There was a time in my life when I kept looking for the answer. It went on for six or seven years.
It began in my early twenties. Something I had not expected went wrong with my body.
It will get better soon.
That is what I thought. It did not.
Instead, little by little, it spread.
Until then, that kind of trouble had had nothing to do with me. And it came at the very age when one is most sensitive about everything. On top of that, it showed up in a place I had no way of hiding.
I went to a hospital.
I went to specialists too. The answer that came back was the same everywhere.
A little better, and then back again.
A little better, and then back again. Over and over.
For those six or seven years, I was simply lost. A good medicine, a good method, a good doctor. This is what it means to clutch at straws.
Doubting, giving up, trying again, blaming myself. “Why” had become a habit of speech.
I understand it now.
Back then, I was always checking my answers against something outside.
Searching, and searching, and searching all over for the correct answer out there.
And the one thing that mattered, myself, I was not looking at in the least.
―― “It is darkest at the foot of the lighthouse,” as the old saying goes. It says it well.
But answers change. What counts as correct changes too, as time goes by.
What I really needed to face was not outside. It was the inside, called “myself.”
After being lost for a long time, I came to notice it, little by little.
This had not been a “search for the answer.”
It had been the beginning of a “search for myself.”
And as I went on looking inward, the story rolled off somewhere I had not expected.
My own bloodline. My constitution. The road my ancestors lived. The know-how of daily life that had been handed down.
I thought I was looking inward, and yet somehow it kept connecting to things much further away.
Something like a core inside me was, little by little, replaced.
And then, strangely enough, the same scenery begins to look different.
Being unwell is hard.
That has not changed, even now.
But for me ―― it also became what opened a door I had not known was there.
From that entrance, it goes on connecting to all sorts of things.
(―― I will keep writing what came after.)
A first-grader had become a fourth-grader
The miso I made was pale. Quite different from the colour I was used to seeing on the shelf.
I knew, and still did not do it
Miso can be made at home. I had known that for a long time.
What I wanted was not for sale
I looked everywhere. The thing I wanted to use was not sold anywhere.