It is a warm day today.
The relationship between temperature and my throat is obvious—no pain, and hardly any coughing.
As I reflect on recent events, I find myself thinking about how little I truly do on my own, and how much I owe to the people around me.
Today is very warm.
The connection between temperature and my throat is clear.
There is no soreness, and I hardly cough at all.
After the year-end and New Year holidays, I found myself needing to make several adjustments. I am not sure whether this was the price of having taken things too easily, but for a while I was flustered and unsettled. Still, I somehow managed to regain my footing.
This, too, was thanks to the people who did their best in their respective roles. There are no words for it other than gratitude.
When I was younger, I believed I had accomplished everything on my own. Only recently have I begun to understand that this was not the case.
That is why, when I hear athletes say in interviews,
“This is all thanks to my family, my coaches, and everyone who has supported me,”
I cannot help but feel impressed.
To be able to say such words at barely twenty years of age—perhaps that is precisely why they achieve results worthy of interviews in the first place.
When I was twenty, I was nothing more than an arrogant fool.
Being accused of self-importance would still have been an understatement.
One of my regrets in life is that I lacked a sense of gratitude toward those around me. If I were somehow given the chance to live my life over again, correcting this would come right after relearning how to study.
There was once a television program that proudly bore the phrase “thanks to everyone” as its banner. At the time, I watched it without much thought. Looking back now, however, I find myself wondering whether the weight of those words was truly carried as it should have been.
That said, I was hardly admirable enough to criticize others.
In my youth, I was simply immature—someone who never stopped to consider the true meaning of gratitude.
Although social norms change with time, certain ideas of justice should remain. People grow, perhaps, only by being bound in some way to their past.
Maybe it is foolish of me to still struggle to come to terms with my former self.
But in the end, other people’s stories do not matter much.
What matters is that today, I can take quiet joy in having learned to feel gratitude toward those around me—and in being able to recognize that as a kind of happiness.
