Take the Long View
South of Omiwa Shrine in Sakurai, at the foot of Mount Miwa, winter has settled in. Behind the workshop, wooden frames strung with pale noodles are carried out into the yard, forming dead-straight lines that sway gently in the dry, cold breeze. The air is sharp and clear.
The noodles are left in the open air only for a short while. As they hang, the workers walk the lines with long chopsticks, carefully easing apart any strands that have stuck together. Before long, the frames are carried back inside, where they continue to dry and mature slowly in the breath of electric fans. This work can only be done during the coldest months of the year, from January through the end of March.
The noodles are not sold within the year they are made. They are stacked away in the dim quiet of a storehouse, waiting until they have passed through the following summer's heat before they are finally packed. Those that endure one summer are called one-year-aged; two summers, two-year-aged. With each passing year, they are said to grow firmer to the bite and smoother on the tongue.
The making of noodles in this village is said to have begun more than twelve hundred years ago. A short walk from the workshop stands the forest of Omiwa Shrine, worshipped as the guardian of noodle-making itself. Every February, a ritual is still held there to set a guiding price for that year's harvest.
'I want the situation I'm in to improve quickly.' 'I want to achieve results quickly -- in study, in sports, in anything.' 'I want a relationship with someone to move forward quickly.'
I understand that feeling well. It is simply human nature.
But in life, the progress of things usually takes more time than we expect.
Even when you chase a quick result, and even when that result comes quickly, more often than not, it soon falls apart.
Of course, even if you take your time, there is no guarantee that the result, once reached, will last. But going in with the readiness that things generally take time tends to make them go more smoothly.
The world is relative by nature, and it is always moving to keep the whole in balance. So wishing for things to turn good quickly, for good results to come quickly, is, without our realizing it, also a way of accepting that things may turn bad just as quickly, that bad results may come just as fast.
Let us take the long view, and meet things as they come.
By the time we left the workshop, the sun had already begun to lean toward the west. The wooden frames in the yard had long since been put away; the newly dried noodles, now bundled, were being carried into the dim storehouse. Before any of it settles into someone's bowl, it will not be this winter, but sometime further ahead, after another summer has come and gone.