I sit beside it and just watch the insects for a while, wondering how many years it will live past me.
And in a way, I feel the same when I watch a crowd cross Shibuya at rush hour. A million tiny organisms in motion, adjusting angles and timings with ballet precision. Some frown, some float. Some lost in thought, some locked to their phones.
Still—moving forward.
“I guess what I’m excited about,” I said finally, “is that people figure things out. Slowly. Clumsily. Often the wrong way first. But they do.”
She sipped her coffee and smiled. “That’s very… non-linear of you.”
“I prefer curved,” I said. “Straight lines break.”
Wabi-sabi lesson:
The future doesn’t arrive all at once.
It grows like a tree—twisting, pausing, trying again.
Every scar becomes part of the shape.
Every delay teaches direction.
Even pain, even chaos, has roots.
Don’t look for perfection.
Look for cohabitation.
Between past and present, nature and steel, sorrow and joy.
The world is learning how to hold all of it—together.
And so are we.
So no, I’m not waiting for some perfect tomorrow.
But I’m watching the way things bend toward light,
even when the weather’s off.
And that, quietly,
is enough.
life 