The Heart's Almanac

Proverbs from Many Roads, Season by Season, for People Who Love to Travel

A Map of the Book

This book follows one year at a small inn where several roads meet. A traveler comes back to it again and again as the seasons turn, the innkeeper lights the lantern by the door, and the two of them lay the sayings of many regions side by side, one feeling of the heart at a time. Here is the road ahead, one evening for each chapter.

Early Spring and First Steps. The lantern is lit for the first time this year, and sayings about beginnings, from "every beginning is hard" to "a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet", turn out to agree far more than they disagree.

Spring Rain and Patience. Drop by drop and grain by grain, sayings from many shores show that patience is not idle waiting but slow, steady work, the kind that fills a measure or a lake.

Blossoms and Old Friends. Under the late spring blossoms, the two voices compare sayings about friends who are near, friends who are far away, and the old friend who is worth more than two new ones.

Long Days and Longing. On the longest days of early summer, sayings about absence argue with each other: does distance make the heart grow fonder, or is what the eyes do not see soon forgotten?

Summer Storms and Temper. A storm blows out the lantern twice, and sayings about anger turn out to say less "never be angry" than "wait until morning before you speak".

High Summer and Courage. After a hard mountain pass, sayings about fear show that courage is not the absence of fear: you may fall seven times, as long as you stand up eight.

Harvest and Gratitude. At harvest time, sayings about remembering the source of the water you drink, and about bread and salt shared at one table, make gratitude something warmer than good manners.

Falling Leaves and Sorrow. When the leaves come down and a neighbor is missed, sayings about sorrow bring comfort rather than gloom: a sorrow shared is half a sorrow, and after rain comes sunshine.

Late Autumn and Homesickness. A man who has never left his crossroads learns what home means, from sayings about the hearth, the nest and the leaf that falls back to its roots.

First Snow and Kindness. On the night of the first snow, old sayings of hospitality show that kindness to strangers is one of the oldest customs on any road.

The Long Night and Forgiveness. On the longest night of the year, sayings about mistakes, pride and mending show that to forgive is not the same as to forget.

Winter's End and Contentment. As the snow turns to slush, sayings about knowing when you have enough show that contentment and hope can share one table, and the lantern waits for the road to open again.

Early Spring and First Steps

The Lantern Relit

Many people who love to travel carry a quiet belief in their luggage. They think that the proverbs of different lands must disagree with one another. After all, every people has its own weather, its own bread and its own long history, so surely its wisdom points in its own direction.

"Put a German saying next to a Chinese one and a Russian one, and you will find the same advice wearing three different coats," said the traveler. She set her pack down by the door of the small inn at the crossroads, where the last snow had shrunk to grey ribbons along the ditches.

"I have waited all winter to hear a sentence like that, because the few guests of the cold months brought almost nothing new for my collection of sayings," said the innkeeper, laughing. He was older than she was, and he had never gone further than the market town two valleys away.

He struck a match and lit the lantern that hung on its hook by the door. It was the first time this year that he had lit it with someone standing beside him to watch. The small flame wavered, steadied behind its glass and laid a round patch of yellow light on the muddy road where several ways met.

The traveler took out her notebook, the small one with the soft cover that had ridden in her coat pocket for years. She opened it at a page of sayings about beginnings, which she said was the right page for the first evening of spring.

Hard Beginnings Everywhere

"Start with the German one," the innkeeper said.

She read "Aller Anfang ist schwer", which means "every beginning is hard". People say it to anyone who is starting something new, from a child on the first day of school to a grandfather learning to bake bread. The saying makes the clumsiness of the first days feel normal instead of shameful. It does not promise that the work will be easy, only that the hardest part comes first and does not last.

Then she turned the page and read a Chinese saying, "Wàn shì kāi tóu nán", "all things are hard at the start". Beside it stood a Russian one, "Likha beda nachalo", which means roughly "the beginning is the only real trouble". Once you are moving, the Russian saying suggests, the rest of the road grows lighter on its own.

"Three languages from three far corners of the map, and not a word of disagreement between them," she said.

The innkeeper nodded at the lantern as if it had joined the conversation. Its flame had flickered hardest in the first moment after the match. Then it had settled into a calm and steady burning, which was exactly what the three sayings described.

