I will introduce to you the special experience which helped
me reconsider myself, and it is dedicated to all people who live
a boring life. It begins with two questions. How do you feel
about yourself these days? Talking about me, I do not have
confidence in my own feelings. Since I entered the university, I
have trained myself so that I have got used to reasoning and
analyzing anything around me. It has gone to the extent that I
doubted my own feelings. The harder I was trying to be
reasonable, the less sensitive I became. I noted that I could not
feel pleasure, sadness or anger. I always analyzed my own
feelings or emotions: what makes me feel sad? I came to be unable
to believe my own feelings, and I felt something was lost.
The second question is, "Have you really felt nature
recently?" This is concerned with the first question, because an
ability of communicating with nature is nearly equivalent to that
of listening to one's emotions. Take an example. It is often said
that Chuo University is located at a top of a hill and surrounded
by beautiful nature. Indeed, there are woods and hills around the
university and even small animals. However, what are we really?
As we commute through such beautiful nature, living around
beautiful nature, we are so busy that we have no time to see and
hear, and it loses its beauty. People with poor minds can never
see the beauty of nature; and unfortunately, most of us Japanese
have become such people. When we pass by a forest and look at
nature through a train window, the sight is only blinking away
from the right to the left side. However, this summer in the most
Northern part of Japan, I found a place where I could restore
what I had lost, and I could be really revived.
I visited a small island, near to the Soya cape, called
Renbun. There, I found the answer for those two issues. There are
few convenient devices; for instance, only five taxicabs run, and
on the west part of the island there are no paved roads, and no
flush toilet, no fire engine, only one book store and so on.
Instead, there are really warm-hearted people, most of whom live
on fishing and gathering sea products. Because of lack of
convenient devices, those people seem to be weaker against nature
than people living in a city. (In fact, urban people merely
understand that they can control nature.) Yet because of
the lack of convenient devices, the people of Renbun pay more
attention to, and to have a sense of appreciation for nature.
In addition to those people living closer to the nature than
us, an eight-hour hike from the north to the south of the island
let me notice the beauty of nature, too. What I relied on was not
a car but just my two legs. There was no paved road in the west
part, as written above. Unlike watching through a window from a
car, I could directly feel wind, soil, flowers, little creatures,
fresh air and grasses all breathing and living! Escaping
from fussy time in urban life into rural time, I could feel that
I was wholly involved with nature.
The most impressive three days in the summer were when I
stayed at Momoiwa youth hostel, which is known for songs and
dances. Some have called it the most energetic youth hostel in
the world. To me, who had come to ponder about everything
seriously, it taught the significance of believing in passion
inside me. I found that human beings could live as they are when
they find the power hidden in themselves. Most of the
songs we sang were 70's folk songs, which I used to regarded as
out of date and turned a deaf ear to. I noticed they encouraged
me, since those songs were full of hope toward the future, and
told us that we were responsible to the earth. Messages brought
by songs could reach my heart easily, and persuaded me much more
successfully than any explanation I had ever heard. As I
experienced the power of songs, I learned the importance of
listening to my heart, not to my brain.
Thanks to this experience, I could catch and use a lively
energy in myself. And also I want to give this message to the
university students who yearn to find reasons for existence and
feel desperate for not being able to do that. Certainly,
searching for reasons for each existence and to discover answers
to problems is a quite respectable work for the happy future of
human beings. However, using only our brain will result in
trouble. That is to say, it cannot work when something above
reason occurs: unfortunately human brain has limitation. A
break-through to avoid such case is only brought by curiosities
we all have. Please listen to another you inside your heart:
there might be a sense of curiosity there. It must encourage you
to stand against any failure.
by Yoshio Ohsawa
