"If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, but lingered on forever in the world, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty."
If this week's routine were to repeat exactly the same way forever, what in it would be the first to lose its shine?
Would Living Forever Really Make Us Happy?
Yoshida Kenkō was a 14th-century Japanese court official who became a Buddhist monk and essayist. In the late Kamakura period, amid war and shifting regimes, he looked for beauty in a fleeting world rather than mourning it.
His collection Tsurezuregusa, 'Essays in Idleness', records thoughts that came to him in idle hours. Legend says he pasted his writings on the walls of his hut and that someone peeled them off and compiled them after his death, but the story has never been confirmed.