Recently, I was doomscrolling and stumbled on an interview, I think it was Maya Angelou, where she said something like: don't love someone who doesn't love himself. Her reasoning was elegant in the way that bad advice often is. You wouldn't ask a hungry person for food. Someone who doesn't love himself won't love you back. He wants to possess you, but he will not love you.

I disagree with this. Not with the observation that self-loathing can warp a relationship (it can), but with the premise underneath it, the idea that love is a resource you must first stockpile before you can distribute. That you must be full before you can feed anyone.

In my experience, those who didn't receive much are often the ones who give more. The reason is simple: they know what it is to have nothing. They recognise absence when they see it in someone else, and they respond to it, not out of surplus, but out of recognition. Being rich has never made anyone more generous. Knowing poor does.

Loving yourself makes life easier, I will grant that. It gives you a certain weight in what you say, a confidence that other people register. And I agree that confidence can be attractive. But the world is full of foolish people who give too much weight to their own words, and I am not convinced that what they are practising is love. It looks more like curation.

There is a version of self-love that means sitting with who you actually are (the anxious parts, the unkind parts, the parts that don't photograph well) and choosing not to abandon yourself. This is difficult, unglamorous work, and it tends to produce people who are gentle with others because they have had to learn gentleness toward themselves.

And then there is another version, the one that has taken over. This version says: build a self worth loving. Optimise. Heal publicly. Curate your damage into a narrative of growth, preferably one with good lighting. Post the meditation retreat, the therapy breakthrough, the morning routine that signals you have done the work. This version is not self-knowledge. It is self-marketing. And it has become so pervasive that we have confused the two, mistaking the person who performs wellness for the person who has actually learned to sit in a room with their own failures.

I should say: not everyone who shares their growth publicly is performing. Some people speak openly about their process and that openness is its own kind of generosity. The problem is not visibility. The problem is when the performance replaces the thing it was supposed to represent, when the curated narrative of healing becomes the healing itself, and the person underneath stops being consulted.

Social media has not invented this confusion, but it has industrialised it. The feed presents an endless procession of people who appear to have arrived at self-acceptance, at inner peace, at a body and a life and a relationship that reflect the work they have done on themselves. The standard is impossibly high and, worse, it is fictional. A comedian I like, Josh Thomas, once made a point that punctures all of it: stop comparing yourself to this impossible image. Get on a bus. Look around. That is the average. That is the bar you are trying to clear, and it is not that high.

He is right, and the relief of it is enormous. The person sitting next to you on the bus (unremarkable, probably tired, almost certainly not thriving in any way that would survive a caption) is capable of great love. Or great cruelty. Or both, in the same week. The capacity to love well has nothing to do with having a curated self. It has to do with showing up, imperfect and aware of it, and deciding that someone else's experience matters as much as your own.

This is where Maya Angelou's metaphor breaks down. Love is not food. It is not a finite resource that depletes as you give it. If anything, it works the other way around: people who have been starved of love often develop an acute sensitivity to it. They notice its absence in others because they have lived inside that absence. And when they choose to offer it (not out of fullness, but out of knowledge) it is not lesser love. It may, in fact, be the more honest kind, because it carries no illusion that the giver has it all figured out.

I do not want to romanticise this. Scarcity does not always produce generosity. Sometimes it produces the opposite: anxiety, control, the desperate grip of someone who has never had enough and cannot believe that what they are holding will stay. The hungry person who grabs at love is real, and I have seen that pattern too. But here is what matters: that grasping is not caused by a failure to love yourself. It is caused by never having been shown what love looks like when it is not scarce. The "love yourself first" orthodoxy treats both responses (the generous and the grasping) as the same pathology, as if anyone who hasn't assembled themselves into a picture of health is equally dangerous to love. They are not. And collapsing them is lazy.

