Pieces of my routine folded up and switched out transformers-like. First it was the short sleeves in the office, then the sandals on the weekends.

Once I started having to strip down the moment I got back home to dry off from 35C highs, I knew it had finally been one year since I came to Matsusaka.

I joked about how I’m surrounded by nothing much besides car dealers, but this fact really did get me for a long time. I sought something green somewhere, anywhere, and happened upon this narrow path to the neighboring rice field on the way to the grocery store. The section running through the rice field is bracketed by train crossings.

Sometimes, by a silly stroke of timing, I’d get stuck between the crossings waiting for passing trains pausing me at the rice field. I’d roll to a stop, lean back on my bike, look out over the field, and notice something new. Right hand on the brake, left on the shutter. I would snap a quick photo. This ended up happening quite often.

Even when dull and empty from the dry, blustery winter, it was beautiful.

I was down to the wire, like usual, stand-up pedaling to rage across the tracks and make it to the office with a new PR. I discovered the once barren rice paddy freshly weeded, watered, and fertilized for spring. I thought, I want to take its picture. I did, on the way home, without a train holding me hostage.

I took many more.

Whenever somebody asked me how long I was going to be in Japan, I gave noncommittal answers that revealed I was wafting. I was seeing multiple futures at once-me in Tokyo, me in California, me somewhere entirely new, me successful and approved. Time seemed nebulous, until I decided I wanted to eventually return to the states, and suddenly it had an end. I could at last feel the finiteness of my life in Japan.

I experienced a similar reckoning, but at the scale of my entire life. While processing the losses of multiple family members, I became obsessed with death in a way that asked, what is a good life? For me, and only me? It was like I had a version of myself who was busy, always calculating what time to leave the house or what would be my next step, and suddenly I had another version of me who slowed, stroked the smiles in pictures from 16 hours in the past and 5,000 miles across the ocean, finally believing that the games of shame and approval were meaningless under the gravity of the truth that I have an end. No future versions of me can forget this. A permanent update. I hold it lovingly and firmly to my chest.

This must be what they really meant when they said to stop and smell the roses.

Yesterday, for the first time in two years, I stopped to rest. I laid down in midday under a soft blanket, closed my eyes, and drifted into contentment. That was me, finally, doing exactly what I wanted. My most radical acts.

I was in China, singing Taylor Swift and Queen, playing on a homemade dry-tooling rig strung with lights, together with old and new friends, eating with the same spoon from a bowl of jujubes and sticky rice after a day of laughing under sunlight, passing each other raw chestnuts to taste, spotting little green and brown mantises from under a chalk stained rock. While swaying in gratitude to the beat of a djembe, I promised I will find this, again and again. These are my roses.

I received a gift of autumn chestnuts from the ladies at the office that I put in my pot over the stove. The boiled chestnuts I shucked one by one with my fingers until the skin peeled away from under my nails tasted so nostalgic, so achingly sweet. I had begun to care for my joy again.

Growing must be learning to be deeply comforted by the fact that our pains, our worries, our joys, our revelations, while vast and infinite, were never uncharted, never not shared. Please know this: we were never, ever alone.

The Mountains, from the Castle Ruins

As a bonus, I have a collection of photos I took in the spring when I started spending more time visiting the castle ruins.

This is my favorite, on an evening run. I still think about this sunset.

Chef’s Note

I’m writing this as the weather is turning autumn again in a cold snap and my winter clothes are coming out of hibernation. I do miss not fighting 25mph winds on a jog, but I will not miss smelling like sourdough at the end of the day.

Thank you, as always, for sharing your time. I’d love to hear about your roses.

Your sweater weather sourdough-sweating life-enjoyer,

Alex