Here is what I’ve learned about life and what I’m still trying to figure out. The essays here are written with curiosity, not certainty. They move through...
When I was growing up, someone close to me labelled people. My brother was the creative one, the brave one. And by comparison, I was not, even though I wanted to be. One afternoon, they flipped to a sketch my brother had made and exclaimed how good it was. I recognised it immediately as a tracing of one of my art books, meant as a study. But I kept quiet. Years later, I failed my life drawing…
Kira arrived at the school with an eager heart. The red gates stood open, twin stone lions guarding the entrance. From somewhere inside came the sharp rhythm of wood striking wood and the smell of incense. She paused at the threshold. Students were training beyond the inner yard, their movements quick and precise. She tightened the strap of her satchel, grinned and stepped inside. Names The first…
Before There once was a city filled with clocks. They stood on rooftops and road junctions; they hung in bakeries where bread cooled on wooden racks. The clocks were all in agreement. They told people when to wake, when to work, when to hurry, when to rest, so that not a minute was wasted. At 9:41 on a Tuesday morning, a child was born. She didn’t cry when the clocks expected her to. She laughed…
They say you cannot cross the same Shatun twice. The land was treacherous and mercurial. It did not hold still. Hills sank in a day. Rivers rose where desert was. You could fall asleep in a lush oasis and wake among stones that remembered the ocean. Most travellers went the long way around, even if it took weeks. Crossing Shatun took days – if you survived. I crossed because I was commanded.…
I came to Buddhism out of pain. I hoped it might offer a way out of the daily thrum of dissatisfaction and into something like happiness — or at least the assurance that everything would eventually be all right. It didn’t. Buddhism, as it turns out, was unflinching. It said that everything and everyone you love, including your own life, is impermanent, and that we live in a world that can’t…
There is an old story. Sen no Rikyū, the Japanese tea master, was invited to tea by a man who owned a prized caddy made of a special pattern. But Rikyū didn’t take much notice of the caddy and left without comment. The owner was so upset that he smashed the caddy to pieces. A friend collected the broken pieces and carefully glued them together. He later invited Rikyū to tea and used the mended…
I’ve never been to France, but someone once saw me there. A friend was looking at a photo of a young man standing in the streets of Paris, wearing a long coat, hair blowing in the wind. “When were you in France?” he asked. But it wasn’t me. He was looking at a photo of my father, who’d gone to France as an engineer. We have the same high forehead, the same downward-sloping eyes, the same sharp…
I used to think prayer was about belief: either you believed, or you did not, and that was that. But after reading The Magic of Vajrayana by Ken McLeod, I no longer think this is true. I now think prayer is less about conviction than about posture: how one stands in relation to what one can’t control. I used to read to understand. But lately, I’ve found myself reading to travel – to go beyond my…
Most people think happiness is something you can get. If you reach for it hard enough – through habits, purchases, routines – it’ll eventually land in your hands. I believed that. When it didn’t work, I reached a different conclusion: happiness must not be very important. Both ideas failed me. For a long time, I treated happiness as proof. If I were living right, then happiness should appear as a…
In Kyoto, the light was failing me. Or maybe it was the other way around. It was day six of my photography assignment, and I had nothing. I’d walked the old capital for hours, camera in hand, trying to capture the spirit of old Japan. I’d shot hundreds of frames, with rickshaws, temples, autumn trees, but all of them felt lifeless. I kept walking and pressing the shutter anyway, hoping to salvage…