Japanese philosophy of Ma: Why embracing the ‘in-between’ is important for private progress

A day with out a concrete plan can really feel like a thick slice of sourdough with out butter, or an extended hike with out a drop of water – dry, relentless, barely uncomfortable.

That was me for a lot of 2025. At 44, between jobs, between identities, and unsure as to what got here subsequent, I stored making an attempt to wrestle the long run into existence. Should I transfer? Should I get divorced? Maybe I ought to get a brand new tattoo. That’s after I found that the toughest place to be is within the not-knowing, the in-between.

In the West, we frequently name it “the void”, which instantly conjures up photos of a darkish gap able to swallow us entire. Anthropologists have a reputation for it too: liminality, the interval after one id has dissolved however earlier than one other has absolutely shaped. We all move by means of these thresholds, typically greater than as soon as.

I’d been looking for a extra hopeful means to consider that liminal house. Then, whereas rewatching Wim Wenders’ 2023 movie Perfect Days, I realised I’d encountered one years in the past, in Japan.

This film follows Hirayama, a quiet man who cleans Tokyo’s public bathrooms and leads an virtually ritualistic life. He eats easy lunches from the native konbini, tends to his crops and infrequently pauses to tilt his head in direction of daylight shimmering by means of the leaves – komorebi, because the Japanese name it. Very little occurs within the film. Yet these pauses, silences and uneventful moments are what give the movie its emotional weight.

This is the essence of a Japanese philosophy known as ma. It’s typically translated as “the space in between”, however that’s virtually too easy. Ma isn’t simply empty house – it’s significant house. It’s the pause between two notes, the silence between two individuals who know one another effectively or the vacancy of a cup ready to be full of tea. The Japanese backyard scholar Teiji Itoh describes ma as “imaginary space”.

Yet in our trendy, productivity-obsessed world, we’ve grow to be satisfied that each hole wants filling. If there’s an empty afternoon, we should always e book one thing. If work dries up, we should always hustle more durable. If a relationship ends, it’s an indication to obtain the apps. And when life stops making sense for 5 minutes, we predict we’ve taken a improper flip – or failed.

From the within, the in-between can really feel extremely unproductive and lonely. You can’t level to achievements. There are not any milestones or before-and-after photographs. It’s irritating as a result of our brains crave motion, progress, certainty. We need proof that we’re going someplace.

During my 12 months within the ready room, as I got here to name it, I began speaking to different girls. Most had been of their 40s, with kids who not wanted them each minute of the day. Some had been burned out from high-intensity careers. For others, the life they’d constructed, which seemed completely wise on paper, began to really feel like a phantom limb.

So they made a transfer. They left the wedding, or the company job, or the occupation they’d studied years for, principally as a result of staying had grow to be extra insufferable than not figuring out what got here subsequent.

One newly separated girl informed me she felt as if she’d disappeared.

Growth has horrible PR as a result of most of it occurs underground. Seeds don’t look spectacular earlier than they break by means of the soil.

“I couldn’t even make small talk,” she mentioned. “People ask what you’ve been up to, and you have nothing to say except… thinking.”

Another had stop a poisonous veterinary job in a regional city. Everyone thought she’d misplaced the plot. “People called me lazy. Or they’d hint that I’d wasted an expensive degree just to stay home and ‘figure things out’.”

It took her a 12 months to provide you with an concept to open a cell veterinary enterprise that gave her the liberty and pleasure she’d craved. Looking again, that vacant 12 months was in all probability an important work she did. But no person applauded it as a result of, from the surface, it seemed like nothing.

Growth has horrible PR as a result of most of it occurs underground. Seeds don’t look spectacular earlier than they break by means of the soil. Forests don’t develop in a single day.

This is the place ma presents one thing our tradition has forgotten. We have little language for these transformative levels of life – puberty, menopause, artistic rut or profession pivot. We glorify beginnings and endings. We rejoice productiveness, whether or not it’s having a baby, getting a brand new job or shopping for a home. But the bit within the center: the ready, wandering, dissolving, changing into? It is handled like a nuisance or a delay. Yet the truth is that these phases are precisely when one thing important, although invisible, is happening.

A Japanese good friend informed me a narrative a couple of squirrel and a forest. Driven by intuition, squirrels bury nuts and seeds to arrange for winter. But many overlook the place they hid them, or die earlier than returning to their caches, leaving the seeds to sprout into brand-new forests. Maybe it’s okay to not all the time know what comes subsequent.

I nonetheless don’t benefit from the in-between. My intuition is to achieve for one more plan, one other pitch, at any time when life falls silent. But then I consider ma. Yesterday morning, earlier than an essential name, I spent 20 minutes sitting on a bench, wanting up on the bushes like Hirayama in Perfect Days. I wasn’t ready for inspiration or making an attempt to be conscious. I used to be merely making house.

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