These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

—from Rilke’s Book of Hours (I, 59)

This stoicism is built into the Japanese language. People always say “shikata ga nai” – it can’t be helped. And one of the most common things to say to someone else is “ganbatte kudasai” – tough it out, be strong. Natural disasters are seen as part of Japan’s “unmei,” or fate – a term that is written by combining the characters for movement and life. I remember reading an ancient account, I believe from 16th century Jesuit visitors, of an earthquake devastating a village, and then within hours the peasants began rebuilding their homes.

Uncomplaining, collective resilience is steeped into the Japanese soul. We sent our eldest son to Japanese school briefly, and I’ll never forget seeing all the little kids having to go to school in shorts even in the dead of winter. The idea was that it built character. I thought it just gave kids colds. But it was one more effort to instill “gaman.” And it’s “gaman” that helped Japan recovered from World War II and tolerated the “lost decade” after the bubble economy burst in about 1990. Indeed, it might be better if Japanese complained a bit more – perhaps then their politicians would be more responsive.

Kristof asserts that there is no precise English equivalent for this term, “gaman,” and seems to imply that this is a quality that’s lacking in other cultures, especially our own.  This has also been echoed recently by another New York Times Columnist, David Brooks, who has written a column called “Modesty Manifesto” about Americans’ overblown sense of self-entitlement.

That all may be true for many Americans, particularly of this generation.  I also know, though, that every generation bemoans the selfishness and depravities of the generations that follow them, and I believe in my heart that this “gaman” is alive and well in America, even today.  You’ve all seen or heard about the film “True Grit,” haven’t you?  You only need to hear or read the indomitable lines of its heroine, Mattie Ross, to know that she is a character of True Grit, and that it is so deeply American and so well portrayed throughout the years, not only through the original book or the 1969 film, but in the 2010 version,  that it’s difficult to imagine that we as a culture lack true grit altogether.

Life is a messy deal.  We all, from beggars to kings, pass gas and go to the bathroom every day.  We all trip over our own feet sometimes, and say the wrong things that makes us want to disappear.  We need not talk about that to be “real” about life, of course, but to pretend that I am  a somber meditator whose life is seeped only in the glorious concepts of beauty, compassion, and grace, would be a disingenuous conceit.

In between the bathroom breaks, the thoughtless web surfing, and broken resolutions, are small moments–breaths, really–that have the power to remind me of what I’m really about, what I want my life to be really about.  I don’t want to live mindlessly.  I want to pay attention and really be here.  Not because my life is a glorious, cinematic montage of one jewel-like moment after another, but simply because…I’m here, and if I don’t pay attention, I might miss it all.

This is a space that documents my daily attempts to live well.  Living well to me is to construct a life that is not only full of beauty, grace, and compassion, but a life that creates more beauty, grace, and compassion for others.

I am going to write about:

1. Stories of those who live well, to inspire us
2. Resources and tools that help us to live better
3. Setbacks and challenges to living well and how I try to overcome them
4. The multi-dimensional aspect of living well–spiritual, intellectual, material, emotional, and social

I hope that this will become a collaborative project, and a rich wellspring of inspiration and information.