What If This Was The Story All Along

The other day I was feeling frustrated by the story of my life. Like many transplants living in New York, I moved here as a young person with a creative ambition. That was years ago, and I haven’t achieved what I’d hoped I would back then. When I landed here, after a year of traveling on credit, I was completely broke. I had a negative net worth, and zero job prospects and I paid my rent with credit card checks.

Eventually, I found work as a receptionist in an office, and I slowly paid down my debt. I had 7 roommates, ate cereal for dinner, and walked to work to save on the subway fare. I went to free museum nights. I wrote short stories. I pitched magazines. I dreamed of a certain creative success.

I had to learn about writing, about love, about friendship. Every lesson followed a failure because that’s how I learn, and I had so very much to learn. Along the way I met my wife. We met at an underground art gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1998. I lived, at the time, in the East Village. We were in the epicenter of some very creative times and places in the City, and in our lives.

Noriko had moved to NYC all the way from Japan to be an actress. Eventually, she changed course. We both found ways to make a living. Her English got better and better, thanks to marrying a pedant who absolutely loves words. We spent countless hours talking about how to say things, the nuances of meaning in every combination of words that confused her, and our love grew and grew.

I was telling Noriko just the other day that I wish I’d climbed a little higher in our life. She didn’t say anything. Then, a day later, she looked up at me (she always looks up at me since I’m a foot taller than she is) and she said, “I thought I was moving here to act. But everything I did, from learning English to living in New York, brought me closer to you. I think that was my life’s work.”

Then I saw it. It was like I was looking back over a wide and deep stretch of trampled sand, the tiny caverns of footprints pocked the landscape of my past. Each was a step taken this way and that, and I was threading the wrong path the entire time. When Noriko said that to me, a lifelong series of steps suddenly illuminated on that landscape. The path I had walked, jig by jag, hop by crawl, led to a woman who taught me about love, to the birth of a son who blasted my heart into dimensions of being of which I had never conceived. The path I’m on is wilder than the one I imagined. Adventures are not posted with signs or marked out on maps. Love is a treasure, hidden in plain sight.

The entire time I’ve been writing, observing, and striving, I’ve also been growing in love and friendship with those around me. That was my life’s work the entire time.

My youthful anger and self-centered ambition has softened into a compassion for others and an embrace of a world I scarcely knew existed, let alone understood when I was mesmerized and confounded at 25.

A dear friend, Billy Glidden, once shared with me this quote by Thomas Merton:

“When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.”

For the world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness. The silence of the spheres is the music of a wedding feast. The more we persist in misunderstanding the phenomena of life, the more we analyze them out into strange finalities and complex purposes of our own, the more we involve ourselves in sadness, absurdity and despair. But it does not matter much, because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things; or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. Indeed, we are in the midst of it, and it is in the midst of us, for it beats in our very blood, whether we want it to or not.

Yet the fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.

―Thomas Merton

I realized, when Noriko shared those sweet words, that I had my role confused. I was never the choreographer. I’m the dancer. And my dance has been cosmic, like all our dances must be.

Dancing with you, my friends,

I am,

Sean Sakamoto