I thought you were heading to that rave. – He means it sincerely. But I still hear a hint of, “Hey, you ghosted us, didn’t you?” This is to be expected after a three-hour tour suddenly dissolves as scheduled, three hours and a generous extra thirty minutes after starting at a sumibiyaki izakaya. Saying you are going to a rave sounds a helluva lot cooler than saying I gotta go home, but I don’t have the alcohol-fueled inclination I once had to barrel into the night, homebound after 4 am still trying to catch a beerbuzz at a conbini two minutes from my booze-filled dining room.
I tell him that I need to get my bike first. He thanks me a second time, having had the chance to tell his wife how I reminded him of another Canadian friend named Paul. It’s a compliment, to be sure. Our Canadian demeanors colouring his impression of the nation as kind, jovial bonhommes who are happy to share in good food, drink, and company, generous in laughs and that quintessentially Canadian word as commonly used as the aloha is for a greeting and parting: Sorry.
With an excuse to part company hastily, I rush away in the direction of my bike and his wife and he towards Namba Station. I breathe easy. No need to spend a night getting munted with strangers to music I barely feel anything for anymore. No, my day of drinking and chatting for money is done. I’m now going to enjoy the silence of my home and the gentle company of my missus.
We have settled into an easy life now that our daughter is in university living a life of wonder 12 time zones away in the past. It seems like we can help her with anything, half a day in advance. But for now she is good, and so are we. It’s been an age since we were together as a couple. We hand in glove most tasks but we still give each other blisters now and then.
There is a way through most troubles, and like inspiration to do a thing passionately, it comes to you five minutes after you’ve begun engaging with the task at hand, rather than before it. It is Humble Gratitude. And it must be Self-powered. Self-directed. And daily applied.
1 % of a day is twenty minutes. And it is with this one percent that I seek to find ways on improving mental faculty to be present in all things. Whether it is yoga, journaling, photographing the minutae of my garden, twenty minutes is plenty of time to center yourself in one course of action. It may take years of discovery and exploration to know what moves you to exude creative confidence in the medium of your choice, but like James Clear stresses about habit-formation in his book, Atomic Habits, you need to make the start of something easy to do and stack this habit on a larger more elaborate habit you want to undertake.
But to get to twenty minutes (which for many of us, is daunting enough), you must first get into a state of flow, and something that sets you up for the task at hand can take five minutes to get you to that groove state. If you want to jog, it takes five minutes to put on what you need to get out the door. This is a habit requiring very little in the set up. This habit then gets stacked on a larger more cumbersome task of exercising to improve your physical well-being.
It takes me five minutes to bring out my yoga mats and lay them in the yard, and to set up my app to instruct me on how to do a morning routine that will take twenty minutes to complete. 5 leads to 20. Resistance doesn’t have time to drive a wedge between intent and result. Feeling better can fast approach this side of done.
For a retiring smoker, it is important to center yourself around an action as no-mind as breathing through meditation. It’s a struggle to label what comes across your mind as sudden distractions vying for your wandering attention, but not in the breathing that comes from sitting down and devoting yourself to it. You used to mindlessly scroll your phone and suck on filtered cigarettes, e-cigs and the like. I will do away with the triggers soon enough. For now, I’m just celebrating the win that is energizing myself positively with one percent of my day.
When I return home, my wife is sitting at the edge of the sofa, upright and startled. She has woken from a nap, and surprised to see me home so early. She gives me the living room and retires proper to a bed in our washitsu, recently vacated by a friend who stayed a week. How well do you sleep on it, she asks me. But before I can answer she’s one percent closer to her dream cloud of syrupy-sleep she hasn’t given herself permission to feel since our daughter left for college.
I count my receipts, staple them and reach for a can of Tokyo Craft pale ale from the fridge. I step outside and say goodnight to the sky. I head to the master bedroom, with some intent to watch an episode of Slow Horses, but choose to put a few thoughts down in my notebook about the popularity of defenses such as the Costco Defense and the Not-my-pants defense I had learned from the public defender on my tour. And with that thought drizzled out before my heavy lidded eyes close, I cap the pen, close the notebook and dream the dark pool of a fitless sleep, yet again.