A Random Place, an Unforeseen Vision

Yesterday, while sitting quietly for several hours at Rikkyo University in Ikebukuro, I was struck by an unexpected inspiration. The university itself was merely a place I had entered at random, yet in that stillness a curious vision gradually took shape. I imagined that, in my fifties, I would become both a renowned novelist and a singer-songwriter, performing with nothing more than a guitar.

What I find most curious is not the vision itself, but its timing. Nothing like this ever came to me in my youth, even though I possessed far greater energy and ambition then. I would have expected such dreams to belong to that earlier chapter of life. Instead, they have arrived only now, as if they had been waiting patiently for a different season before revealing themselves. Whether this is merely a passing fancy or the quiet emergence of a future that had long remained hidden, I cannot tell. Yet the experience has left me with the peculiar feeling that some aspirations do not announce themselves until one has lived long enough to recognize them.