We recently connected with Yuichi and have shared our conversation below.
Yuichi, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?
I tend to think of myself as being resilient, and I think most people around me would agree. But I also likely hold a somewhat different image of what resilience means than most.
I imagine that when most people think of being resilient, they think of having a strong sense of self or purpose, but for me, it’s almost the opposite. If someone were to ask me where my strength comes from, I would say that it comes from seeing and experiencing my insignificance or insubstantiality. When I look into myself, I find that there really isn’t anything of substance there. I might as well be looking at a cluster of dust, mired in some thoughts and feelings and what have you. It’s not that I try to see things this way. It’s more that this is what I see and observe.
When it comes to resilience, I don’t think it comes down to having a strong drive or anything of that sort. Instead, I see it more as being able to take way more punches from life than most. (Think Rocky in one of those movies.) If I have a strong drive but after a few harsh traumatizing punches from life, I falter, then that’s not particularly resilient. It means that I can’t withstand the harsh forces of living.
But, when I can touch into the seeming insubstantiality of self, things just seem to fall away. All the punches that seem to have landed unland. It’s as if there was no punch, there was no “traumatic event,” there was no harm. Just a story of one. And the whole thing just kind of dismantles and becomes undone–all the good and the bad at once. At that point, there’s a chance for the mind to re-form, or to re-imagine a new self in the new moment, and there’s a feeling of freshness. Over and over.
From the outside, this seems to appear as if I can withstand so much more than most. But it’s not a withstanding. It’s more an undoing and re-forming. Repeatedly. Across days and weeks and months and years and decades. And so, it’s a constant adapting to new information that comes. I still feel everything and I have thoughts of “I don’t know if I can take any more” at times. And yet, I can, because of the undoing, and that undoing comes from recognizing that there really is no central landing place for all the punches that life throws. But of course, I’m human. So, I often believe that the punches are real, and that they truly do land, and I experience the consequence of believing that until I’m reminded yet again that it was mostly a story. And I’m reminded as such, again and again, when I truly look and see what’s actually happening, which is that nothing is truly happening. Just a semi-convincing story of what I believe to be happening.
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If you want a story, I’ve been the primary caregiver for my ex for the past six years. She’s the dearest and closest person in my life. She ends up hospitalized a few times a year for weeks at a time. When this happens, I usually visit daily and spend my days with her. It’s not easy, as she’s a kidney transplant patient who has lost the ability to ingest food due to being on peritoneal dialysis for over 12 years. For the past few years, she throws up almost daily, and she’s been diagnosed with a new condition that has an over 50% chance of death within a year. At this point, she basically lives with me because she needs someone to help take care of her when things aren’t going well. Every bit of medical news is heartbreaking. Watching her suffer over and over is heartbreaking. But I just show up for her over and over. If I didn’t have the capacity to be undone, I would have had countless nervous breakdowns. But I haven’t.
That’s the story.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
1. Meeting teachers and mentors. I can’t think of anything more important than this.
As they say, the teacher appears when the student is ready, so the real question is, how does one get ready?
There’s also the saying, necessity is the mother of invention.
Putting the two together, it seems that I got ready to meet my teachers and mentors by creating the necessity for meeting such persons. Technically, I didn’t “create” a necessity. It’s more that the necessity became very apparent.
So then the real question is, how does one make the necessity for guidance apparent? The short answer would be to minimize distractions, whether that be an overfocus on work and relationships, over usage of phones, computers, television, social media, and so on, and to spend as much time as possible being with what is, and in my early life, that amounted mostly to being with pain and suffering. In short, the best thing I can do is to be with whatever misery and unhappiness I have, not seeking to remedy or heal it away, but to be with it. Something happens then. In time, some deep shell/armor breaks, and the need is created unbeknownst to myself, and then, the remedy appears of itself, whether in the form of an insight or a word of advice that’s perfect for me, or a friend or mentor.
2. The area of knowledge that was most impactful for me was encountering phenomenology from an actual practicing phenomenologist. So it became like an apprenticeship.
I’m not sure what advice I can give in this regard. Maybe it’s that learning things directly from someone engaged and practicing that thing (and has been involved as such for decades) is infinitely more valuable than reading books or watching videos on the subject. This has been true in just about every domain of life I’ve engaged in. I’d equate it along the lines of one mentor = 10,000+ books on the topic.
3. I suppose the single most important quality I can think of is patience. It’s one of the hardest, I believe, but I can’t think of any quality more important in life than that.
Two comments:
1. The root word of patience is the Latin ‘pati,’ meaning ‘to suffer.’ This suffering can mean what we think of when we hear the word, but it also has a different meaning, as in “I will suffer you.” That meaning points to a forbearance, or a somewhat passive or receptive quality of being. Instead of always being in charge and in control, to forbear (or to suffer in this manner) is to submit to what is occurring. Some call this surrender. I prefer the word “submit.”
In short, to practice patience is to practice submitting to things as they are, or to the situation at hand. It means relinquishing all control and surrendering. From that place, the solutions and actions that arise tend to be much more powerful than those that arise from a place of still wanting to alter events from self.
2. I want to start with a disclaimer that I’m not Christian nor am I a fan of it. But as someone living in the States, I naturally come across all sorts of quotes from that tradition, and I have a semi-healthy respect for some aspects of that tradition.
A quote I often come across is from the Corinthians, and it’s on love. It starts like this: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude…”
As a writer, I’m well aware that the opening sentence or sentiment is usually a summary or else the most important line in a piece of writing. Notice that it doesn’t place kindness before patience, but rather the opposite. I think of that as telling. We often think of love as equated with kindness, and yet the writers of that passage put patience as perhaps more primary to love than kindness, or at the very least, on equal footing with kindness.
Love without patience would be like a love that felt kind and sweet but without much sustaining quality. As the recipient of such love, one would never know when the patience runs out and there would be no sense of safety in that. And without safety, how can it be called love? But with patience, such a love can forbear even the most intolerable of conditions.
As for developing patience, I think of it as developing the capacity to submit to things as they are, or the capacity to surrender to what is. Learning to sit still and quietly for an hour or two daily seems a good way to begin to develop such qualities.
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(Wasn’t sure what to upload. Please feel free to use whichever photo(s) you think is/are most suitable.)
(Also, I’m not sure that what I’ve written is a good fit for your publication. If it isn’t, please feel free to let me know, and I’m happy to try to respond to a different question. I was under the impression that I would be responding to all of the prompts, and not just one of them.)
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