everything beautiful is far away

a reminder

“it takes a day to walk to tokyo tower. i tried it once.

it looks beautiful from here, but as i got closer it was run-down. it was a deserted and lonely place.”

– hiromi kawakami for the new yorker

i remember the first time i saw tokyo tower, years and years ago. it was at the tail end of twilight, when the skies were fading into a violet blue and the streetlights just beginning to blink into existence. from the balcony where i stood, tokyo tower glittered bewitchingly in the twilight, its orange-and-white hues rising like an amaryllis flower against the purple skies, hovering above the nighttime cityscape that was slowly rumbling to life. 

from a distance, tokyo tower looked stunningly beautiful. 

if faraway things are always beautiful, then conversely, are they always uglier up close?

i never ended up visiting tokyo tower, so i don’t know. but lately i’ve been feeling this – this turmoil of no longer being far away. 

for the longest time, the end of my travels was a distant point on the horizon, the magical one-year mark that symbolized a kind of turning point for me. it represented the end of one phase of my life and the beginning of another, the day i would put my travels aside and dedicate my time to other endeavors. 

from a distance, this inflection point looked beautiful: i had, after a year of soul-searching, arrived at three projects i wanted to commit to post-travel. the end of my adventures would be bittersweet, yes, but i couldn’t wait to stop moving around and finally kickstart my projects. the end of my travels didn’t feel like the end of something, necessarily, but rather the birth of something new and exciting. it was my tokyo tower.

but as i buried myself in the deep and gritty work the past few weeks, i found myself slowly losing sight of that initial view of the tower. in the process of calculating costs, navigating logistics, and all the nitty gritty of setting up something up for the first time, i’ve started second-guessing myself at every turn, doubting my projects, and questioning whether i should spend my time working on them at all.

at times, i even entertained – however briefly – the thought of returning to my old profession as an engineer, something i swore i would never do. why take a gamble on these projects that probably won’t work out, i thought to myself, when you could just go back to your old job and make a safe, guaranteed amount of money?

what makes it worse, perhaps, is confronting not only my doubts, but those of my peers as well. when every other person tells me, “wait, are you sure this is a good idea? it’s going to be a lot of work” – at what point am i supposed to start listening?

ironically, i had faced these same feelings of doubt and fear a little over a year ago, when i first decided to leave my career behind to travel the world. i knew these feelings like a second skin – had lived with them, for months, on and off – and yet my familiarity did little to assuage these renewed fears. self-doubt doesn’t suffocate you immediately the way a panic attack does; it’s a slow-rising anxiety, a delayed chokehold that creeps in like an oil spill across the gulf of your mind. it circles the nape of your neck like a boa constrictor, squeezing out your confidence, self-worth, and ambitions until you finally decide to give up.

but then i read the new yorker piece, and i remembered tokyo tower.

faraway things are always beautiful, we all know this. 

but as we move closer, it’s easy to lose sight of that shimmering view that had once enraptured us. i got so bogged down in the grind of work that i forgot why i started the projects in the first place.

in these moments of disquiet, i have to remind myself of the why. kora, you are trying to create a life where you can live freely and mostly work from anywhere, i tell myself. a life where the things you pursue are deeply aligned with who you are as a person.

that’s what your projects are about. and it will take time to get there.

beautiful things take time to reach. our goals and dreams will not happen in an instant; and in the time that it takes to get there, the journey will feel anything but pretty.

when the going gets rough and doubt starts creeping in, the only thing we can do is to remind ourselves of why we are here in the first place – to remember the tokyo tower we sought, and to re-conjure that once-infinite image in our minds once more.

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thank you

Jeremy Scharf

for reading an earlier version of this post.

p.s. i know i’m being vague about the “three projects” – i promise to share more as they develop. but i will share now that one project is to finish writing my book, which i’m prioritizing for the rest of the year. it’s coming :)