It was last spring when the dancing leaves of the trees caught my attention. There was this appealing sunlight coming through the leaves to my eyes. It was a beautiful moment to take a picture and spend some time looking at the light and the leaves.

Then recently I watched “Perfect Days” and learned that this phenomenon is called komorebi, a Japanese word for the shimmering of light and shadows created by leaves swaying in the wind.

“Perfect Days” is the story of a man named Hirayama. He is a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, detached from smartphones and the internet, drawn to music on cassette tapes and komorebi moments. Hirayama lives fully in the present; he slows down and finds beauty in simplicity.

That’s where I understood more about what I had felt last spring: the quiet joy of noticing fleeting moments that will never happen again.

The recipe for a perfect day isn’t found in Hirayama’s lifestyle, but in how he chooses to live each moment, letting life happen and experiencing and cherishing it as it comes.

Little Stoppers in Life

I think komorebi is more than just the beauty of the shimmering of light and shadows. It is the art of slowing the speed of life to zero, a moment when something happens that forces you to live in the present. Sometimes we need these little stoppers to truly enjoy the moment.

I once read somewhere about a man who took the elevator to his office on the 11th floor. A pile of work was waiting for him. The elevator stopped halfway, and he had to push the help button. A voice from outside said it would take a few minutes for the technician to fix the problem.

He thought he could use the time to respond to some emails, but there was no internet. So he spent a few unwanted yet unexpected minutes simply standing there, looking at the elevator walls and doing nothing at all. He realized he liked that kind of forced pause — that moment to simply live in the now.

It reminded him of another time when his shoe had fallen apart, and he tried to fix it with some glue. He followed the instructions written on the glue, from cleaning the torn part to pressing the sole together. The last step was to keep it pressed for eight minutes until the glue dried. So he sat by the window overlooking the yard, holding the shoe gently in his hands.

Those eight minutes of forced waiting brought out a different person in him, someone who finally looked around. When did this tree start bearing fruit? When did the neighbor’s daughter grow so much?

Now is Now!

As Hirayama says in Perfect Days: next time is next time, now is now.

How often do you stop to notice the little moments around you?