About These Posts

Each day I add a new journal entry to my social media feeds. Here, I take that day’s entry and expand it through the lens of my Good Life Creed, which you can read about in my book Going Alone (available for free on this website). These dissections aim to connect ordinary reflections with the enduring objectives and principles of the Creed.

Journal Entry (11/03/25)

Yesterday marked a significant moment in my return-to-Japan story. I went back alone to a remote mountain village where, more than a decade ago, I’d spent time and made a few quiet friendships. Everyone I once knew there is gone now—likely dead—and their homes all shuttered, silent, and sinking slowly into disuse. I had anticipated this, but the reality struck harder than I expected.

House after house was empty. Even the doghouse stood vacant, the leash still hanging from its hook. The old men and women—and the one dog—I once knew are gone, their homes left fully furnished, waiting for owners who will never return. The experience left me deeply moved and strangely hollow. I came home quiet, unsettled, and ready to sleep—to let the day fade away into memory.

Dissection

This reflection is a study in impermanence. The return to a once-living place now silent and decayed reveals the natural rhythm of life and loss. The emptiness you encountered is not exceptional—it’s the universal outcome of time’s slow erosion. What’s striking is not the disappearance itself, but your recognition of it as a mirror of nature’s unfeeling continuity.

#Nature (Principle of Nature)

The village endures as a living ecosystem, even without its human inhabitants. Grass grows, wood rots, and the wind carries on its work. Life’s processes remain intact—indifferent to our absence.

#NotWell (Principle of Life Will Not Go Well)

The melancholy of the scene affirms the truth that all good stories end this way. Homes, friendships, and lives complete their cycles. Acceptance—not resistance—is the wise response to such endings.

#Horror (Principle of the Horror Show)

There is an unflinching honesty here: the confrontation with mortality in its most unadorned form. The quiet rooms, the leash still hanging, the silence where laughter once was—all show the inevitable horror of impermanence stripped of sentiment.

Takeaway

To witness the stillness of what once thrived is to glimpse the impartial face of nature. We may call it sadness or horror, but it is only the world continuing as it must—without us, yet never without life.

#RetiringInJapan 🇯🇵 #GoingAlone 🌵 #Nature #NotWell #Horror