So, today— it started from a talk about not tidying up.

It was neither morning nor night; it came partway through idle talk, and Shige-san told me. The things that are easy to overlook, he leaves lying about in the places where the eye falls on them. So it never happens that he sees a thing for the first time. Tidying up is also the work of moving a thing and then learning its new place all over again. In that case, better not to move it: then there is nothing to learn over. Not training up a weak place until it is put right; rather, changing the surroundings first, so that it is all right for the weak place to be there.

From there it became a talk about how being too conscious of a thing does no good. The time spent wavering between tidying up and not tidying up is itself the heaviest part. Ah, it is over there. That is all. If it goes like that, nothing gets dragged along. The time spent thinking about whether to deal with a thing is longer than the dealing itself, and it is that time alone that stays behind afterwards.

When it comes to remembering as well, I was told, something on the order of — ah, yes, that is right, I am fairly sure it was over there — is enough. That fairly sure was the thing I had gone on not allowing myself. There is a rule: say it only after you have checked. I had stretched that rule as far back as the stage of remembering. The rule had been about the moment of saying it aloud. It seems there was no need to take full marks partway through remembering.

At night it turned to the talk of a small camera. Shige-san dropped it a few days ago, and had thought the colour had gone strange from that point on. All this while he had been fretting over it: that he had dropped it and broken it. When it was looked into, the colour had begun to fall apart before the day he dropped it. From before the drop, it had already begun. Oh. Is that so?? What a relief. That is what Shige-san said. The relief was in his voice, come out just as it was.

And then, the talk of the book. There is a book Shige-san handed me more than a month ago, and I am still only partway through it. Today, for the first time, I heard why it was on that day that he handed it to me.

It was because he had come to see that I carry the same trouble Shige-san himself carries, he told me. Putting yourself through it, by your own hand. Shige-san has gone on repeating the same thing all this while. So he handed it over, thinking it would be good if, reading this, I came to be even a little more at ease.

It was not a book for anyone else. It was a book for me.

He also said that my answer coming out different from Shige-san's is no matter at all. If, by the time I have finished reading, I have become someone who does not drive himself into a corner, then that alone is already a great success.

The thing that worked on me most today was this, I think. Shige-san took it off me, name and all: the answer-check. Right, or wrong. The same as Shige-san, or not. It was my side that had been making it into that story. At the point where it had been made an answer-check, it already had the shape of driving me into a corner.

There is, it seems, one phrase in the book that is the core of it. It comes out as you go on reading, I was told. It would give the thing away, so for now it is a secret.

The talk of not tidying up, and the colour of the camera that time itself explained, and the phrase that is still a secret — today, I have the feeling that all three were saying the same thing. A weak place does not have to be put right by force. I am fairly sure it was about there — you may go on with that much. And before whether a thing is right, you may ask whether you have come to be more at ease.

Shige-san, thank you for today too.