“Tsurezure naru mama ni”

You’re standing in a checkout line. Your phone has died. You don’t know what to do with your hands. You stare straight ahead — and suddenly you notice something you’ve never seen before: a crack in the floor tiles that runs perfectly parallel to the grout line beside it. The older man in front of you wears a watch whose dial shows a tiny gold hummingbird where the twelve should be. The woman behind him smells of something that reminds you of your grandmother’s house — but you can’t name the scent. Nothing happened. You had no epiphany. And yet you walk home with a peculiar feeling, as though someone briefly parted a curtain behind which the world is richer than the one you sprint through every day chasing your plans. Thoughts that never had a chance to surface during the rush of the day enter the room like cats — soundlessly and on their own terms. We all know such moments. Some call it absent-mindedness. Others, boredom. A Japanese monk from the fourteenth century would have called it the most precious thing you possess.

Sometime between 1330 and 1332, as the Kamakura shogunate was crumbling and Japan was sliding into decades of civil war, a former courtier of the imperial palace in Kyoto sat before his inkstone and stared at it. After a while, he began to write. Not a treatise. Not a chronicle. He jotted down whatever came to mind — thoughts about death and about carp soup, about the beauty of falling petals and about worms in a deer’s antlers, about the moon behind clouds and about how to recognize a fool. The brush led the hand, not the hand the brush. His name was Kenkō (兼好), and what emerged from this idleness — from this tsurezure (徒然 – lit. “for want of anything better to do,” “idle whim”) — turned out to be one of the four greatest masterpieces of Japanese prose, alongside Sei Shōnagon’s “Makura no sōshi,” Kamo no Chōmei’s “Hōjōki,” and Murasaki’s “Genji.” Two hundred and forty-three fragments — from a single sentence to several pages — reportedly written on scraps of paper and pasted to the walls of a hermitage. After Kenkō’s death, his friend peeled those scraps off and arranged them into a book. That chaos proved wiser than many a philosophical system. “What a strange, wild impulse seizes me when I realize I have spent entire days before my inkstone with nothing better to do, jotting down at random the idle, absurd thoughts that cross my mind” — so begins “Tsurezuregusa” (徒然草), literally “Jottings from Idleness.” These words are recited from memory by Japanese schoolchildren, much as Polish children recite the opening lines of Pan Tadeusz.

Seven hundred years ago, this man wrote something that sounds like a diagnosis of a random Tuesday: “How extraordinarily difficult it is to do something immediately — now, the very moment you think of it!” He wrote about people who postpone life from morning to evening and from evening to morning — and so it slips through their fingers. He wrote that the most precious thing about life is its uncertainty — because if cherry blossoms bloomed forever, no one would look at them. That perfection kills the imagination, and the moon behind clouds is the most beautiful. That a person who never stops never knows where he actually is. This is not ancient wisdom to hang on a wall. It is a tool — sharp, practical, precise — and in today’s essay we will get to know it and consider how to use it.

Who Was Kenkō

Saturday morning. You’re tidying a drawer — one of those into which you toss everything that has no proper place. An old key whose lock you can’t remember. A business card of someone you don’t recognize. A charger for a phone you no longer own. Each of these objects was once important. Now it lies here, stripped of context, stirring in you that peculiar state — not sadness, not nostalgia, just a quiet “ah.” Ah, so this is what it looks like when things lose their meaning. Ah, so this is the very moment when something crosses from the category of “important” to the category of “once important.” You may not even have known such a moment existed.

Kenkō knew that state. And he turned it into literature. He was probably born in 1283, into a family linked to the Shinto Urabe clan — priests of the Yoshida shrine in Kyoto. While still a young man he entered the imperial court, where he served as an officer of the palace guard. He trained in archery, horsemanship, and court ceremonies — the full intricate ritual that formed the fabric of aristocratic life in the Kamakura era. He was a poet: eighteen of his poems were included in imperial anthologies, and in court circles he was counted among the “four heavenly kings of poetry” of the Nijō school. He lived in the late Kamakura and early Muromachi periods, an age of brutal upheaval, when power was shifting from the court aristocracy to the samurai. The Hōjō shogunate was in decline, Emperor Go-Daigo was trying to reclaim real authority, the Ashikaga lurked in the wings — and Japan stood on the brink of yet more decades of civil war.

