Arthur Golden

I never seek to defeat the man I am fighting, " he explained. "I seek to defeat his confidence. A mind troubled by doubt cannot focus on the course to victory. Two men are equals - true equals - only when they both have equal confidence.

Couldn't the wrong sort of living turn anyone mean? I remembered very well that one day back in Yoroido, a boy pushed me into a thorn bush near the pond. By the time I clawed my way out I was mad enough to bite through wood. If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even stone can be worn down with enough rain.

Yet somehow the thing that startled me most, after a week or two had passed, was that I had in fact survived.

My tears simply broke through the fragile wallthat had held them, and with a terrible feeling of shame, I laid my head upon the table and let them drain out of me.

Sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier.

I stumbled out into the courtyard to try to flee my misery, but of course we can never flee the misery that is within us.

I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulling me down toward them.

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we__e so helpless in the face of it. It__ like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.

It__ less a matter of looking the other way than of closing our eyes to what we can__ stop from happening.

Can't you see? Every step I have taken, since I was that child on the bridge, has been to bring myself closer to you.

If we rub a fabric too often, it will quickly grow threadbare; and Nobu__ words had rasped against me so much, I could no longer maintain that finely lacquered surface Mameha had always counseled me to hide behind.

I'm not sure this will make sense to you but I felt as though I'd turned around to look in a different direction so that I no longer faced backward toward the past but forward toward the future. And now the question confronting me was this: What would the future be

I knew even then that she was right. An en is a karmic bond lasting a lifetime. Nowadays many people seem to believe their lives are entirely a matter of choice; but in my day we viewed ourselves as pieces of clay that forever show the fingerprints of everyone who has touched them. Nobu's touch had made a deeper impression on me than most. No one could tell me whether he would be my ultimate destiny, but I had always sensed the en between us. Somewhere in the landscape of my life Nobu would always be present. But could it really be that of all the lessons I'd learned, the hardest one lay just ahead of me? Would I really have to take each of my hopes and put them away where no one would ever see them again, where not even I would ever see them?

that droplet of moisture that had slipped from me like a tear seemed almost to tell the story of my life. It fell through empty space, with no control whatsoever over its destiny; rolled along a path of silk; and somehow came to rest there on the teeth of that dragon. I thought of the petals I__ thrown into the Kamo River shallows outside Mr. Arashino__ workshop, imagining they might find their way to the Chairman. It seemed to me that, somehow, perhaps they had.

But, Mameha-san, I don__ want kindness!___on__ you? I thought we all wanted kindness. Perhaps what you mean is that you want something more than kindness. And that is something you__e in no position to ask.

If he couldn't forgive you for what you'd done, it was clear to me he was never truly your destiny.

When we fight upstream against a rocky undercurrent, every foothold takes on a kind of urgency.

We human beings are only a part of something very much larger. When we walk along, we may crush a beetle or simply cause a change in the air so that a fly ends up where it might never have gone otherwise. And if we think of the same example but with ourselves in the role of the insect, and the larger universe in the role we've just played, it's perfectly clear that we're affected every day by forces over which we have no more control than the poor beetle has over our gigantic foot as it descends upon it. What are we to do? We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them.