The feeling of hikikomogomo 悲喜交々 (having alternating feelings of joy and sorrow in your heart, tasting the bittersweetness of life)

A wedding memory, a confession, and a book built on five yen coins

Last year we took our children to Japan for the summer. It didn’t turn out quite as we had hoped. We landed. We melted. We celebrated an eighth birthday at Disneyland on the hottest day of the year. We went to more convenience stores in three days than I had been to in my life. I tried to focus on the basics: stay cool and hydrated, find food they will eat, be spontaneous, have fun. It was easier said than done when I didn’t recognise myself. I am normally a calm, curious and flexible traveller, especially in Japan, where I have lived and worked for years, and been back to more times than I can remember.

I had experienced Kyoto summers before. What did I expect? The children had lost their beloved grandma just months before, and were tired at the end of a long school year. What did I expect? I was trying to have a holiday at the same time as grieving my mother and writing a book. What did I expect? Travelling anywhere with children takes all your reserves. We had no reserves. What did I expect?

I had hoped to leave the stress of the previous few months behind, but it turned out I had brought it all with me, and I was on edge, impatient and shattered.

After a couple of weeks, which got better as soon as we decided Mr K would take the girls home early and leave me to my research for Kokoro, my family left on a midnight plane to Dubai and sleep taunted me like a ghost, hovering yet not quite arriving. Despite the joy-filled last few days of our time together in Kyoto, I felt like a failure.

I tried not to think of how everything most precious to me was hurtling around the planet in a metal tube. I berated myself for not having planned better. For not having been more patient. I was sick with something that felt like the flu. I got up while it was still dark and looked in the bathroom mirror. My face was lopsided and puffy with dark triangles under my eyes. I could see every drop of grief laid out in the deep creases of my face. I had a suntan but somehow looked grey. My hair was flat. I didn’t recognise myself.

I lit a candle, made some tea, and listened for traces of my family’s laughter soaked into the walls of our tiny rented machiya. There is a beautiful term in Japanese, hikikomogomo (悲喜交々), which means having alternating feelings of joy and sorrow in your heart, tasting the bittersweetness of life. I had felt this often over the past few months, and it lingered in our little house once my family had gone. Love and loss, frustration and laughter, shadow and light, numbness and aliveness, shattering and gratitude.

It is this feeling I am remembering now, on the day that book I was there to work on – KOKORO: Japanese wisdom for a life well lived – is finally launched into the world, and I am doing none of the things you are supposed to do for a book launch. I have no events today. No live social media broadcasts. No spoken interviews, on podcasts, TV or radio. I will do all that in the coming weeks and months I am sure, but for now, for me, today is all about honouring the bittersweetness of this book being born, honouring those who shaped it but are no longer here to see it – my mother, who died last spring, and my friend Lisa, whose wise words in an end-of-life conversation as I passed the threshold of statistical midlife made me dig deep for this book.

Kokoro is dedicated to both of them, and over on Instagram this morning I invited people to post a heart, or a name, in the comments of my launch post, so Kokoro could be dedicated to the ones they love and miss too. The flood of comments reminded me how so many of us walk in this world cradling the imprint of those we can no longer share our days with. Tonight, before I go out for a celebratory dinner with Mr K, I will be lighting a candle for each and every one of them, and for all of us left behind.

Today is also my eleventh wedding anniversary. Eleven years ago today it was snowing as I arrived at the small chapel in an old white VW beetle, to marry Mr K.

We had got engaged in Japan the previous spring, and to mark this we decided to include a five-yen coin in each of the wedding favours. In Japanese, ‘five yen’ is goen, which is also a homonym for the word goen, meaning the blessing of a serendipitous, treasured relationship that honours the way our lives are mysteriously and beautifully entangled. Certain encounters shift the trajectory of our lives, or leave traces which we revisit over and over through the years.

Kokoro is built on a web of such connections spanning twenty-five years, and I can see that this book launch has been powered by such connections too. I can see it in the way this community has supported me with so many pre-orders, shared with excitement as Kokoro has arrived on their doorsteps and in their Audible accounts, and then sent me notes with their responses to reading the first few chapters today:

“I feel like you wrote this book just for me, in this part of my life right now. It resonates so deeply.”

“So moving. Powerful.”

“Stunning.” “Magical.”

“I am one third in and awe-struck.”

(You can get a copy here. Just sayin’)

We had always said we would do a big celebration on our tenth anniversary, perhaps gathering all our guests together again, but this time last year I was my mother’s bedside as she faded. Tonight we will raise a toast to her and Lisa, as we celebrate our anniversary, and the birth of Kokoro, on a rare dinner date. There may be heels. There will be cocktails. I hope there is dancing.

If I reach further back through the concertinaed book of April 4ths through the years, I come across the day, seven years ago, when my first book Freedom Seeker was published. It was the only time I have ever had a book launch party. It felt necessary, because writing a book was such a big thing, and it was my first, and there were so many people to thank. It cost me a fortune, but my ego had told me it was an important thing to do. I have since learnt that it’s OK to do things differently.

This time I have focused on writing. Written interviews, such as this one on Cave of the Heart with

Amanda B. Hinton

, and my own essays and newsletters and posts. But mostly I have been writing personal messages to people who have supported my research for Kokoro over the past five years, and supported me personally in the past year. I have been taking my time, writing a personal message in each copy of the book, and wrapping it carefully, tweaking the details depending on the person. I spent hours with my children making wax seals, imprinted with an origami heart, to attach to some of the packages. (After all, one translation of ‘kokoro’ is ‘heart’).

I have sent these off all over the UK and across the world, and it has been a joy to think of each person, and wrap my gratitude into the package each time. I know that some of those people will generously share Kokoro with their audiences, which I will be very grateful for, because it makes a huge difference. But others have no ‘audience’. Instead I imagine them sitting down with it in a comfy armchair, or under the kotatsu (heated table) at the ragged end of winter, to read, and remember our conversations over the years.

This book feels different to my others in ways I cannot explain, but I think it is to do with the fact that I finally stopped caring about what other people think, or perhaps more accurately just stopped allowing what other people think to get in the way. I just wrote what I needed to say, in order that we might meet each other, witness each other, and stumble along side by side along this wild and unpredictable road of life.

I used to think that the older I got the more I would know for sure. I was wrong.

I used to think that by the time I was in midlife I’d have everything figured out. I was wrong.

I used to think that if I never spoke of death it would not come near my door. I was wrong.

I used to think that hiding your emotions showed strength. I was wrong.

I used to think that if we just held on tightly enough, things would last for ever. I was wrong.

I used to be afraid of being wrong. I am not afraid any more.

A life well lived begins and ends with the kokoro, which is a beautiful, untranslatable word in the Japanese language which approximates to ‘the intelligent heart’. To explore the kokoro is to explore the very essence of what it means to be human in this tough yet devastatingly beautiful world, and taste the bittersweetness of all of it.

May this book be exactly what you need right now, and may it long remain with you as you embrace all that is to come. Let me know what resonates.

Beth Xx

Photos @hollybobbins_photography