For more than thirty years now, I’ve been a full-time journalist and travel writer: One card in my wallet shows I flew more than 100,000 miles on United Airlines alone last year—I’ve long been a member of the company’s Million Mile club—and my doctor has recently taken to prescribing daily medication for my blood pressure. My poor wife has grown too accustomed to hearing pages spewing from our fax machine at 3:00 a.m., or seeing me race off, before dawn, on what are meant to be holidays, to deal with “urgent” requests from bosses or “can’t wait” emails.
Still, I never guessed, when I fell into this life, that soon so much of the world would be stockpiling data, uploading photos, and trying to keep up with the roller coaster of the Nikkei stock market. We’re all journalists now, it can sometimes seem, racing to stay on top of a moment that refuses to stay put. The only way I’ve found to try to keep my balance in a globe permanently on the move—and ever more cluttered with stuff—is to step out of the world on a regular basis, and to step back from my life, so as to see what’s truly inside them. Otherwise, I can feel I’m standing two inches away from a vast and constantly shifting canvas, terminally unable to make out the larger picture.
Over the years, therefore, I’ve gradually tried to develop various decidedly homemade and amateurish ways of keeping my head clear and ensuring I have time and space to breathe.
The first thing I did, when I was 29, was leave my 25th floor office four blocks from Times Square and move to the backstreets of Japan. My job, writing on world affairs for Time, was exhilarating, and that was precisely why I felt I had to leave it: The minute-to-minute excitements could blind me from the fact that I was seeing only one tiny corner of the universe. The same was true in Kyoto, of course, but it was a very different corner, one based on principles and values fashioned 1,200 years before—not the previous weekend.
Even better, the minute I arrived in Japan, not speaking Japanese, I was a voluntary deaf-mute of sorts, as well as an illiterate. I had to watch everything more attentively. I had to try to read gestures and patterns without knowing the words beneath them. I couldn’t begin to take myself and my ideas very seriously, and my business card and résumé meant nothing to kindly, patient people who saw before them a disheveled, dark-skinned foreigner gesturing like an idiot.
With no other means of transport, I walk around the neighborhood, register the early plum-blossoms on the bare winter branches, notice how the light is changing through our pebble-glass windows, notice how the light is changing in myself and my beloved family.
My schools in England and the U.S. taught me to speak, to push myself forward, to consider myself something valuable. Japan, I felt and found, would train me in how to listen, how to make myself as invisible as possible, how to attend to everything around me and think in terms of larger units than the self. Of course Japan can be as cacophonous, crowded, and dizzying as anywhere. But at least I was in a country that believed in the power of an empty room (if there’s just one scroll and a flower in a tatami space, you bring all your attention to that scroll and flower, and find everything you need in them; on the stone basin near the famous rock garden in Kyoto, an inscription reads, “What you have is all you need”).
The next thing I did, four years on, was make sure to take a retreat every season, for at least three days, if possible. Moving to Japan and leaving the office—while bringing a Japanese partner and her two children into my life—had left me with even more daunting obligations than before. The only way I could do justice to them, I felt, was by stepping into silence every now and then to remind myself of what I cared about and how to point myself in that direction.
Of course I felt more than a little guilty, every time, to be leaving my sweetheart behind, neglecting my bosses’ frantic emails, or missing a friend’s birthday party, but I had to spend a few days in absolute stillness, doing nothing, to see that it was only by collecting myself in this way that I could gather anything fresh and creative and joyful to share with friends and bosses. Otherwise, I was foisting my distractedness on them.
One year after embarking on this practice of going on retreat, I moved with my Japanese family into a two-room apartment more or less in the middle of nowhere. We had—and have—no car or bicycle or TV I can really follow; we also have the luxury of all those things we don’t have to think about. I wake up and the day seems to stretch forever.
Not getting any newspapers or magazines—even though I’m a journalist—means I’m not furiously trying to keep up with a moving target I can never keep up with, and I have to try to see events in a larger context. And not having any private means of transportation means I take walks around the neighborhood, register the early plum-blo