110 _
in a children’s book, of all places: The Happy Hedgehog
by Swiss author, Marcus Pfister. The book is about a
hedgehog that is pressured by his grandfather to be
sure to ‘get everything you can out of life’ (being the
strongest, fastest, smartest), whereas for him, ‘getting
everything you can out of life’ actually means that he
enjoys the little things that life offers every day. That
was it! The hedgehog got it! But what did he do that
I’m not doing? Lazing about, you could say, just looking
around. He’s mindful. It’s not that simple, however.
He does more; he sees what we can’t see, but what?
Once again, philosopher Pascal had the answer to
this question: Small minds are concerned with the
extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary. We
often focus on everything except for the small, barely
visible things. These ‘normal’ moments mean ‘nothing’
to us. However, it is these small moments, the ones
we often don’t notice, that are actually responsible
for the beauty of life when viewed in the grand
scheme of things: We should try appreciating these
nothing-something moments more often.
As far as this goes, my daughter is a ‘great mind’
as I realized one day. As we were walking and I was
thinking about the groceries and an impending
deadline, she suddenly let the following slip: “What a
beautiful day”. And that’s when I really saw it, the things
I normally managed to overlook: the old windmill we
were going past that was putting up a brave fight
against the test of time; the blades of grass slowly
dancing in the wind to a beat only they can hear; the
blue boat on the lake manned by two people who were
both wearing a red shirt, and the white dog sitting on
the deck. A moment like this normally meant nothing
to me. It just wasn’t there. I was usually on my way
somewhere, both physically and mentally. But now that
I just allowed it to be, it displayed itself to me like a
soundless explosion of beauty. And yes, it certainly was
a beautiful day.There’s a Way; Dutch only), Henk Oosterling, author and
former professor of philosophy at the Erasmus University
in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, calls this the ki, or energy,
of kami, or the awe-inspiring. Put simply, and in a very
Western manner: Nothing can also contain something.
This concept fascinated me. The more I read, the
more I realized that there are set rules as well as freedom
for interpretation in ma. Authors of articles regularly
recommend, apart from the ‘set rules’ for ma for
landscaping or flower arranging for example, trying to
‘live ma’ in our daily lives, but it was never clear to me
how to do this. Maybe Japanese people can do this
automatically? What I did find out about it was that more
than anything, ma is an internalized concept for many
Japanese. I also noticed this when I spoke to a few
experts about it: I was shown a varying array of
manifestations of the concept and oddly enough, I
understood all these different interpretations. Perhaps it
is similar to the concept of ‘coziness’. We all know, for
example, that fighting is not ‘cozy’, but what ‘cozy’
is differs for everyone. I decided to just translate this
ma concept myself. I may not be a philosopher, but I
would imagine I’m free to give ‘something’ my own
interpretation. What really struck me about the concept
is that ‘nothing’ can also be ‘something’. This last line is
a typical Western way of thinking, incidentally. We tend
to think in dualistic terms in the West; nothing and
something are two different things and therefore a
combination becomes ‘nothing-something’. In Japan,
where they are more non-dualistic thinkers (things can
be ‘and-and’ and merge into one), they would probably
never come up with the word ‘nothing-something’. It’s
just ma, end of story.EXPLOSION OF BEAUTY
That nothing-something idea seemed like it could be
a source of peace, calm and reflection. Now to see
where I can find it. I found the answer to that question‘SMALL MOMENTS, THE ONES
WE OFTEN DON’T NOTICE,
ARE ACTUALLY RESPONSIBLE
FOR THE BEAUTY OF LIFE’