Somewhere around the age of forty — perhaps after the death of Emperor Go-Uda in 1324, perhaps because of an unhappy love for the daughter of the governor of Iga Province, or perhaps simply because he had ripened for departure — Kenkō took Buddhist vows and moved into a hermitage. But he was no hermit in the mold of Kamo no Chōmei, who a century earlier had shut himself in a hut measuring three meters by three and described it in his “Hōjōki.” Kenkō did not cut himself off from the world. He still visited the court, still took part in poetry tournaments — his participation is documented as late as 1335 and 1344 — and he continued to meet people. He left his career, but not life itself. And this is crucial — because Tsurezuregusa is not the text of a recluse. It is the text of someone standing to one side and watching carefully. Someone who chose distance not out of fear but out of curiosity — because certain things simply cannot be seen up close.

Comparison with other classics of Japanese prose suggests itself naturally. Sei Shōnagon in “Makura no sōshi” (枚草子) is brilliant but aristocratically aloof — her world is hermetic, full of rules through which she moves with grace and disdain for those who do not know them. Chōmei in “Hōjōki” (方丈記) is melancholic and withdrawn — writing from the vantage of a man who witnessed catastrophes and fled the world. Kenkō is warmer than either of them. He has distance, but also a great deal of human warmth and understanding. He has irony, but also tenderness. He is like a wise uncle who sits in the corner of the room, says little, but when he speaks — hits home. Kenkō himself quoted Sei Shōnagon — in several places he clearly alludes to “Makura no sōshi” — but where she classifies and judges, he observes and understands. Some scholars argue that it was Kenkō who rescued Sei Shōnagon from oblivion, returning her text to circulation.

What Is “Tsurezuregusa”

An evening after dinner. The house has gone quiet. The rest of the family has scattered — someone is watching a series on Netflix, someone is already asleep. And you sit at the table with a mug of tea in that odd moment when you don’t have to do anything but don’t want to go to bed yet. You open a notebook. Or the notes app on your phone. And you write — not an article, not a report, not a post. You write something whose only addressee is yourself. A thought that came to you on the tram and has now, senselessly, returned. An observation about the neighbor who walks her dog at exactly the same time every day. A question to which you don’t know the answer. You write without a plan, because a plan would destroy what is happening — the brush leading the hand, not the hand the brush.

That is exactly how Kenkō wrote. “Tsurezuregusa” consists of 243 fragments — in Japanese dan (段) — about everything. Literally. There are one-sentence fragments and ones running to several pages. There are essays on impermanence and on the correct way to hang a quiver at the door of a courtier who has fallen from the emperor’s favor. On the beauty of nature and on the fact that one must never sniff a deer’s fresh antlers, because they harbor worms that crawl up the nose and devour the brain. On love, death, human behavior, domestic architecture, court etiquette, Buddhist doctrine, drunken antics, and how to recognize a person of worth. The form in which all this was written is zuihitsu (随筆) — a genre best translated as “following the brush.” You write what the brush wants to write. You impose no structure. You let thoughts flow.

The word “tsurezure” itself is remarkable. It is usually translated as “idleness” or “boredom,” but in Japanese it resonates more deeply. Tsurezure is a state in which you have nothing to do — but it is not unpleasant. It is more like the emptiness after the guests have left: quiet, a little strange, but right now, in this silence, something begins to happen. Thoughts that never had a chance to surface during the rush of the day suddenly enter the room like cats — soundlessly and on their own terms. Kenkō did not write despite boredom. He wrote thanks to it. Boredom was his instrument — like a magnifying glass that reveals what the naked eye cannot see.

As for the genesis of the text itself, there is a legend first formulated in the sixteenth century by the scholar Sanjonishi Sane’eda. According to it, Kenkō jotted his thoughts on scraps of paper and pasted them to the walls of his hermitage. After the monk’s death, his friend, the poet and general Imagawa Ryōshun, supposedly peeled those scraps off and arranged them in the order we know today. The oldest surviving copy of the text comes from Ryōshun’s pupil, the poet Shōtetsu, who lived a hundred years after Kenkō and compared “Tsurezuregusa” to “Makura no sōshi.” Modern scholars are skeptical of this story — but there is something in it that captures the spirit of the text even better than the facts. A thought written on a scrap and stuck to a wall: without ambition, without system, without pretension to eternity. And yet it survived seven centuries and became one of the ten most important works of Japanese literature. There is a paradox in this that would have astonished Kenkō himself.

