Beyond Letting Go, There Is Now | Part 3: Living Without Knowing
Grief Isn’t Something to End
Not long after moving to France, Atau went through a breakup, the end of a relationship that had lasted more than six years, and it changed how he related to his own emotions. Alone in an unfamiliar country, in a language he was still learning, with no one nearby to lean on, that period of instability became the breakthrough for a new way of thinking: “No one has to worry about it even if I cry right there. Nothing changes either way. So maybe I don’t need to hold my emotion back anymore.” It became, later, the foundation for something larger, accepting that he could never fully control everything.
Negative emotions — sadness, anger — aren’t something bad, in his view. They’re a natural process that takes time to work through. Society and education tend to treat sadness as something to erase as quickly as possible, but doing that, he believes, only causes problems down the line. “If you take fever medicine the second you get a fever, sometimes the cold actually gets worse, right? It’s the same idea. You notice the fever, and you let it do its work. Your body’s trying hard, so you let it be. But if the reason you got the fever is something like you kept dressing too lightly in the cold, that’s something you can fix, so you should fix it. The fever itself, though, you can’t control that. So I try not to fixate on it.” What he means to work with isn’t the feeling itself, but whatever caused it. The emotion can simply be acknowledged as it is. Grief, maybe, isn’t something to bring to an end. It’s something you spend time with.
Another memory that has stayed with him is the death of his dog, in his early twenties. Atau had stopped attending school for a period in elementary school and had been seeing a counselor at the time. When his dog died years later, that same counselor sent him a message he still carries: “Take care and cherish this time of parting.” That single sentence has stayed alive in him ever since.
Life Can’t Be Controlled
His doubts about meritocracy lead naturally into a related theme: luck. The country you’re born in, the family you grow up in — so much of a life is decided by things outside your own will. And yet society keeps talking as if everything comes down to personal responsibility. Atau pushes back against that framing.
Belonging to a generation that has lived through the Tōhoku earthquake, through a pandemic — events that brought death close — has also given him more occasions to think about it. Even the human urge to give life meaning or purpose, he suggests, might just be another expression of the desire to control things. Even the concept of time, he points out, only exists within the limits of human perception; even the certainty that you were somewhere in the past is nothing more than a hazy thing borrowed from memory.
Trees produce oxygen and sustain their ecosystems without ever knowing they’re holding up the forest. Maybe people are the same — playing some role, unaware of it, without realizing it themselves. That’s how he sees it. Which is why, he believes, letting go of the impulse to control everything, and honoring the feelings of this exact moment, might be the richest way to live. Acknowledging his own powerlessness, and still following, honestly, whatever it is he wants to do — that’s the core of the life he’s arrived at.
Asked, finally, what kind of impression he wants to leave on the people he meets, Atau answered this way. Ideally, he’d like people to want to see him again. But even if someone walked away thinking, “I never want to see him again,” that wouldn’t be a bad thing, either. What he genuinely wants to avoid is the one response that leaves no feeling behind at all: indifference.
A tree doesn’t know it’s holding up the forest. And yet it does. By sleeping when he's tired, eating when he's hungry, and living honestly by focusing on what he wants to do each moment, Atau's words, too, may be settling into someone else, and holding up the world in ways he'll never see.
