This is April. Cherry blossoms all over the timeline. I saw a post mentioning “Mono no aware” (物の哀れ). Never heard this phrase before. Turns out what makes cherry blossoms special isn’t the beauty alone. But also knowing the beauty will be gone in two weeks. And the Japanese have a name for it. Mono no aware, the ache of being moved by things that won’t stay.
Wabi sabi (Beauty in imperfection). Mono no aware. Different phrases. Both built around the same truth… nothing lasts. One is about seeing beauty in what remains. The other is about feeling the ache of what’s leaving. The Japanese don’t let these kinds of feelings pass on. They go deep. Study it. Name it. Build a culture around it. They have words for things the rest of us feel but forget. Why?
Is it the geography? The earthquakes? The typhoons? The four seasons? When the ground beneath us keeps shifting, maybe we stop building things that last forever and start building for now. We start to choose moments over monuments. A tea ceremony instead of a pyramid. Because the land keeps reminding us that nothing lasts. We can’t do anything about the tsunami. The least we can do is name what it felt like to live through. And once we name it, it becomes shared. A feeling without a name dies with the person who felt it. But a name crosses time. This one traveled an ocean and a thousand years to find me.
The moment I learned about “Mono no aware” and its meaning, I recognized that feeling. I just never had a word for it.
Thousands of photos on our phones. When was the last time you scrolled back to 2020? Why do we take photos? To remember the moment or to hold on to something we already know is leaving?
We say “capture the moment.”
Capture. A strange word.
You capture something that is trying to escape. We know the moment is passing. So we reach for the phone. Just to hold on to the moment. We tell ourselves we will revisit. Nobody’s going back to those 55 fireworks photos. But we took them anyway. Our camera roll knows the truth. There’s something mono no aware about this. Or maybe just our reflex against losing those moments.
Once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere. It’s the last evening of a holiday. You’re still there in a beautiful moment, but something starts shifting. You become aware of the passing. And that awareness changes everything, including how you experience the moment. The holiday is still there. But you know it’s ending. And that knowing is the feeling.
Funny thing is… sometimes not knowing is a feeling too. Take the spinning top climax of Inception. The whole theatre is holding its breath. Will it fall? It feels like it’s starting to wobble… and then it cuts to black. The whole theatre wanted one more second. Just one more second with that spinning top. But Nolan doesn’t give it. And that ache of not getting it… is what made it more beautiful than any answer.
If cherry blossoms bloomed all year, nobody would look up. If a song never ended, it would just become noise. If a holiday never ended, it would just become another Monday. We need the ending to feel the thing. Maybe beauty doesn’t fade. It only exists because it fades.
The petal is most beautiful between the branch and the ground.
The blossoms are still on my timeline. For now.
物の哀れ。