what if, you dared to enjoy your life
imagine!
It’s July first.
It’s the first official day of opening the waters and the mountains in Japan.
It’s like a beckoning, a call: Hike! Swim! Frolic! Go outside! Remember the whole point of being alive!
It’s the halfway point of the year. The real beginning of summer, where the rain begins to clear, the heat rises and the air seems almost to solidify.
It’s July first and I’m wheeling a small suitcase out of the Inokashira line at Shibuya station and down into a department store food paradise called Mark City. It’s still early on a weekday morning and it’s quiet. ( I recommend you take a visit next time you’re in Tokyo).
I wind my way around the fresh produce, past corn cobs, proudly displayed like newborn babies, past high end luxury rice and artfully packaged beans, toward the section dedicated to sweet foods, designed to be given as gifts. I choose a small organza bag of three half spherical jellies, each with tiny gold fish suspended inside as an offering for a friend of a friend I am about to meet for the first time.
I pick up a weak latte from obscura coffee and board the Shonan Shinjuku line bound for Zushi. On the train I finish reading The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, pushing back tears, until the crowd begins to thin and I look up and see the windows filled, completely, with green.
I am so far from home and yet, feel as if we are separated only by a transparent sheet of paper, a sliding door, a curtain made of silk.
It’s my third Japanese Summer, my second as a resident. That first Summer I was completely lost at sea. Within the space of three months, I went from packing up my apartment and my life in Sydney, a city I had lived for fifteen years, to applying for a business visa in Japan.
Only in reflection, can I fully understand how quickly my life fell apart and then re-built again, shooting up into the sky like feral bamboo. At the time, it all seemed stretched out, infinite, unbearably slow: but in reality it happened in a heartbeat.
Life changed so fast, the animal part of me struggled to keep up.
And yet my mind still wondered why it was all taking so long.
When I arrive at Zushi station, my friends pick me up and we drive, first to a small onigiri shop, with the menu written on paper sheets stuck to the walls, then to a cafe in a perfect old house, all soft jazz, fresh flowers, dim light and the sound of coffee beans being ground, resting on the very edge of the coast.
There’s something about July first that felt new to me this year, both like a long awaited exhalation and the beginning of a chapter I’ve been waiting a really long time to read.
Over espresso tonic and lavender lemonade, we talk. In Japanese, and in English, about childhood dreams and family lines. About priests and art and stone churches. About tea bowls and synchronicities. It’s a conversation you’ll hear more about soon. In the back corner of the cafe, a handful of wind chimes were strung up by an open window. The sea breeze rattled through in rounded bursts. Each one had a slightly different sound.
I could say it was a single conversation changed my life. One I had in Kyoto with the founder of a skincare brand, foreign owned, built here in Japan.
But it’s never just one, isolated moment.
It’s never a lone opportunity, separate from everything else.
In the spiritual world, people often talk about ‘awakenings’ — this singular, messy, sexy experience where everything changed. It makes a great story to be sure, and yes, moments can absolutely come to a peak, but they do not, and cannot happen in isolation.
It’s easy to forget that.
Life is a web, not a straight line.
I was only able to have that conversation, the one that ignited the most obvious spark of moving my life to Japan, because of the literal hundreds of other steps and decisions I took before that.
Some of them ten years in the past.
Many of them both terrifying and deeply, anti-climatic.
Most of them, technically irresponsible and with zero immediate payoff.
In hearing stories about peak moments, wild synchronicities and living an intuitive life, it’s important to remember that outside of the dark nights of the soul and the lightning strike of clarity, there is very often long stretches of confusion and uncertainty. A lot of wondering if you’ve messed it all up. Months, years even, when your intuition was not yet confirmed. All the seeds planted that didn’t make it up through the dirt.
It’s July second.
My friend whizzes past on her bike outside my hotel at 8:30am. We walk through the farmers market before popping into a local shrine and shrieking upon our very own celebrity sighting: a pink lotus flower in perfect full bloom.
An easy fifteen minute walk brings us to a Japanese breakfast restaurant, where we are served wooden trays loaded with grilled meaty fish, miso soup, salad and fresh hot rice. A toddler turns and smiles at us on repeat for no reason other than simply being alive.
We pick up hot drinks, even though it’s already pushing thirty degrees, from a bakery in an traditional building next door, watching downstairs customers select pastries through the open beams of the second floor, while others sit on tatami, chatting quietly, flipping through magazines.
Every moment is like a scene I want to write, to capture on polaroid film.
I was meant to visit Zushi for a single day, and I ended up staying for three.
I sipped homemade ginger ale, ate shirasu pizza, watched my friend hold a pigeon on her outstretched arm and spent hours with talented, creative women. I read books on local flower and matchmaking temples. I conversed in Japanese until my brain was so fried, my eyes ached. I fell asleep at night, exhausted, with a smile on my face.
It’s funny, how much time you actually have, when you simply decide to take it for yourself, amidst all the things endless things forever impatiently waiting to be ticked off the list.
Just incase you forgot:
The whole world won’t fall apart when you make a choice to simply, and however briefly, deeply enjoy your one wild and precious life.
It’s the halfway point of the year.
Where are you trying to hurry past the anti-climatic part of your story? How can you remind yourself, the ‘good bits’ are usually found in-between the peaks?
What would it mean to open the mountains and the waters of your body, your summer, your own creative life?
The Daily Rest Studio
The Daily Rest Studio is an opened ended, ongoing membership with the ability to join, or cancel at anytime. We’re currently exploring a three month season of Cultivating Sweetness: The Art of A Well Lived Life. If you desire daily reminders to move, stretch, breathe and have encouragement, permission and support to romanticise your life, I’d love to have you join us.
Related Previous Essays
TDR Tokyo Retreats
Many of the people and the places written about in this piece are part of our Kamakura & Hayama Retreats. Kokoro is currently sold out, but there are still three spots available in Whisper of the Heart, a very (very) special small group tour & retreat in the heart of Japan, this October.
I’ve just inhaled your words - sitting at my parents kitchen table after tea with my dad in the garden. Love youuuu thank you for sharing this magic
Thank you Emmie for reminding us that our soul knows her path and will guide us towards our dreams. Before becoming reality in the physical world they're so alive inside us and give us so much strength and joy even in dark moments. On our way we can read good books, drink tea, walk with friends and make photographs of flowers. Life is such a blessing 🩷 !