Imagine that you have just arrived in a city where you cannot read the signs. You are standing at a bus stop with the wrong coins in your hand, and an older woman beside you watches with interest.

"I have been here for two hours and I have already taken the wrong bus twice," you tell her, laughing a little so that she will not see how tired you are.

"Aller Anfang ist schwer," she says as she picks the right coins out of your palm. "By the end of the week you will be the one explaining these buses to the next lost traveler."

Steps Beneath the Feet

The traveler said that her favorite saying about beginnings comes from an old Chinese book of wisdom, the Daodejing. It is still used every day by people who have never opened that book: "Qiān lǐ zhī xíng, shǐ yú zú xià", "a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet".

Most people put it as "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step", and that is close enough. She preferred the older picture, though. It says that the journey starts exactly where you are standing now, not at some better place you have not yet reached. People quote it to someone who is staring at a great task and cannot move, a long trek, a new language, a house to rebuild after a storm. The saying gently turns their eyes away from the far end of the road and down to their own boots. It does not ask them to finish anything tonight. It asks them only to lift one foot, and it trusts that the next step will follow the first.

The innkeeper remembered a guest from far in the east who had said almost the same words years ago. In Japanese it runs "Senri no michi mo ippo kara", "even a road of a thousand ri starts with one step". The traveler said the saying had walked from one language into the other long ago, which seemed right for a saying about walking.

Imagine that you are standing at the foot of a long mountain trail with a map that shows far too many bends. Your friend at home calls and asks whether you are really going to walk all of it.

"From here it looks impossible," you admit, "but the woman who runs my guesthouse told me that a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet, so tonight I will only think about the first bend."

"Then call me from the first bend," your friend says.

Half the Work Begun

"Here the sayings begin to sound like cousins," the traveler said. She read four of them in a row while the innkeeper counted them on his fingers.

In Korean people say "Sijagi banida", "starting is half". In Irish they say "Tús maith leath na hoibre", "a good start is half the work". In Italian it is "Chi ben comincia è a metà dell'opera", "whoever begins well is halfway through the work". And in English there is "Well begun is half done". All four say that the beginning is not a thin first slice of a task but a large part of it. The hardest choice, the choice to start at all, has already been made, and what remains is mostly patient walking.

The innkeeper pointed out that this seemed to quarrel with the German saying. One claims that the start is hard, and the other claims that the start is already half the work. The traveler smiled, because this was exactly the kind of quarrel she had come back to enjoy.

"They are not quarrelling at all," she said. "One tells you that the door is heavy, and the other tells you that once the door is open you are already halfway into the house, and both of them want you to push."

Imagine that it is the first morning of a cooking class in a guesthouse kitchen, and you have burned the onions while the teacher stands at your shoulder.

"I am already terrible at this," you say.

She scrapes the pan clean and tells you, "Chi ben comincia è a metà dell'opera, and you have begun, which was the heavy part, so now we simply begin again with fresh onions."

The Lumpy First Pancake

The Russian saying "Pervyi blin komom", "the first pancake comes out lumpy", made the innkeeper laugh aloud. He had cooked for guests for thirty years, and he knew that the first pancake from a cold pan is always a sad, folded thing. The cook eats it alone in the kitchen and serves the guests the second one.

People say it after any first attempt that goes badly, a first speech, a first drawing or a first conversation in a new language. It carries a kind of permission. Everyone knows that the second pancake will be rounder, and nobody judges a cook by the first one.

Imagine that you have just tried to order breakfast in a language you have studied for three weeks. The waiter has brought you a bowl of soup instead of the eggs you hoped for.

"I asked for eggs, I am quite sure I asked for eggs," you say to the woman at the next table, who is laughing kindly into her coffee, "and now I am eating soup at seven in the morning."

"Pervyi blin komom," she answers. "Eat the soup, which is very good here, and ask again tomorrow, because the second pancake always comes out rounder."

Forging and Starting Somewhere

From French the traveler read "C'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron", "it is by forging that one becomes a smith". From Spanish she read the shorter "Por algo se empieza", "one has to start with something". People say the Spanish one when a first step looks embarrassingly small next to the goal.

Both sayings answer the same worry, she explained. It is the fear that you must already be good at a thing before you are allowed to try it. Both reply that skill grows out of the trying and never arrives before it.

