Notes from Kyoto, November 2024

I went to Kyoto in November because a friend told me the maple leaves would be red. She was right. She didn't warn me that I'd spend four days walking through temples at 6am, mostly alone, mostly quiet, mostly uncertain what I was thinking about.

On slowness

Japan does something to your sense of time. Not because it's slower — Tokyo is one of the most efficient cities I've ever moved through — but because everything is so deliberate. The way a meal is arranged. The way a garden is raked. The way a shopkeeper wraps something you've bought.

There's a word: shokunin. It roughly translates to craftsman, but the connotation is deeper. It implies a lifetime of refinement toward a single discipline. The sushi chef who has been making the same fish for forty years. The tatami maker who learned from his grandfather.

I kept thinking about this in relation to work. About how much of what I do is optimized for breadth, for throughput, for the next thing. And whether that's actually good.

Fushimi Inari at dawn

The famous gates — thousands of orange torii climbing the mountain — are photographed constantly. In every photo they look mystical and empty.

In reality, at 11am, you're walking through them with several hundred other people and a few dozen camera setups.

Go at 5:30am. The gates glow against the dark and the mountain is silent and it's one of the few times I've felt genuinely small in a way that felt good.

What I brought home

Not an insight. Not a framework. Just a lingering sense that I move through most days too fast to notice them.

Which isn't a problem I solved. But I think noticing it is the beginning of something.