Celebrate Your Festivals As They Happen

I hit a lot of milestones this year. It was my 10-year-anniversary as a writer. I’ve done push-ups and sit-ups every day for five years. And my daily blog has now been published for over 1,000 days.

I didn’t feel like celebrating any of these achievements. For all the meaningful markers along the road, financially and career-wise, it’s been anything but a good year. But we have a saying in German: “Man muss die Feste feiern, wie sie fallen”—”You have to celebrate the festivals as they happen.”

The “Stadtfest” in Zweibrücken is the town’s annual city celebration. Since I went to school there with some of my childhood friends, we all go every year—or try to, at least. One of our traditions is that we take a group picture before we walk down from our meeting spot. Two years ago, I realized that after ten years, I was only in half the pictures. That’s how Stadtfest works: You’re either there, or you’re not. And whatever you do in those last few days of July, history will take note.

When I realized this, I decided to make more of an effort to attend every year. Only time will tell if I’ll live up to that aspiration, but for now, I haven’t missed the two years since. As I sat on my couch, feeling “meh” about my accomplishments, that same saying wiggled it’s way into my brain: “Man muss die Feste feiern, wie sie fallen.” That’s why, in the end, I took some time to reflect and write about each of the mileposts I passed this year.

A bad week needn’t make a good lunch taste any less delicious, and a bad year shouldn’t make you any less proud of how far you’ve come. Celebrate your festivals as they happen—because sometimes, even looking back is an opportunity you get only once while wearing the right glasses.

Reading With the Wrong Glasses On

“It pains me to give this book just one star,” the young woman from Austria wrote in her Goodreads review of The Way of Nagomi by Ken Mogi. “I was so curious about this book, but reading it was really just painful.”

Her complaints? For one, in his “love letter to Japanese culture,” Mogi introduces “too many Japanese words” for her taste. Furthermore, he “mainly describes how nagomi manifests in life, not WHAT it is.” And finally, she says, there is “no trace of tangible tips for a better life thanks to this philosophy.” In the end, she was “rarely so disappointed” and would “absolutely not” recommend the book.

You know what always pains me? When I see a great book get a bad review because the person read it with the wrong glasses on. That’s what happened here, and that’s why, for once in a blue moon, I went out of my way to leave a comment the young lady will most likely never see.

The Way of Nagomi is a beautiful book that explains the titular concept, which describes a state of calm, relaxed harmony. Covering various areas of life, like food, creativity, and relationships, Ken Mogi then shares plenty of anecdotes to show the many shapes nagomi might take. After reading the book, you’ll have a decent gut sense of what nagomi feels like in all kinds of situations—and that is worth infinitely more than yet another ten-step how-to manual.

But that’s what we look for, isn’t it? Our Western minds are primed for easily digestible action items and authoritative calls to action. At least, that’s what the young lady seems to have wanted. She was wearing her US self-help glasses while reading this book, and so inevitably, she was let down.

Ironically, the entire point of ideas like ikigai, wabi-sabi, and nagomi is to get us to understand that life is not black-and-white, and that’s precisely why our Western approach to handling challenges so often fails us—because life is not a problem you can solve with minimal explanations and three-point bullet lists.

This is a fundamental theme of Japanese philosophy, and so a real book about Japan from a real Japanese author will never be littered with the kind of instruction we might expect from a typical New York Times Bestseller—because that would go against the very culture the author wants to reveal to us.

“Don’t try to approach everything in life with a five-step plan,” Japanese philosophy says. It’s about accepting that the world is full of uncertainty, that everything is connected, and that small impulses might unfold their big effect much later or elsewhere in life. That’s why books like The Way of Nagomi are less like a recipe from the doctor and more like a beautiful painting you look at: In the end, you don’t know exactly how or why, but it moved you, and that’s the part that counts.

I don’t know if the girl from Austria will ever re-read the book or a similar one with an open mind and without assumptions. But I do know that you can’t bully a book into giving you exactly what you want or expect. All you can do is read it and be ready to receive whatever it has to teach you—or not.

Just as with people, there are two versions of every book: The one we want it to be, and the one we actually end up reading. In both cases, the only way to truly see what’s ultimately there—for us to learn, to discover, even to marvel at—is to wear the right glasses when we engage.

Even Gods Don’t Want To Live Forever

For all their flaws compared to the dwarves and especially the elves, the humans in J.R.R. Tolkien’s world, as described in The Silmarillion, receive two courtesies from Iluvatar, the world’s maker, that even the gods themselves do not: They can act out of free will, and they will die.

It is one with this gift of freedom that the children of Men dwell only a short space in the world alive, and are not bound to it, and depart soon whither the Elves know not. […] But the sons of Men die indeed, and leave the world; wherefore they are called the Guests, or the Strangers. Death is their fate, the gift of Iluvatar, which as Time wears even the Powers shall envy.

The “Powers,” the Valar, are the 14 deities in charge of creating and steering Middle Earth and all its inhabitants—but even they only follow the will of Iluvatar. And though you’d think to gods, even the millennia pass like minutes, apparently, they do not. For the more entries and departures of other beings they observe, the more their creations are brought to nought by Morgoth, the evil one, and the more beauty and suffering they witness shine and fade, shine and fade, the more even the Valar long for a break.

