This title is a phrase from a Japanese poem by Kenji Miyazawa. The opening of the poem reads as follows:
Be not defeated by the rain, Nor let the wind prove your better.
Succumb not to the snows of winter. Nor be bested by the heat of summer.
Be strong in body. Unfettered by desire. Not enticed to anger. Cultivate a quiet joy.
Count yourself last in everything. Put others before you.
Watch well and listen closely. Hold the learned lessons dear.
I read this translation first while in Japan as a teenager. At that time, in addition to a full day of classes, my parents insisted that I take Japanese lessons three days a week after school. As I was already taking French and Latin in school, trudging to my Japanese lessons while my friends were liberated from classes was one thing too many. I was not a very eager pupil, and this one poem was the only thing I took away from those lessons. The teacher read me the poem in English and then Japanese trying to show me how important it was to read a person’s artistic effort in his original language. The nuances of her examples are long forgotten a half a century later, but the poem in translation still rings true to me these many years later.
It is interesting that what engaged me at thirteen in 1955 were the first two lines. As with every teenager I often felt defeated by my life’s winds and storms and heat and I longed not to succumb. Now I am struck by the rest of the poem which seems to speak to old age with the calm that can come with the mounting years. The quiet joy is encouraging the next generation, putting the needs of the others one meets in the day’s rounds ahead of ones own --- listening, watching, and working to use life’s lessons every day.
I wish for all of us at the remoter end of life’s continuum a quiet joy.