A Shrine To What Is

 A week in Japan. Three days in Osaka. My twenty-seventh country and—how many cities, monuments and faces have I seen?  Yet I feel I am experiencing everything for the first time.

This has been my first trip to a place I hadn’t previously seen since I went to Greece six summers ago, a few months before COVID changed the world—and me.  (In early 2023 I went to Paris, where I lived years ago and have visited several times since.) Tokyo, Osaka and Japan certainly are different from other places I’ve seen: The qualities of light and color, and even of time and space, are as unlike others I’ve felt as takoyaki is from a jambon-beurre sandwich or a hamburger. Yet I can’t help but to feel that the real differences between what I have known and what I am learning lie within me and sometimes within my body itself.

For one thing, I notice that I am more tired at the end of a day of cycling, walking and sightseeing. Mind you, I have long realized that wanting to end a day of any journey—whether in a place I am seeing for the first time or a place to which I return nearly every day—by laying down my head is usually a good thing:  It means that I have lived that day, if not fully, then at least to the best I could.

The bike I rented in Tokyo.

Of course, some of my fatigue has to do with age: While I am in the middle of my life as long as I don’t know when it will end, I cannot pretend that my body is what it was forty years, or even minutes, ago. That, I realize, is also the reason why I could—and, I admit, do—wish I could have taken this trip earlier in my life, I am glad I am on it, and that it still lies ahead, now.

Then there is the weather: I landed in a heat wave. Or so it seems. Every day I have been here has been as hot as the steamiest days of any summer in New York.  That makes sense when one realizes that Tokyo and Osaka are on the same parallels as the American South. But it seems even hotter here than in Cambodia and Laos, which are undeniably tropical. 

I am not complaining: If everything is exactly as you expected, you aren’t traveling.

Perhaps that previous sentence seems smug or sanctimonious. Perhaps it is. For what it’s worth, it’s something that made sense to me today when I visited the Sumiyoshi Taisha shrine. (Hmm, maybe there is something to those shrines and temples after all!) Yesterday, after touring Osaka Castle, I wandered into NHK World. Not surprisingly, there were screens everywhere showing various Japanese TV programs—and Jaws with Japanese subtitles. I saw that movie the summer it was released and thought back to that movie time when I was pursuing the dreams of my father and a few other adults in my life. I thought that if I hadn’t pursued what they envisioned for me—mainly, their own unfulfilled wishes—my life would have been what it was “supposed to be.” I utterly failed in most of those pursuits because, I was told, I didn’t try or study or Jesus hard enough and that I should just “snap out of “ my “moodiness.”

But today I realize I hadn’t failed, although I couldn’t have known it all of those years ago. If nothing else, I learned that those dreams and goals—such as going to West Point or Annapolis and embarking on a military career, which my father wanted for me—simply weren’t right for me. Perhaps even the dreams I had, like being a marine biologist, were not meant to be even if I blamoed my father and a buddy of his for hijacking them.

As for what any of this has to do with cycling: It’s probably one of the few passions I’ve ever had that nobody could change or destroy.  So here I am, in midlife, cycling in my 27th country.

Anyway, I realized at the shrine that my failure—if indeed there is any—was in believing that my life was “supposed to be” a certain way, whether in line with my own or other people’s wishes. Rather, I need to acknowledge, if not embrace, what is and journey through whatever will be.

Front and side view of one of the shrine’s sanctuaries .

After leaving the shrine, I entered a cafe—“Vie de France”—for a cafe au lait and to use their internet connection. I called Callie, Sam’s significant other, who is looking after Marlee. “I miss you,” she said.

“I miss you too. And Marlee?”

I met her—and “Sam”—just over a year ago, when I moved to the place where I live now.