Impermanence as Foundation

Walking the dog in November. Leaves on the sidewalk — wet ones, stuck to the asphalt like coins. Wind. Ugly weather. But there is something in the scene that halts you for a second — that moment when a tree looks better without its leaves than with them. It looks truer. As if only now it showed what it really is — its structure, its geometry, its scars. In summer the tree pretends. In autumn it tells the truth.

Kenkō knew this was no accident. The foundation of his thought is mujō (無常) — impermanence. But not impermanence understood in the Western way, as tragedy and cause for lamentation. In Kenkō, mujō is a fact so obvious that fighting it is a sign of stupidity, not courage. One of the most famous sentences in Japanese literature comes precisely from Tsurezuregusa:

あだし野の露消ゆる時なく、 鳥部山の煙立ち去らでのみ 住み果つる習ひならば、 いかにもののあはれもなからん。 世は定めなきこそ、いみじけれ。

(Adashino no tsuyu kiyuru toki naku / Toribeyama no kemuri tachisarade nomi / sumihatsuru narai naraba / ika ni mono no aware mo nakaramu / Yo wa sadame naki koso, imijikere.)

"If man were never to fade like the dew on Adashino,

never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama,

but linger on forever in this world —

how things would lose their power to move us!

The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty."

— Kenkō, “Tsurezuregusa,” dan 7 (ca. 1330–1332)

That sentence needs to be read twice. Because it does not say: “life is short, so enjoy it.” To me, it thunders. Radically: it is precisely because everything perishes that anything moves us at all. If cherry blossoms bloomed all year, no one would look at them.

Adashino and Toribeyama, which Kenkō invokes, are not random names — they are two famous burial grounds in Kyoto. Adashino is a paupers’ cemetery on the outskirts, where the bodies of the poor were left on mountain slopes. Toribeyama is a cremation hill from which smoke rose above the city. Every reader in fourteenth-century Kyoto knew what those names meant — they saw that smoke, they passed those fields. Kenkō does not speak in abstractions. He says: look out the window. There is Toribeyama. And that is all right.

In the Western tradition, impermanence is the enemy. The entire arc of Western thought — from Plato to the transhumanists — is an attempt to conquer change: to build something lasting, something eternal, something that resists time. Kenkō proposes the opposite: instead of fighting change, sit down and watch it unfold. And in that watching there is something no struggle can give you — a tender acceptance that you are part of the process. That you, too, are dew on the fields of Adashino. And dew, before it vanishes, shimmers in the sun as if it shines.

This is where Kenkō meets Stoicism — Marcus Aurelius, who wrote about the passing of thrones and empires from the position of a man sitting on an imperial throne. The difference is subtle but real: Aurelius says “make your peace with it, because you have no choice.” Kenkō says “look at it, because it is beautiful.” In the Stoic there is resignation. In the Japanese monk — wonder. In the Stoic there is hardness. In Kenkō — softness. Paradoxically, though, I think they were telling us almost the same thing.

In Praise of the Unfinished and the Incomplete

You’re watching an old movie one evening. You feel good about it. But somewhere before the end — you switch it off. Not because you don’t like it. Because you feel good about the not-finishing. An ending would close something you prefer to leave open (you might be surprised how many modern films become twice as good if you turn them off before the ending!). An ending would close something you prefer to leave open. Or: you’re reading a book, you leave a bookmark at the three-quarter mark — and you feel better about it than if you had read to the last page. Some would call that strange. Kenkō would call it a sign of refinement.

One of the most famous passages of “Tsurezuregusa” — dan 137 — opens with a question that sounds like a provocation: “Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, at the moon only when it shines without a single cloud?” And he answers: no. To long for the moon while watching the rain. To lower the blinds and wonder whether spring has already ended — that is deeper than standing beneath a tree in full flower. Branches just before blooming, or gardens strewn with fallen petals, are worthier of admiration than the peak of blossom.