How pesky, those humans! Appear for a few decades each at most, and yet they are the only ones who can pour either oil or sand into the gearbox of time all the same. And the height of frivolity? They won’t even be around to see the consequences, let alone suffer them! Meanwhile, the elves and Valar bear it all—an endless TV show without pause. Death a fate even the Powers envy? Ha! But time wears…and it wears.

Why do humans not want to die? Perhaps the main reason is that none of us have ever met someone who didn’t. If we talked to such a person, who knows? Maybe we might see death for the gift from Iluvatar it actually is. If even gods don’t want to live forever, the fact that our lives end may be one of the best things about them.

A Special Kind of Bakery

“Can we swap around so he can pause for a bit?” the girl at the bakery asked her manager as she was prepping my order. I didn’t get the full context, but after a bit of back and forth, they seemed to agree. “Okay, yeah, that could work. Let’s do that!”

A minute later, the aforementioned “he” flung his arms around the saleslady’s neck. “Thank you, honey!” She just started laughing and said, “Aw, come on, get outta here! You need to get some rest.” “Stepping up for her boyfriend,” I thought, “how nice of her!”

I’ll never know what plagued the poor guy, but I could tell he was working hard—and tired. His girlfriend was also whizzing around the small shop, but she seemed cheery and in good spirits. Way to trade off their energy levels!

I, too, left the bakery in an elevated mood. The cake was great, sure, but nothing beats visiting a place where people look out for each other.

Touch Everything, Move Nothing

“I swear, all she does is use ChatGPT all day long and then copy and paste the output,” my friend told me over dinner. He was thoroughly disillusioned with the marketing person at his company. “You can’t do that for a product as technical as ours. You need to get the details right.”

Besides creating potential safety issues for customers, having factual holes in your materials also just makes for lazy marketing, my friend explained—and these days, lazy is no longer good enough. “Everything she does, someone else has to double-check and correct. Nothing can go out as is.”

When he said that, a line sprang to my mind. It’s not exactly a German idiom, but it could be: “Alles angefasst, nichts berührt.” Both “anfassen” and “berühren” mean to touch something physically, but only the latter also carries the meaning of making someone feel touched. Moved. Affected. “Touch everything, move nothing,” you might say. That’s what this person seems to be doing.

At Mercedes-AMG, all major engines are still built by a single individual. “One man, one engine,” goes their philosophy. Imagine such an engineer operating with the carelessness of “touch everything, move nothing.” The engine might fall apart before it makes it into the car or, worse, break at 200 kilometers per hour.

And even if someone who doesn’t put much thought into their work could deliver qualitatively impeccable output, there’d still be one thing missing: love. That feeling AMG customers get when they hit the accelerator and hear the engine’s low rumbling, it’s not just physics. It’s knowing that a human being put a piece of themselves into the work that creates the goosebumps—and goosebumps are what buying an AMG is for.

In chess, there’s a rule that if you touch a piece, you must move it. In life, the moving we wish to do is often of a different kind, but the rule still applies: Only touch what you truly intend to move—with your effort, care, and real emotion—for if we touch everything yet move nothing, we miss not just the victory but the point of the entire game.

Presence Over Presents

The latter may have us running in circles for weeks to find the perfect Christmas gift, but only the former can make it all worthwhile. How present were you when picking your presents? That’s what determines the recipient’s face as they unwrap it. Is it proof of your empathy and thoughtfulness? Or is it actually “an absent,” mindlessly ordered online so you can move on with your day?

The best presents of all, however, are the ones sitting around us as we open our packages. They’re the ones that really count, and it’s our presence in their midst that makes Christmas worth celebrating. Ask the people you love some new questions. Really listen to their answers. Toast to their health and mean it, or quietly clink your glasses together and enjoy each other’s company in silence.

Everyone loves a good gift, but remember: In the end, it’s presence over presents, because one is a singular opportunity, whereas the other is a gesture we can always make next year.

Don’t Keep Playing the Same Card

It’s good to share your struggles. When I have a problem with work, money, or a personal issue, I write about it. But if rock bottom lasts for a while, I need to find other topics. You can’t moan about the shitty job market every day. You can’t play only supporter cards. After doing so a few times in various places, I can feel even myself getting tired of it—and readers notice it too.

Some cards are more durable than others. Plenty of doomsday writers find a new catastrophe to shout from the rooftops every day. And though fear-mongering might be profitable in the age of clickbait, at the end of the day, it’s still just one card. How fatiguing it must be to read about the world ending on a daily basis. Who’d want to do it forever only to see the world still spinning every morning? So eventually, even that card will run out.

A person who sees racism at every corner won’t overthrow the social system. Like a false alarm, they’ll simply be ignored, and that will hurt their credibility when they really need it. Life isn’t Uno—and even that game only has four of each kind. Don’t keep playing the same card.

Miracle Noodles

Lee Mi-ryeong, better known by her stage name, Auntie Omakase #1, was an unlikely finalist on Culinary Class Wars. Operating two noodle shops in an obscure part of Seoul with mostly traditional cooking, she was not as well-trained as many of the other chefs, nor as creative.

