October, Right Here, Daylight

My student recommended this song and I had to write this down right away, because if I die at 27, that's only two years from now. Just yesterday, while scrolling on social media, I came across a post asking: what would you do if you died tomorrow?

I read Seneca's How to Die two or three times, unlike me, who usually watches a movie or reads a book only once. Since then I've stopped fearing death, though not in the sense that I don't care. Three or four years ago, I would simply have liked this song. I believed I needed nothing, and whenever I flew, I kept thinking it wouldn't be so bad if the plane crashed.

Now I still need nothing more, but not because I want to die. There's nothing I feel I must chase, yet it isn't out of bitterness. Maybe someday I'll cross the overpass in Higashi-Fushimi, Kodaira, Fujimidoori, and the shopping district, or go abroad again and pass the street vendors in Stockholm, Kiruna, and the cobbled streets of Gamla Stan. I hope I won't be in an "it doesn't matter" state by then. Isn't happiness alive even in small things?

No, I think it doesn't live in the things, but in me. Whenever I realize I have it, or decide "this matters," then everything can matter.

Not everything is in our control, but don't we have some free will? Maybe not all the freedom in the world, yet even choosing to write this is mine. My freedom. Maybe my happiness, too. If I let it.

So... what a song. My heart thumps as I listen to this Yorushika piece. But as someone who always reads lyrics and contemplates them, I don't want to go back to being the one who kept telling himself "I'm the worst." I'm not. Nobody is. We all have our good and bad. But even then, isn't it me who decides which is which?