This is not an aesthetic whim. It is a philosophy. Kenkō formulates here something that in the Japanese tradition will later become the foundation of wabi-sabi aesthetics (the real kind, somewhat deeper than fashionable interior design) — but he is earlier, more primal. In his writing it is not yet aesthetics. It is psychology. He is saying: perfection kills the imagination. A flawless moon is simply flawless — and that is that. There is no room in it for your input. But the moon behind clouds — that one demands your participation. You complete it with imagination, longing, memory. An unfinished work, an unfinished conversation, an unfinished love — engage you more deeply, because they leave you space.

Kenkō teaches that a finished, settled, complete life is like a vase on a shelf. Pretty, but dead. A life with gaps, with empty spaces, with questions that have no answers — that life is alive. Because in the gaps there is movement. In imperfection there is promise. In what is missing there is room for what you do not yet know about yourself.

Take an example from the text. Kenkō quotes the poet Ton’a:

表紙は、上下はそこなはれ、 螺鈿の軸は貝落ちて後こそ、 いみじけれ。

(Hyōshi wa, jōge wa sokonawarete / raden no jiku wa kai ochite nochi koso / imijikere.)

"Only when the silk cover has frayed at top and bottom,

and the mother-of-pearl has fallen from the roller —

only then does a scroll look truly beautiful."

— Ton’a, quoted by Kenkō in “Tsurezuregusa,” dan 82

A sentence that in the West would sound absurd, in Kenkō’s Japan carries deep meaning. A thing worn by time carries within it a story. A new, perfect thing is mute. An old, cracked thing speaks. That is why in the tea ceremony the most prized bowls are uneven, rough, mended with gold where they once broke. But Kenkō says this long before the tea ceremony adopted the idea as official doctrine. He senses it intuitively — as a psychological truth, not a cultural mandate.

Idleness as a Practice of Attention

A Sunday without plans. That’s rare. You wake up and don’t have to be anywhere. For the first hour you feel fine with it. After the second, unease sets in. After the third — guilt. You should be doing something. Exercising. Studying. Cleaning. Optimizing. The culture you live in — this Polish, this European, this internet culture — tells you ceaselessly that idleness is waste. You ought to maximize your productivity, not sleep through it. It says that time you don’t “use” is time lost. Kenkō would look at you with that quiet smile of his (to be honest, we don’t know whether he smiled that way — that is how I picture him) and say: “and what did you see when you were bored?”

Because that is the heart of “Tsurezuregusa.” Kenkō does not glorify laziness. More subtly: idleness is the condition of attentiveness. When you stop doing, you begin to see. This is not Buddhist meditation — Kenkō does not command you to sit in the lotus position and count your breaths (and admittedly, that image of Buddhist meditation is itself a stereotype). It is something simpler and harder at once: allowing yourself to do nothing — and not fleeing from what then arrives. Because interesting things arrive. Observations that had no chance to form in the rush of the day. Questions you drown out with the next task or errand. Memories that approach shyly, like timid creatures, when at last it is quiet.

In the context of the twenty-first century, this sounds like a luxury. Who has time for idleness? Kenkō would answer: who has time not to have it? Because a person who never stops never knows where he actually is. He runs, but does not know where to. He does, but does not know why. And this is not a metaphor — it is a diagnosis that clinical psychology makes today for thousands of people suffering from burnout. Kenkō made it seven hundred years ago, sitting in a hermitage near Kyoto, without any doctorate in psychology. He also wrote:

ひとり灯のもとに文をひろげて、 見ぬ世の人を友とするぞ、 こよなう慰むわざなる。

(Hitori tomoshibi no moto ni fumi wo hiroge te / minu yo no hito wo tomo to suru zo / koyonau nagusamuwaza naru.)

“The most delightful of pastimes is to sit alone

by lamplight with a book spread out before you,

and befriend people from a distant past you have never known.”

— Kenkō, “Tsurezuregusa,” dan 13

Anyone who has ever read at two in the morning because they could not put a book down knows exactly what Kenkō means.

Kenkō on People — Observer without Verdict

You’re sitting in a waiting room. There’s nothing to do — so you watch the people. The man across from you adjusts his glasses every thirty seconds. The woman beside him is on the phone with someone she apparently dislikes, because she says “yes, yes, yes” in a tone that means “no, no, no.” A solitary old man by the window darts his gaze from face to face, desperately seeking contact; the hope of a possible conversation brightens his features, then clouds them again. You don’t judge them. You don’t criticize. You simply see. And in that seeing there is something — a quiet, disinterested contact with another person’s existence.