Imagine that you are learning to bargain at a busy market, and you have just paid nearly double for a scarf because you did not dare to offer less.

"Por algo se empieza," says the boy who is helping you carry your bags to the bus. "Tomorrow you will offer half, and the day after you will offer half and smile, and by Sunday the sellers will grow nervous when they see you coming."

The Measure Called Li

While the innkeeper refilled their cups, the traveler made a short detour into the word "li". It sits inside the saying about the journey, and most people simply turn it into "mile".

The li is an old Chinese measure of distance that changed its length over the centuries. Today it is usually counted as half a kilometre, so a journey of a thousand li comes to about five hundred kilometres. That is a long walk, but not an endless one. The Japanese ri took a different path and grew to almost four kilometres, so the Japanese road of a thousand ri is far longer than the Chinese one, although nobody who says either saying is really counting.

She liked knowing this, she said. A thousand miles sounds like a distance only heroes could cover. Five hundred kilometres sounds like something an ordinary person with good boots and a few spare weeks could actually walk, step by step, from one lit doorway to the next.

Plans Made in Spring

The innkeeper said that early spring was the season when he made his plans for the year. He would mend the gate, paint the shutters and plant beans along the warm side of the wall. The traveler said that two languages agreed with him in almost the same words.

In Chinese people say "Yī nián zhī jì zài yú chūn", "the plan for the whole year lies in spring". In Japanese they say "Ichinen no kei wa gantan ni ari", "the plan for the year lies in its first day". Both mean that the start of anything is the right moment to decide where you want it to go.

Imagine that you are sitting on a night ferry on the first evening of a long journey, writing in a fresh notebook. The passenger beside you asks what you are writing so carefully.

"I am making a list of what I hope this trip will give me, before I get too busy enjoying it to remember," you say.

"Yī nián zhī jì zài yú chūn," the passenger answers with a nod, "so you are wise to write the plan while the journey is still new."

Hope That Stays Last

Every beginning also needs hope. The innkeeper said that hope was the oil of the lantern, the thing you cannot see from the road but without which the flame goes out by midnight.

The traveler had two sayings for that. One was in Spanish, "La esperanza es lo último que se pierde", "hope is the last thing to be lost". The other was in Italian, "Finché c'è vita c'è speranza", "while there is life there is hope". People reach for both when plans have gone wrong but have not yet ended, which is most of the time on a journey. Neither saying pretends that things are fine. They only point out that the story is not over, and that a person who still hopes still has something to work with.

Imagine that your flight has been delayed for the third time and the café at the gate has closed. A grandmother on the seat beside you offers you half of her orange.

"At this rate we will be sleeping here," you sigh.

She shrugs and says, "La esperanza es lo último que se pierde, and the board still says delayed, not cancelled, so let us eat this orange and keep on hoping."

Words on a Ticket

Here is a small thing to try on the first day of your next journey. Ask someone you meet, a driver, a host or a person at the next table, how they would say "every beginning is hard" in their own language. Write their answer on the back of your ticket. Keep the ticket, and on the last day of the trip read it again. You will be surprised by how far you have come since the hour when that saying was written down.

The innkeeper liked this idea so much that he said he would hang such tickets on a nail beside the lantern, where every guest could add one. The traveler gave him the first one from her coat pocket.

First Drops on the Glass

Just then a single drop of rain ticked against the lantern glass, then another. The traveler read her last saying of the evening, from Arabic: "Awwal al-ghayth qatra", "the first of the rain is a single drop". It is often finished with the words "thumma yanhamir", "and then it pours".

People use it to say that great things begin small. They also use it to say that good news usually arrives first as a hint, so the first small success is worth celebrating, because the rest is on its way.

"Then let this be the first drop of the year," the innkeeper said, and he moved the lantern a little further under the eaves so that the rain would not reach it.

So the evening's sayings lay side by side in the lantern light, saying one thing in many languages. Every beginning is hard in German, Chinese and Russian, and a journey of a thousand li begins beneath your feet. Starting is half the work in Korean, Irish, Italian and English. The first pancake is lumpy, you become a smith by forging, and you must start with something. The year's plan lies in spring and in its first day. Hope is the last thing lost while there is life, and the first of the rain is a single drop.