Lights Along the Road · Hiroshi Kanda
Chapter 22: Trusting That Your Time Will Come
The Words: Marina Tsvetaeva, 1913
In 1913, when she was about twenty, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote a short poem that begins "To my poems, written so early". In it she looks at her own young poems with surprising confidence. In my own words, she says: my poems, written so early that I did not yet know I was a poet, burst out like spray from a fountain and like sparks from fireworks. These poems about youth and death, which no one has read, lie scattered in the dust of bookshops, where no one has taken them and no one takes them now. But my poems, like precious wines, will have their turn.
It is a bold thing for a young poet to say. At the time, few people were reading her work. Yet she does not complain or beg for attention. She simply states, calmly, that good work can wait. Fine wine is not drunk on the day it is made; it is put away and grows better with time. In the same way, her poems will find their readers when the time is right.
The Life Behind the Words
Tsvetaeva was born in 1892 and wrote in Russian. She began writing poems as a small child and published her first book when she was only about eighteen. Her poems were intense, musical and full of strong feeling, and they did not follow the fashions of her day. During her life she was admired by some fellow poets, but she was never widely read, and for long years she lived in poverty and hardship, moving from place to place with her family, much of the time far from the land where she was born.
Her later life was very hard, and she died in 1941. For years after her death her poems were little known. Then, slowly, readers discovered them, and today she is counted among the greatest poets of her language. Her poems are printed, recited and set to music, and they are loved by many readers. The young woman who wrote that her poems would have their turn, like precious wines, turned out to be right.
What the Words Ask of Us
Most of us want our work to be noticed now. When it is not, we may stop believing in it. Tsvetaeva's words ask us for a quieter kind of faith. If we do our work honestly and well, its value does not depend on how many people see it today. Some things ripen slowly. Patience here is not passive waiting. It is the confidence to keep working, even in silence, because we believe that good work keeps its worth.
Think of Samuel, nineteen, who writes songs in his room and shares them online, where almost no one listens. Some evenings he wonders why he bothers. Then he plays a song he wrote a year ago and finds that he still likes it, and he hears how much better his new songs have become. He decides to keep going, not for quick praise but for the work itself. Whether many people ever hear him or not, Samuel is filling his cellar with wine that will keep.
Similar Words From Around the World
A traditional saying in Arabic says that patience is the key to relief. A key is a small thing, but it opens a heavy door. This echo adds comfort to Tsvetaeva's confidence. Patience is not only enduring; it is what finally lets the good thing in. The poet waited, and her words were not lost. For anyone who is working without reward, the saying gently suggests that waiting well is the way to an open door.
In his book On Old Age, written in Latin, Cicero quotes an older poet who says that the farmer plants trees that will help another generation. The farmer knows he may never sit in their shade. He plants anyway, because good work is meant to last beyond the day it is done. Tsvetaeva's poems were like such trees. Many readers found shade in them only long after she had planted them. This echo invites us to work not only for today's thanks but also for people we may never meet.
Living It Today
These words speak to anyone whose efforts seem unseen: an artist without an audience, a parent whose daily care no one notices, a teacher whose students may thank them only years later, a volunteer whose work goes unpraised. Your work has value even before anyone praises it. Older readers may also find comfort here, because many good things they did long ago are still quietly helping other people today.
This week, return to something you made or began and then put aside because no one seemed interested: a story, a drawing, a plan, a collection of recipes. Look at it again with patient eyes. Improve one small part, then put it safely away, or share it with one person who might enjoy it. Treat it like a good wine resting in a cool place. Its turn will come, in its own time.
Chapter 23: I Am I and My Circumstance
The Words: José Ortega y Gasset, 1914
In 1914 José Ortega y Gasset published his first book, Meditations on Quixote, a set of essays that start from the famous novel about the knight Don Quixote. Near its beginning stands a sentence that became the best-known line of his whole work. In my own words, it says: I am I and my circumstance, and if I do not save my circumstance, I do not save myself. By "circumstance" he means everything around a person: the people, the time, the landscape, the language, even the small things of daily life.
The word circumstance comes from Latin and means, at its root, what stands around us. Ortega's point is that a person is not a lonely mind floating in the air. We are always somewhere, with someone, at some moment in history. Our circumstance is part of who we are. And so our task is double: to become fully ourselves, and to care for and improve the world around us, because the two cannot be separated.
The Life Behind the Words
Ortega was born in 1883 in southern Europe and wrote in Spanish. He grew up in a family of journalists and writers, and he studied for some years at universities in Central Europe before returning home to teach philosophy at a university. He was a gifted speaker and writer who believed that philosophy should not hide in difficult books. He wanted it to speak to ordinary educated readers, and so he wrote much of his work as essays, articles and lectures, in clear and lively language.
Meditations on Quixote came out when he was about thirty. In it he looked at the world he had been born into and asked how a person could live fully and well within it, neither running away from it nor simply accepting it as it was. He went on writing and teaching for four more decades and died in 1955. His famous sentence stayed at the heart of much of his later thought: a life is always a life in a particular place and time, and it is lived well only when we take that place and time seriously.
What the Words Ask of Us
Sometimes we imagine that our "real" life would begin somewhere else: in another job, another town, another time. Ortega gently brings us back. Your life is here, with these people, in these conditions. That does not mean you must accept everything as it is. It means that you cannot save yourself by ignoring your circumstance. To grow as a person, you also have to care for the world close to you: your street, your workplace, your family, your friendships.
Think of Lidia, thirty-eight, who works in a busy hospital kitchen and often dreams of a calmer life far away. One day she decides to stop waiting. She starts small: she reorganises the shelves so that the work flows better, she learns the names of the new workers, and she brings a radio for the quiet hours. The kitchen becomes a little friendlier. To her surprise, Lidia feels more at home in herself too. By caring for her circumstance, she has also cared for herself.
Similar Words From Around the World
Epictetus, a teacher who had once been enslaved and who taught in Greek, begins his short handbook, the Enchiridion, which a student wrote down from his teaching, by saying that some things are up to us and some are not. Our opinions, choices and efforts are ours; much of the world around us is not. This echo adds a useful balance to Ortega. We cannot change our whole circumstance. But we can change our response to it, and the small part of it that lies within our reach. Saving our circumstance begins with the part that is up to us.
A traditional saying in the Nguni languages of southern Africa, umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, means that a person is a person through other people. This idea is often called ubuntu. It says, in another way, what Ortega said: we are not alone, and we do not become ourselves alone. Our circumstance includes the people around us, and we are shaped by them as they are shaped by us. To care for others is not a duty added on top of our own life. It is part of that life itself.
Living It Today
Ortega's words help in many situations. A student who feels that real life will start after graduation can begin living fully now. A worker unhappy with a workplace can improve one small corner of it. A person who has just moved can learn about the new neighbourhood and its people. An older reader can see that the circumstances of a long life, with all their limits, were also the material from which a whole self was made.
This week, choose one small part of your circumstance and save it a little. Tidy a shared space, learn a neighbour's name, help a colleague with a task, plant something by the door, or fix a thing that has been broken for months. Then notice how you feel. Ortega believed that the self and the world around it rise together. When you make your corner of the world a little better, you are also making yourself.