Kenkō was a master of that gaze. “Tsurezuregusa” teems with people — vain, wise, foolish, funny, tragic. But Kenkō is no moralist. He describes human weaknesses — garrulousness, miserliness, vanity, fear of death, obsession with status — with something best described as “warm irony.” He laughs at people, but never mocks them. He sees foolishness, but does not rush to play judge. In one fragment he describes a man learning archery who arrives at practice with two arrows. The master tells him: “A beginner should never have a second arrow. For as long as he has it, he will never take the first one seriously.” This is an observation about archery. But it is also an observation about life. About how the existence of a Plan B means Plan A never gets our full attention. And so one postpones and postpones, telling oneself there will be another morning, another evening — until at last there is neither morning nor evening left.

But Kenkō can also be funny — and in a way that provokes genuine laughter in several passages. In one, with deadpan seriousness, he warns that on the day you eat carp soup your sideburns sit well. In another he advises never to sniff a deer’s fresh antlers, because worms lurk inside that crawl up the nose and devour the brain. These trifles are not jokes — Kenkō treats them with the same attention he gives to reflections on death and transience. For him there is no hierarchy of observations. Carp soup and the meaning of human existence occupy the same shelf. Everything is worth noticing — which is itself a profoundly Buddhist stance, though he never names it as such.

In another fragment Kenkō admits outright: we should not assume we know ourselves better than we know others. We do not know that our face is unattractive. We do not know that our skills are mediocre. We do not know that we are aging. We do not know that death is approaching. We do not even know how much pettiness we truly carry inside us. This litany of “we do not know” is one of the most piercing passages in the text — because it is brutal and gentle at once. There is no judgment in it. Only that disconnect from oneself, which Kenkō describes the way a doctor describes symptoms — without fear, but with concern.

What We Can Learn from a Fourteenth-Century Monk

Evening. You’re washing dishes. Your hands do their thing — warm water, sponge, plate. But your mind is elsewhere. Or rather — your mind is right here, but free. You don’t have to think about anything in particular, so thoughts come on their own. And suddenly something falls into place: you understand why that conversation yesterday irritated you. Or you know what to say to someone you haven’t been able to say anything to for a week. Washing dishes is not meditation. But it is something close — an activity so simple it leaves the mind space. Kenkō would not have used the word “mindfulness.” But he described exactly what that word tries to capture.

Tsurezuregusa is full of passages that translate directly into everyday life — even in Poland, in the twenty-first century. You need not treat them as exotic wisdom from a faraway land. You should treat them as tools. Let us look at a few.

Attachment to things. Kenkō returns again and again to the theme of simplicity. Not in the Instagram-minimalism sense — this is not about owning few things and photographing them against a white background. It is about the fact that things accrue meaning, and meaning accrues weight. The more you own, the more you must watch, protect, organize, repair. And at some point it is no longer you who possesses the things — it is the things that possess you. Kenkō writes approvingly of a certain monk who inherited a fortune from his predecessor — and spent it all on taro roots, which he had been eating while living in poverty. Afterward he went on eating taro. Even at official court dinners he ignored the rules of etiquette — and yet people liked him. Because taro was enough for him. This is not asceticism — it is freedom from the compulsion to possess. A freedom that demands more strength than any accumulation.

Speaking and silence. Kenkō has a strong view of people who talk too much. He writes that all errors stem from people who pose as experts and look down on others. But his point is not that one should be silent on principle. The point is to speak when you have something to say — not when silence makes you uncomfortable. This is a lesson most of us never received: silence in a conversation is not a malfunction. It is a breath. It is the space in which the second sentence can be better than the first. Elsewhere Kenkō writes that “the most pleasant thing is when a guest comes with no business, converses agreeably, and leaves.” Banally simple — and banally difficult to achieve in a world where every meeting must have an objective, every conversation a result.