But when it came to the “Cook a dish that represents your life” challenge, Auntie Omakase revealed why she was exactly where she belonged. She created a variation of Andong Guksi, her most famous dish, which she had cooked thousands of times over more than 20 years. And as she presents it to the judges, we finally learn how noodles became her specialty.

“I grew up in a very wealthy household when I was little,” Auntie Omakase explains, “but when my father’s business suddenly failed, we fell on hard times.” Eventually, her dad collapsed from cerebral hemorrhaging from the stress, and he became partially paralyzed. To raise Auntie Omakase and her siblings, her mom stepped up and started selling noodles from a tiny corner stall at a market.

“Back when I was in school, I hated eating those noodles,” Omakase says. “I think I hated them so much because I saw them as a symbol of poverty.” Worse, when her mom had to have eye surgery as a complication of diabetes, it was her turn to make noodles. “My mom was struggling so much, I didn’t really have a choice. So I took over the job, and I kept working.”

As the years passed, Auntie Omakase got married. She had kids. She expanded the business and opened a second store. “Now, we make a comfortable living, and we’re able to take care of my parents and my husband’s parents,” Omakase goes on. “And I’m able to buy my son and daughter delicious food and everything they want. I did this by selling noodles. The same noodles that I hated so much eventually became my greatest savior.”

And then, with a tear in her eye and those of every other finalist, Auntie Omakase explains what makes her noodles so special: “These noodles have allowed me to put food on the table. They’ve let our family live happily, which is why I’ve gone with this dish as the one that shaped my life. To me, these noodles are…something of a miracle.”

Unless it’s very spicy, it’s not every day that a bowl of noodle soup makes you cry. But when you hear Auntie Omakase tell her story, that really does the trick. The best ingredients are not ingredients at all, and that’s why, even when there’s nothing mystical about them, we all have our own variety of miracle noodles. The only question is: What’s yours?

28 Lessons From 5 Years of Meditating Every Day Cover

28 Lessons From 5 Years of Meditating Every Day

I started meditating on August 29, 2019. I haven’t missed a day since. That’s over five years — almost 2,000 days — of sitting with my eyes closed for at least five minutes, usually 15, without fail.

I originally started meditating for two reasons. First, I felt called out when I heard Naval Ravikant say in an interview that meditation is “one of those things that everybody says they do, but nobody actually does.” I was already a mindful, self-aware person — but noticing is not the same as processing. Instead of just realizing that I was, say, biting my nails, I wanted to feel calm and present enough to actively stop, too.

Second, in that same interview, Naval actually provided a doable way to meditate. “It is literally the art of doing nothing,” he said. “All you need to do for meditation is to sit down, close your eyes, comfortable position, whatever happens happens. If you think, you think. If you don’t think, you don’t think. Don’t put effort into it, don’t put effort against it.” Freed from all the gurus, gadgets, and distractions of what has since become a $5 billion industry, I could finally start meditating right then and there, without complications or expectations. So I did.

After my first, intense week of meditating for an hour each day, I wrote down some initial lessons. Then, as my habit became smaller but stayed consistent, I reflected some more on day 800. Since then, I’ve shared the occasional, individual insight on my daily blog.

For my five-year anniversary, I figured why not round up all lessons, organize them, and present them in a way that makes sense? So that’s exactly what I’ve done. This way, you can get a comprehensive overview in one post but also dive deeper into any particular idea that interests you.

Here are 28 lessons from five years of meditating every day.

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Everything That Happens Stays Inside You

Towards the end of Spirited Away, protagonist Chihiro finds shelter with an unlikely friend. The witch Zeniba, twin sister of the evil Yubaba, offers her a meal and a place to rest. But Chihiro being Chihiro, she can’t sit still for long. At least not while Yubaba holds both her parents and her friend hostage.

“Haku could die while I’m sitting here!” But Chihiro doesn’t exactly have a plan, and the true challenge of this strange spirit world she finds herself in even Zeniba can’t help with: In order to escape, people must first recall their true name. Just as Chihiro’s impatience is about to get the best of her, Haku arrives in dragon-form, wounded but alive.

Before the two set off to free Chihiro’s parents, however, Zeniba does have one instrumental piece of advice: “Everything that happens stays inside you—even if you can’t remember it.”

That’s why, while flying through the cool summer air on Haku’s back, Chihiro decides to tell him a story. It’s a story about a girl falling into a river, losing her shoe, but then making it safely back ashore—a story Chihiro has lived but doesn’t remember—and it is thanks to her tale that Haku can finally recall his real name.

Spirited Away holds many wonderful lessons, but this one stuck with me the most: You can’t waste anything. Everything that happens has its place. The good. The bad. The feelings of powerlessness, and the necessary rest before a sprint. In the end, it all adds up to you—a unique, incomparable, inimitable you—and that is the point.

Just like our names, it is the totality of our lives that gives them meaning. So whether we are soaring through the sky or desperately trying to save our friends, it’s a good thing that…

“Everything that happens stays inside you—even if you can’t remember it.”