Nothing will ever be perfect, not in any individual life. Yet each day we greet the morning star. Each day we are given a new chance to shine.

Ahead the clouds hung low, and the grey was thick. It was a true rain, not mist, but it was soft, didn’t splatter on the windshield. It seemed as if the drops were being dribbled out from hundreds of invisible eyedroppers, their tips fractions of inches above the glass. The windshield was already wet, so the drops spread out silently into big perfect circles.

I remembered a long time ago, during a high school summer, working with a team of brick masons. It was my job to push the wheelbarrow around the muddy lot, delivering the cement that the masons would trowel onto bricks and blocks. If it was too stiff they couldn’t work with it. If it was too soupy they couldn’t work with it. It had to be just right. And they’d get irritated if I splattered it onto their arms and clothes or into their faces. It took a while to get the hang of it, lowering the shovel right down to the edge of their “palettes,” tipping the shovel gently so that the cement—the “mud,” they called it—would spread out evenly, gently, without a mess, just like those soft raindrops on the windshield.

A bit of unpleasant business awaited. Maybe, I thought, not able to see the traffic light just a hundred meters or so up the road, the next couple of hours were going to play themselves out in a minor key. All felt somber.

But as I turned toward the park, I found myself thinking (as obvious as the fact was) that it wasn’t complete darkness. If it were, I wouldn’t even be able to see the soft drops spreading out on the windshield. For sure, light, which I seemed not to “see,” was seeping through—and as long as there was light, no matter how much or little, no matter how strong or weak, there was the opportunity to shine.

It was weird how tangible it was—how I could feel, submerged in the pea-soup grey, all the good things to come.

The next morning I was on Ryuso Mountain.  Beneath the cedars, you could see the sun filtering in.  All there was to do was to climb—and see what the light hit.

At the top, out in the open, everyone was hungry.