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 (10/15/25)

Yesterday afternoon, before the cold and heavy rain arrived, I stood on my balcony watching the last giant hornet of the season drift among the dark foliage of the abandoned meadow behind my home. Giant hornets were my constant companions through this first summer of retired life in Japan. Living somewhere deep within the bamboo forest beside my house, they came daily—buzzing up to my window in search of food, sometimes slipping inside, entering through the open screen door and leaving again through the opposite window. I’d grown dangerously accustomed to them—hardly flinching when they came near. But last night the killing rain came, and with it the cold, and I expect that all the remaining hornets—save for the new queens—are gone now, not built to survive beyond the warmth of summer.

The one I watched yesterday was a sad sight. Her queen surely dead, her brothers and sisters gone, no grubs left to guard, her purpose in life complete. Such hornets are known to wander before they die—flying aimlessly for up to a kilometer from their nests before falling to the ground, convulsing briefly, then still. The great hornet I watched in the meadow was one such wanderer, flying low and slow, without purpose, preparing to die somewhere in the sunlit green before the dark rain of autumn began to fall.

Dissection

This entry dwells in the uneasy calm between purpose and extinction—the moment when life, having fulfilled its reason for being, continues only as motion without meaning. The hornet’s final flight mirrors the fading pulse of a season, a life, a purpose completed. There’s no pity here, only the stark recognition of nature’s rhythm—birth, work, decline, and death.

#Purpose (The Principle of Purpose)

The hornet’s life cycle becomes a mirror of human endeavor: a season of necessity, duty, and labor, ending not in tragedy but in natural closure. Purpose, once fulfilled, dissolves quietly into rest.

#Social (The Principle of Society)

The image of the vanished colony—of once-busy, communal life reduced to a single wanderer—reflects the ephemerality of belonging. Every bond, however deep, is destined to end in solitude, as all living systems scatter in time.

#Horror (The Principle of Horror)

The reflection also glances toward the quiet terror of mortality. Yet it is not the hornet’s death itself that chills, but the indifferent normalcy of it—the recognition that such endings belong to everything that lives. Horror here becomes understanding, and through understanding, peace.

Takeaway

To watch another creature’s ending is to glimpse our own. Yet there’s comfort in this symmetry, too—the knowledge that nothing is wasted, and that life, even in decline, plays its part perfectly. The hornet dies as she must, and the rain falls as it should, and both together complete the season’s script.