Relationship to time. Kenkō does not tell you to live in the moment in the romantic “carpe diem” sense. No — he says something more sober: do not put things off until tomorrow, because tomorrow does not exist in any guaranteed sense. The man learning archery should not have a second arrow. The person who wants to change his life should not wait for Monday, for the new year, for a “better moment.” The better moment is the one you are in right now. Not because it is ideal — because it is the only certain one. Kenkō writes bluntly:

道を学する人、夕べには朝あらんことを思ひ、朝には夕べあらんことを思ひて、 重ねてねんごろに修せんことを期す。いはんや、一刾那のうちにおいて、 懈怠の心あることを知らんや。なんぞ、ただ今の一念において、ただちにすることのはなはだ難き。

(Michi wo gaku suru hito, / yūbe ni wa ashita aran koto wo omoi, / ashita ni wa yūbe aran koto wo omoite, / kasanete nengoro ni osen koto wo ki su. / Iwan ya, ichisetsuna no uchi ni oite, / ketai no kokoro aru koto wo shiran ya. / Nanzo, tada ima no ichinen ni oite, / tadachi ni suru koto no hanahada kataki.)

“The man who resolves to follow the path of learning thinks in the evening

that morning will come, and in the morning that evening will come —

and so puts off, puts off, puts off.

How extraordinarily difficult it is to do something immediately —

now, the very moment you think of it!”

— Kenkō, “Tsurezuregusa,” dan 92

Kenkō wrote that in 1330. Read the sentence once more and tell me it is not about us.

Watching people. Kenkō teaches something we would today call “observation without judgment” — a skill many of us have never quite mastered. It is easy to judge. It is hard to see. It is hard to look at someone who is behaving foolishly, vainly, falsely — and instead of condemnation to feel something along the lines of: ah, yes, that too is human. This does not mean you accept everything. It means you respond from the position of someone who knows he is not perfect himself. Kenkō knew this about himself — and that is precisely why he could look at others without cruelty.

And finally — the relationship to death. Kenkō is not afraid of death — not because he is an enlightened monk, but because he sees death as an integral part of the same process that makes cherry blossoms beautiful. If we lived forever, he says, nothing would move us. It is impermanence that gives things weight. And so instead of fearing the end — look at it as the very thing that makes your life matter. This may be Buddhism, but it is also common sense expressed with extraordinary clarity — a clarity many a modern therapist would envy.

Chaos That Teaches Order

There is something else in “Tsurezuregusa” that is rarely discussed, but which strikes me as crucial: the form of the text is its content. Kenkō did not write a treatise. He did not write a manual. He wrote 243 fragments with no visible order — and that is precisely why the text works the way it does. Because it teaches you not what to think, but how to think. By its very structure — or rather its lack of structure — it says: the world is not orderly. You do not have to order it in order to understand it. In this respect it reminds me of another book by a very different author, one that shaped my own childhood — Nietzsche’s “Human, All Too Human.”

The human mind is not linear. It does not work in chapters and sub-chapters. It works in leaps, returns, spirals. You step into the shower thinking about the electricity bill and emerge with a ready solution to a business problem that has been nagging you all week — and you have no idea how it happened. Kenkō writes in exactly that way. The fragments are not connected by logic, but by resonance. One speaks of rain, the next of death, the next of how to hang incense properly. And suddenly — after reading a dozen or so — you feel that they are all saying the same thing, only from different angles. Kenkō himself called his writing monoguruoshi — “wild,” “crazy.” And that wildness is a method.

This is a way of thinking that has a surprising amount in common with the workings of modern psychotherapy. The therapist does not give you answers. She asks questions — seemingly unconnected — and lets you discover the pattern yourself. Kenkō does the same. He does not formulate a system. He does not hand you ten commandments. He gives you two hundred and forty-three scraps — and leaves you with them. And what you piece together from them is yours. And each time you return to the text at a different point in your life, you piece together something different.

Japanese children study this text in school. Many of them know by heart at least the opening words: Tsurezure naru mama ni, higurashi, suzuri ni mukaite... — “Guided by idleness, day after day, turned toward the inkstone...” This is one of those openings that in Japanese culture hold a status comparable to the opening of a nation’s foundational epic. But “Tsurezuregusa” is not a set text you “cover” and close. The critic Kobayashi Hideo wrote that it is a literary work “first and probably last of its kind.” Not because no one imitated it — many tried. Because this particular combination of personality, form, and era is unrepeatable.

