Mid-December. Early evening, 5:30 PM.
The winter sky over the Netherlands is already pitch black.
Overcast — not even a star or the moon in sight.
Lately, jogging at this hour had become
a quiet pleasure of mine.

I take my time with the bong,
drawing slowly from the homegrown ganja
so as not to irritate my throat.
Glug, glug, glug, glug...
I invite the white smoke gently into my lungs.
Hold it for a moment,
then release it long and thin and slow.
Almost immediately, my consciousness shifts
into something different from its sober self.

A strange sensation — as if being pulled upward,
or sinking slowly down.
Each time I feel this unmistakable shift,
it washes over me like remembering:
oh yes, this world exists too.

Here in the Netherlands,
all of it is permitted.
The scent drifts through the streets,
people wander high and unbothered.
That is simply how things are here.

Wrapped in a soft, floating feeling,
I step out into the dark.
The moment I do,
the fresh scent of trees fills my lungs deeply.
Or rather — I pull it in, deliberately, with everything I have.

Ah, what air. What air.
I stretch both arms wide open.

Moved by how beautiful it is,
and at the same time, quietly regretful —
all this open, fresh world had been out here,
and I had spent the day shut inside,
surrounded by four walls.

I open my phone
and put on a playlist called Blossom on Apple Music.
The gentle sounds play in random order,
passing through my ears and flowing into my body.

At this time of year, the houses are dressed in glittering lights.
Some of them are truly stunning.
With the music playing, the contrast against the darkness is beautiful.
It is of course a Christian observance,
but I imagine there is something in it too
about deterring crime, or keeping the winter darkness from pressing too hard on the mind.

As for me —
these lights soften something in my chest, just a little.

In this country, I am a foreigner. An immigrant.
The culture, the language, the people —
everything is different.
And now it is a Dutch winter.
Long, dark, cold.
Since coming here, I have accumulated many new experiences —
things I could never have imagined when I was still in Japan.
So much has moved me. So much to be grateful for.

And yet, at the same time,
there has been a feeling of pressing on
through something long and dark and cold —
like this country's winter itself.
I kept believing that if I just kept moving, the light would be there ahead.
But somewhere along the way,
I began to feel the walls — in the discrimination, in the particular grain of European culture —
and at some point I stopped knowing
whether I was moving forward
or simply standing still.

I exhaled sharply,

then drew in a long, slow breath.

This time, the scent of burning firewood reached me.
Of all the scents in the world,
burning wood is the one I love most.
It carries something that loosens the brain in an instant —
as if a switch buried deep in my DNA,
wired for relief, is finally turned on.
How grateful I am...

Then, quietly, I began to jog alone.

When it comes to running,
most people fall into short, quick mouth-breathing.
But I had made it my practice to run with deliberate nasal breathing —
deep, steady, rhythmic.
I had come to realize this suited me far better.

With each inhale,
I focused on drawing the air all the way to the deepest part of my lungs.
Like lifting a bedsheet with both hands and letting it billow down —
the wave traveling from edge to edge before settling softly —
I breathed to pull the oxygen and energy from the air
deep into my lungs, into every corner of my body.

With each exhale,
I released at an even, unhurried pace.
Breathing out the old, the unnecessary —
purifying as I went.

I gave myself fully to keeping that rhythm intact.

After about ten minutes of running,
a wide park opens up — one you could almost call a forest.
Stepping inside, I was wrapped in the dense scent of trees.
A narrow asphalt path wound its way between countless tall trunks,
but days of continuous rain had laid down a carpet
of mud, dead leaves, and scattered horse manure.

I turned on my phone's flashlight
and ran through it alone.
No trace of other people, no lights anywhere around me.
I kept my attention on my breathing,
careful not to trip.
Now and then I stepped into a patch of mud,
and cold flecks of it splattered up to my shins.

At a certain point, the darkness deepens.
The trees close in,
and almost no light reaches through.
I felt as though I had slipped into a different world entirely.
Gradually, everything was swallowed by darkness,
and the faint light of my phone became the only light left.
Even that small flame was barely enough to matter.

I switched off the flashlight.
I took out my earphones.

In the dark forest, stripped of light and music,
only the sharp chatter of birds,
the sound of my own breathing,
and the rhythm of my footsteps filled the air.

I kept running. I kept my focus on the breath.

With that much darkness around me,
I lost any sense of how fast I was moving,
or even where I was.

Still, I kept running.
Breath. Just the breath.

At some point, the birds — whose voices had filled the air — fell silent.

My own body dissolved,
becoming part of the darkness itself.

A dense mix of fear and exhilaration
came creeping up from behind,
hand in hand.

They wrapped their arms around me from the back.
But I did what I could not to let them take hold of my heart.
Somehow, I kept from turning around.

Still, I ran.
Breath. Just the breath.

By now,
I could no longer tell
whether I was moving forward
or simply running in place.

Eventually,
the only thing that remained of me
was the steady vibration of feet striking ground —
the rhythm of running itself.

It was something like the beating of a heart —
that quiet, constant force
that keeps you alive without ever asking to be noticed.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

Yes.

I am not living.
I am being kept alive.

Here, now —
held up by an astronomical convergence of miracles and connections.

What if my parents had never met?
What if I had been in an accident somewhere along the way?
This body that can run,
this room that keeps out the wind and rain —
not one single thing about any of it is guaranteed.

And yet, in the middle of everyday life,
I forget.

I believe the light is somewhere out there,
and I move toward it,
and when it doesn't come,
I grieve.
Suffering, sorrow, anger, tears.
Why?

But when things go even a little right,
Happiness, joy, delight, laughter.
Why?

My focus was on my breathing,
yet somewhere inside, a conversation was carrying on by itself.
All I had was a faint sense of watching it from a distance,
as if it had nothing to do with me.

Then, faintly, a light appeared deep ahead.
The path leading out of the dark forest.

Stepping out of the trees,
the surroundings brightened with streetlamps and the warm glow of houses.
It felt like being pulled back to reality all at once.

I gradually slowed from a run
and shifted into a walk.
But my breathing held steady,
keeping its same rhythm.
My feet were caked in mud.

Each exhaled breath appeared briefly as white mist,
then vanished into the night wind.

I placed my hand over my heart.

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

It felt like the vibrations of running still moving through me.
Sweat poured from my heated body.

Ah... I see...

Dark emotions and bright emotions —
they simply overflow as long as we live as human beings.
Run, and the body heats; sweat pours out.
That is the natural order of things.

And so these feelings that naturally rise within us
are neither meant to be suppressed nor ignored.
If suppressed too long, they smolder inside, and in time wear down both body and mind.
If ignored too long, the voice of your own heart becomes impossible to hear.

Shadow and light alike — everything that overflows through this body and this heart,
to taste it, embrace it, and give it form —
is that not why I came to this universe, to this earth:
to experience what it means to be human, as myself?

It is okay to grieve. It is okay to rejoice.
Every bit of it becomes a memory that belongs only to me.
A miraculous path walked by no one but me.

The light is not waiting somewhere ahead.
The *walking itself* is the light.

So it is fine.
This is enough, just as I am.
This is exactly as it should be.

Surely every moment arrives with its own necessity, at its own perfect time.

Just then, a cold night wind swept past me.
My heart was slowly, gradually, returning to calm.