Let a Good Moment be Enough - Daily Wisdom #63

Every spring, the Japanese weather services publish a forecast that has nothing to do with rain.

It is called the Sakura Zensen, the Cherry Blossom Front.

And it is tracked across the country the way we would track a storm system.

It starts in the south in late March and moves north over the following weeks.

And the bulletins give dates and percentages, first bloom, full bloom, and people plan around them the way you would plan around a wedding.

Because when the trees open, the whole country goes outside.

blue tarpaulins appear under the branches in the parks.

Officers send the most junior colleague ahead in the morning to sit on a good spot until everyone arrives after work.

People eat and drink and stay out late under the flowers.

And this is hanami, flower viewing, and it has been going on for well over a thousand years.

The blossom lasts about a week, sometimes less.

One hard rain on the wrong night takes most of it down.

And everybody knows this.

Nobody has ever spread a tarpaulin under those trees believing that this year it might hold, or that with better planning they could stretch it to a month.

The falling is not the disappointing part of the festival.

poetry and the painting, the falling is very often the point, the petals coming down on the water and on the shoulders of people's coats and into the food.

There's a term in Japanese aesthetics, Monono aware, usually translated as something like the pathos of things, and it names precisely this, the tenderness we feel towards something because it is passing.

So an entire country arranges its spring around a flower that will be gone in a week and considers this the best thing about it.

Now, imagine an evening outdoors in late summer.

A long table, four or five people you're genuinely glad to be with.

Somewhere in the second hour, you hear yourself say it, we should do this more often.

It is a lovely sentence.

It is made entirely of affection.

And in the half second it takes to say, you have left the table and gone into the calendar where you are now checking September against everyone's availability.

I want to talk about that half second today.