How Do You Stay Calm and Move Fast in an Unpredictable World? Living in Two Kinds of Time

Our present runs on two kinds of time at once: the hyper-accelerated time of the modern world, and a time so unhurried it feels as if time itself had ceased to exist. Sitting in a quiet cafe, watching the sunlight shift across a white wall, I know in my bones that the people who will grow strong in the world ahead are those who can inhabit both poles—and move between them in an instant.

Traveling like this, I feel how sharply our age asks each of us what richness in life actually is, and where we mean to build it.

Rainstorms and typhoons can be skirted if you read the movement of the clouds with enough care. Earthquakes cannot. When you are moving from hotel to hotel conducting fieldwork, a quake can strike at any moment, and the only real preparation is to carry almost nothing.

To keep moving while dodging sudden torrential rains and typhoons, nothing matters more than the readiness—in both kit and mind—to leave at a moment's notice.

Simply doing what can be done in each place, moment by moment, and letting those moments accumulate: that, I feel, is the heart of this new way of living.

Why are we so unfulfilled? I am not talking about material want. Things overflow around us, choices stretch without limit, and convenience is promised as never before. Yet drowning in this sea of abundance, we feel a strange "wrongness." What lies behind it is "absence": the sense that we ourselves are not sitting in the pilot's seat of our own lives.

From the moment we wake, a row of tasks lines up in our heads. The face in the mirror is not our own but a mask built to play a social role, and the true face that should lie beneath it has, without our noticing, forgotten its expression and vanished.

To find it, I recommend starting by making a small inkyo in your daily life. The answer is never on the internet. Put down the smartphone, cut off the information, make a single cup of tea, and look inward in quiet.

Those who came before teach us that a true life can begin again, any number of times, from any moment at which we cast off what we do not need. When Jakuchu took up his brush and Baisao made his tea, they were not confronting the world. They were simply playing with their own souls. True independence lives in this state of play.

But history teaches that a time that seems calm and safe never lasts long.

A "living human being" is not someone whose heart merely beats and who merely goes on breathing.

To truly "live" is to hold, without remainder, the vitality a human being is born with, and to sharpen something that cannot be put into words, like magma seething in the pit of the belly.