“A never-ending journey continues”

Listening again to the song “This is my road” (here on YouTube, but I bought my copy) by Kanon, sung in a mix of English and Japanese with a little Latin and Greek thrown in from Christian rituals. (There is also an English-only version, but they differ a bit.) This is a truly beautiful song, and it was almost solely the inspiration for my attempts at last year’s NaNoWriMo. Eventually I failed that one, but not because of this song. The vision it raised in my mind was simply greater than I was capable of expressing.

The phrase that particularly rang out to me was “Hateshinai toki wo koete” – approximately “unlimited time is surpassed” or words to that effect. So I set out to write a story about a road that surpassed time – a road to immortality. The simple discipline of walking this road day after day would slowly transform the main character as he bit by bit, almost unnoticeably, moved from the barely ordinary into the extraordinary, and then ever deeper into it, into a world filled with miracles.

A lot of people have walked such a road, and some are even now doing so. But I speak then about a spiritual journey. I wanted to dress it in a more concrete language, to make it come alive for those who are yet unable to see that other road. But I failed, which should probably surprise no one.

Perhaps less talk, more walk would help. It has already been a year since then. I am still not one of those “where did the years go” people, for which I am thankful, but I am not sure I have changed as much this past year as I did the year before. Timelessness takes time, and I am wasting too much of mine, when I could be moving deep into a land of miracles, surpassing even the undefined expanses of time itself.