Not in a Hurry Anymore

 Part I: The Detour

Reflecting on the path that led here

Today, our landlord’s cat, Chino, passed away. Chino’s passing away spurred some thoughts that I wanted to share.

To make sense of them, I have to rewind the clock to when we lived in Japan between 2018 and 2022. It started when I learned about the FIRE movement. I was probably 25 or 26. My dream job of being a CIR on the JET program had been cut short due to a lack of funding , and I ended up taking an ALT position—a role I had consciously avoided when I first applied.

I was living in a teacher’s apartment in Fukuoka. It was a time when I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with my ALT job and increasingly anxious about my post-JET job prospects in Japan. It was during that period that I read about what FIRE was about. 

The idea of not having to work full-time for another 30-40 years was certainly appealing, but what really got my attention was the liberty it granted; The ability to chose, to be able to yes/no to things on my own terms. It was probably the most powerful idea that completely changed how I looked at personal finance and life going forward. 

It also spotlighted the gap between where I was versus where I wanted to be. From that vantage point, I saw where I was headed and felt severely off-course.  Between the unexpected role change and the setbacks from COVID, I felt stuck and grew antsy. Working as an ALT is a known dead-end job, so I didn’t need much convincing to completely rethink our careers going forward. So, after much deliberation, we decided to leave Japan and start anew in Canada with the main goal of switching to a higher paying and more flexible career. For it, it was software development.

Fast forward to 2023-2024. I was living in Toronto, working full-time as a software developer. It was a great start; hard work and patience had finally paid off after 845 applications. But the company’s sales plummeted. There were no actual software projects to work on, and I was reassigned, yet again, to a role I never wanted. It was a déjà vu moment to my CIR turned ALT days. I felt side-tracked. Out of financial circumstance, I couldn’t quit, so I latched on. I poured most of my free time and energy outside of work into studying, building projects, and preparing to find a better job. 

Part II: The Era of "The Hurry"

The internal struggle with control and time

The three-year transition from 2022 to 2025 was a difficult period. I was throwing myself into steering my career in the direction I wanted to go, yet random setbacks—entirely out of my control—kept diverting me elsewhere. 

Each detour felt like I was veering off-course. During those stretches, I couldn’t help but feel down. A general dissatisfaction and gloom hovered over everything. I was constantly reminded of the distance between where I was and where I thought I should be.

Those feelings became most pronounced whenever I did something non–career-related in my free time. Any moment not spent studying, building, or preparing felt unjustifiable. I felt guilty resting, guilty for idling. I know now where that came from: fear — fear of uncertainty, of losing control, of time slipping away while I was being forced down a detour that felt like the wrong stream altogether.

In response, I optimized my time religiously. I hurried from one thing to the next—work, study, projects, sleep—repeating the cycle with mechanical precision. For a while, I lived like a machine running on a schedule I had imposed on myself. Everything I did was future-facing; the present was a blur. I consumed enough calories and slept enough to keep my body functioning, but little else registered. I didn’t want to waste a single second on anything that didn’t push me closer to that idea of “freedom” I had learned about years earlier.

Ironically, optimizing for future freedom made me a slave in the present to that future.

What emerged was a strange, self-enforcing state of being constantly hurried—where I was both the one being rushed and the one applying the pressure. Over time, this “hurrying forward” hardened into habit. I felt anxious when I sat down to do nothing. Inaction felt dangerous. Idling felt like a crime. I convinced myself I had neither the reason nor the time to slow down, so I filled every gap by doing something—anything—that made it feel like I was still moving in the right direction.

Everything was in a hurry. And I didn’t know how to stop.

Part III: Learning Stillness

Recovering the breath and learning from Chino

The sense of being hurried—and the worry that followed—were symptoms of the psychological trap I was caught in. I treated the present moment solely as a transactional cost, a currency to be burned in order to purchase a specific future state. The consequence was a visceral sense of veering off-course. By devaluing the present, I paradoxically increased my anxiety about the future. When the present has zero value, any moment spent in it feels like a waste.

Fortunately, those feelings have left me. They shed off, and as they did, I started to feel that I was finally catching my breath. It felt as though I had been sprinting forward for so long that I could finally slow down and recover. You are still breathing violently, still feeling the strain, but you know you are safe. You know you no longer have to run at maximum velocity.

Beyond getting my career back on track and putting that chapter behind me, I think this shift came from learning to be present with my feelings. And the most immediate source of that learning came from Chino.