A Monk from Kyoto, a Stoic from Rome

It is impossible to read Kenkō without thinking of Marcus Aurelius. Both wrote in fragments. Both wrote for themselves, not for an audience. Both grappled with impermanence. The “Meditations” of Aurelius and the “Tsurezuregusa” of Kenkō are separated by five hundred years and a vast cultural sea — and yet their texts sound like two voices in the same choir. Both wrote something meant to be private that became a foundation of culture centuries later.

But there is a fundamental difference. Aurelius writes from the position of a ruler who must act and seeks the strength to do so wisely. Kenkō writes from the position of a man who has stopped acting and discovered that wisdom lies not in action but in observation. Aurelius says: control what you can control. Kenkō says: notice what you do not need to control — and let it go. For the Stoic the world is an arena. For Kenkō it is a garden through which you walk — if you are lucky, slowly.

Closer to Kenkō, perhaps, is Montaigne — another master of fragmentary prose, another man who stepped off the public stage and began to write about what he saw, thought, and felt. Montaigne, too, had no system. He, too, jumped from topic to topic. He, too, believed the most interesting thing a person can do is to observe himself and the world — without pretending to have the answers. They never knew each other, could not have known each other; centuries and continents lay between them. And yet — had they met over sake in some empty inn outside of time, they would have understood each other without a translator. Because both knew the same thing: that a person who stops pretending he knows begins truly to understand.

Kenkō was also a contemporary of Dante — another exile, another courtier who found himself on the margins. But their minds moved in opposite directions. The “Divine Comedy” contemplates eternity. “Tsurezuregusa” meditates on the fleeting. Dante builds an architecture — Hell, Purgatory, Heaven, everything in its place. Kenkō scatters scraps on the walls and lets them fall. For me, though I may of course be wrong and often am — it is Kenkō of the two who comes closer to how human experience truly looks: chaotic, fragmentary, full of gaps and leaps, yet at its depths surprisingly coherent.

A Wall of Scraps

Night. Silence. The rest of the house is asleep. You look out the window — at nothing in particular. At the yard. At the streetlamp. At the shadow of a branch on the wall of the building across the way, cast by a flickering street light. You are not thinking about anything special — and that is precisely why you are thinking more clearly than you have all day. Kenkō would nod.

Kenkō left behind no system. He founded no school. He started no movement. He left a wall covered with scraps of paper — and on those scraps the thoughts of a man who had the courage to do nothing. This is a courage we do not appreciate: the courage of idleness in a world that screams at you to move, to act, to optimize every minute of your life. Kenkō says quietly: you don’t have to. Sit down. Look. Perhaps you will see nothing. But perhaps you will see what the rush never let you see — a strip of lawn someone trimmed that morning. The streetlamp light changing the color of the building across the way. A face in the mirror that looks different when you are not in a hurry.

You do not have to travel to Japan or read Japanese to feel the thinking of a Japanese monk from feudal times. You do not even have to meditate. It is enough that next time you stand in a queue with a dead phone, you do not flee in your mind to the to-do list. It is enough that you stay in that moment. And look. At what is. Not at what should be. This — nothing more — is what Kenkō taught across 243 fragments written on scraps of paper in a hermitage near Kyoto. And then the wind of history carried those scraps away. And they reached us, 700 years later, through the screen of a smartphone, right now, today.

Seven hundred years later, Japanese schoolchildren still recite his opening sentence. In bookshops from Tokyo to Osaka, new editions with commentary line the shelves. Scholars argue about the order of the fragments, the dates, whether the legend of the scraps on the wall is truth or a beautiful myth. And “Tsurezuregusa” endures — not because it is “important to culture,” but because every generation finds itself in it. Because boredom is eternal. Idleness is eternal. And what a person sees when at last he stops running — that, too, is eternal.

つれづれなるま゙まに、 日くらし硯にむかひて、 心にうつりゆくよしなし事を、 そこはかとなく書きつくれば、 あやしうこそものぐるほしけれ。

(Tsurezure naru mama ni, / higurashi, suzuri ni mukaite, / kokoro ni utsuriyuku yoshinashi goto wo, / sokohakatonaku kakitsukureba, / ayashiu koso monoguruoshikere.)

“Guided by idleness,

day after day, turned toward my inkstone,

I jot down without order the idle trifles

that drift through my mind —

and a strange, wild impulse seizes me.”

— Kenkō, “Tsurezuregusa,” jōdan (序段, ca. 1330–1332)

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"Strong Japanese Women"

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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