The demand that someone love themselves before they are worthy of being loved is, when you look at it closely, a way of making love conditional on a performance of health. It says: come to me whole, or do not come at all. But no one is whole. The people who seem whole are often simply better at presentation. And the people who admit they are not (who show up fractured, uncertain, still learning) are not asking you to fix them. They are asking you to be present while they do the work. That is not possession. That is trust.

I think what Maya Angelou was describing, the hungry person who grabs at love, is real. But it is not caused by a lack of self-love. It is caused by a lack of self-awareness. Those are different things entirely. You can love yourself enormously and still be incapable of seeing another person clearly. In fact, an excess of self-regard might be the thing that most reliably blinds you. The narcissist loves himself plenty. He is not, by any useful definition, good at love.

What matters is not whether you have arrived at some threshold of self-acceptance before you are permitted to love someone. What matters is whether you can see the other person, not as a mirror, not as a solution, not as proof of your own progress, but as someone with their own weather, their own noise, their own particular way of being afraid. That kind of seeing does not require you to be healed first. It requires you to pay attention.

But I want to say something to the other kind, the ones who have made a religion out of their own growth. The ones who move through people like chapters they have outgrown, who speak about boundaries the way others speak about walls, who have learned the vocabulary of healing so thoroughly that they can narrate their own cruelty as progress. Someone once told me that we should "graduate" from each other. As if people were coursework. As if the ones you leave behind were just a stage in your development, a prerequisite for the better version of yourself that no longer needs them. 

Responsible affection is not something you arrive at once you are whole. It is something you practise while you are not. And it has never depended on how good you are. It depends on whether you are willing to look back at the people you have touched and ask yourself honestly: did I leave them better or worse for knowing me? Not in the narrative you tell yourself at night. In theirs.

Some years ago, I lived on the campus of Kyushu University. The campus itself was a collage of grey cement; functional, graceless, the kind of architecture that seems designed to discourage attachment. But it was built in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mountains, and if you walked toward the coast you would stumble into rice fields and, at the right hour, crabs, hundreds of them, running together across the wet ground, their shells catching the sunlight. The effect was strange and beautiful, like dew drops that had learned to move.

If I wanted to see civilisation, I had to take a bus. It crossed the rice fields on a narrow road, and I would press my forehead against the window, feeling the glass cool against my skin, watching the landscape pass. A small temple half-hidden by trees. A person bent over in a rice paddy. The mountains behind everything, holding it all in place. And I remember, very clearly, that I was happy and sad at the same time. Not sad about anything. Sad the way you are sad when something is so beautiful it already feels like a memory while it is still happening.

I did not have a word for this at the time. I do now, several, in fact, borrowed from different traditions and disciplines, none of them quite sufficient on their own. But I want to try laying them next to each other, because I think they are all describing the same experience from different angles, the way several people might describe the same room depending on which window they are looking through.

The Japanese phrase ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会) is usually translated as "one time, one meeting." It comes from the tea ceremony tradition, where it served as a reminder that each gathering is unique and cannot be repeated, even if the same people sit in the same room and drink from the same cup. The standard reading is aspirational: because this moment will never come again, be fully present to it. Savour it. Let it be enough.

I have always found this advice beautiful and slightly cruel. Because in my experience, the awareness that something is unrepeatable is not what allows me to savour it. It is what makes it ache. On the bus through the rice fields, I was not failing to be present. I was excruciatingly present. And the presence itself was what produced the sadness, because to perceive something fully is to perceive, simultaneously, that it is passing.

During my last weeks at Kyushu, this sharpened into something more explicit. I would catch myself thinking: what if this is the last time I see these rice fields? What if this is the last time I take this bus? What if I never see the crabs again? The thoughts were not dramatic. They arrived quietly, on the bus, forehead to glass, as observations. But they changed the quality of the looking. Everything became more vivid and more painful at once, as if beauty and loss were not opposites but the same thing seen from two directions.