During those hurrying days, I often put off simple household tasks—like sharpening my cooking knife—until I couldn’t defer them any longer. But nowadays, that sense of being rushed is absent. I just sharpened the knife on the whetstone. Twice, actually. Just me, the knife, and the stone.

I didn’t feel there was something more important I needed to get to. I could focus entirely on what was at hand. Be with each moment. Be with yourself at each moment.

Chino was often around whenever I felt hurried. He would be lying on the carpet, stretched out or curled up napping beside the fireplace. He never seemed worried about anything.

There was me, a high-anxiety, future-oriented, efficient machine. And then there was Chino, a zero-anxiety, present-oriented, inefficient being. 

The “inefficient” being was living a complete life. 

The “efficient” machine was suffering.

Cats naturally know how to relax. It’s in their nature. It’s their default state of being. What we lack in ourselves stands out so clearly in them. I often wondered if that was Zen. I’m even more convinced of it now, especially after listening to Alan Watts’ recordings and getting halfway through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

There is no past nor future. There is only here and now.

For the past month or two, I have felt present with myself. The first several minutes of my morning commute. The moments staring out at the road from the bus. The feeling of stepping outside the office building after a day’s work. There is something deeply calming about being on the go, but not in a hurry.

Now that I no longer push myself to do things I feel I should do outside of work hours, I allow myself to choose what I am genuinely interested in doing. It is the act of learning how to slow down while still treading forward—without haste, and without waste.

Part IV: Space, Time, and What Matters

On proximity, grief, and the cost of distance

Those were the thoughts Chino spurred while he was alive. The thoughts that follow came from his death. They concern the relationship between physical distance, the people we care about — and why proximity, in the end, is nonnegotiable.

I think the grief you feel is proportional to the love and care you were given.

Chino came into our lives when we started renting at our landlord’s place two and a half years ago. We were fortunate to have lived under one roof. We are all blessed with people we care about deeply, but there aren’t many of them, nor is there much time guaranteed in this probabilistic world. Someone you care about could be gone the next day.

That realization forced me to question the way we have been living.

The decision to return to Canada was made to develop our careers—to pave the way for a future with more options. It was, in hindsight, a strategic arbitrage: trading proximity to our most intimate relationships in Japan and China for economic velocity and career optionality in any part of the world. 

There was nothing wrong with that choice. The trade worked. I broke out of the dead-end ALT trajectory and established myself as a developer.

But now that the career capital is secured, the equation has changed. The marginal utility of staying in Canada is decreasing, while the cost of separation—in space and in time—from the people we love continues to compound.

In many ways, I am an economic migrant in my own country. Outside of the labor market and a handful of friends from my school years, there are few strong ties keeping us here. For both my wife and me, “home” is still where our most intimate relationships reside.

I strongly believe there is no substitute for the interactions that take place between you and the people you care about. The biggest barrier is physical distance. To be separated in space is to be separated in time, and relationships require temporal investment. You need to exist in the same space-time for a relationship to grow. To nurture it is to spend time caring for it—together. How can you care for something if you are not there? This is one thing that can never be outsourced nor replaced.

In my earlier years, I looked outward for meaning—travel, absorption, new experiences. Those were formative years. But after a decade of wandering, I think I’ve entered a different season of life. “Know thyself,” as the maxim states. For what? To shed the illusions that obscure what is truly important.

Modern life offers us an abundance of things we find enjoyable. But as both the good and the bad are mutually arising, so too are neglect, loneliness, and anxiety. It is easy to lose sight of what matters while chasing what we thought was important.

I have come to realize there is only a handful of people I want to invest more time and effort into. One way to care for those relationships is to physically move closer—to simply be there. No matter how mundane the activity: a walk around the neighbourhood, a conversation that leads nowhere. It doesn’t need to lead anywhere. That’s the point. 

The goal is not to have a goal, as paradoxical as that sounds. As Alan Watts would have put it, the ultimate purpose of life is to break free from purposiveness itself.

I am fortunate to know where a great source of joy in my life comes from. So I will do what I can to follow it upstream, to be closer to the source of that spring.

The last thing I will say is this: we all lose sight of what truly matters. We chase what we believe is important without examining it, until the cost begins to hurt. Pain, in this sense, is a gift. It is one of the few feedback mechanisms strong enough to interrupt our momentum, to force a pause, and to demand that we examine the source of that pain. Often, it is because our assumptions about what mattered were wrong, and they were quietly driving us into a dead end.

It is never too late to back out of a dead end. Our hearts already know the truth. 

The difficulty is that they only whisper.