There is a term in psychology for grieving something that has not yet been lost: anticipatory grief. It was originally described in the context of terminal illness, the mourning that begins before death, when the loss is certain but has not yet arrived. But the mechanism is broader than that. Anticipatory grief can attach itself to a place you know you are leaving, a phase of life you feel ending, a version of yourself that is quietly being replaced by another. It does not require a tragedy. It only requires the recognition that something you love is impermanent, which is to say, it only requires paying attention.

What interests me is that anticipatory grief is not a failure of presence. It is, if anything, an excess of it. The person grieving in advance is not distracted or detached. They are doing something almost unbearably attentive: holding the experience and its disappearance in the same hand.

Neuroscience offers a strange companion to this. The phenomenon known as cortical reinstatement describes how the brain, when recalling a past experience, reactivates many of the same neural patterns that were active during the original event. Memory, in other words, is not a recording played back on a different screen. It is a partial reliving. The visual cortex lights up again. The sensory associations return. When I remember the bus, the cool glass, the light on the rice fields, the crabs; some part of my brain is not retrieving a file. It is, in a limited but measurable sense, putting me back on the bus.

This means something, I think, for the question of attachment. I still feel attached to that view, to that bus, to the particular quality of light on those particular fields. I used to think this was sentimental. Maybe it is. But cortical reinstatement suggests that the attachment is not merely emotional residue. The experience is still partially alive in the architecture of the brain. Nostalgia is not a longing for the past. It is the past, incompletely, insistently, still happening.

The Japanese have a phrase for this: mono no aware (物の哀れ), the pathos of things, the bittersweet awareness that everything we perceive is in the process of passing. It is not a diagnosis. It is closer to an aesthetic principle, the idea that beauty and transience are not separate qualities but the same quality, and that the ache you feel in the presence of something beautiful is not a failure to enjoy it. It is the enjoyment, fully registered.

I left Kyushu years ago. I have not been back. The campus, I imagine, still looks the same, grey cement against green mountains, the bus crossing the rice fields on its narrow road. I do not know if the crabs are still there. What I know is that when I close my eyes and return to that window, the glass is still cool, the light still falls the way it fell, and the sadness is still there, folded neatly inside the beauty, exactly where I left it. My brain, faithful and unasked, putting me back on the bus.

There is a moment, every spring, when the city seems to hold its breath.

It lasts perhaps a week, sometimes less. The cherry trees along the canal break open all at once, as if by quiet agreement, and for a few days the air is thick with pale petals drifting like slow snow. People stop. They sit on blue tarps beneath the branches with bento boxes and cans of beer, laughing, taking photographs, doing nothing in particular. It feels, briefly, like the world has decided to be gentle.

And then it ends.

The petals brown at the edges. The wind carries them into gutters and storm drains. The branches empty. By June, the trees are just trees again, green, ordinary, easy to ignore.

What people notice is the spectacle. What they forget is everything that made it possible.

The sakura that line Japan's rivers and parks are not wild. They are the result of centuries of careful cultivation, grafting, selection, patience layered across generations. The most iconic variety, the Somei-yoshino, did not exist before the Edo period. It was shaped by human hands into something very specific: abundant, pale, and fleeting.

Every tree is a continuation of that decision.

And the work did not stop there. Cherry trees are fragile. They bend under the weight of their own blossoms after rain. They are vulnerable to disease, to insects, to time itself. In parks across Kyoto and Tokyo, there are people whose entire working lives are devoted to keeping particular trees alive, monitoring soil, pruning with precision, bracing old limbs so they do not break.

This is not casual care. It is closer to devotion.

All of it, for a week of flowers.

There is a Japanese phrase for the feeling this produces: mono no aware, often translated as "the pathos of things." It names a kind of knowledge that isn't intellectual but felt, a sensitivity to the way things arrive, and the way they leave. The cherry blossom is its clearest expression: a beauty so brief it teaches you, as you watch it, that beauty and loss are not opposites, but reflections of the same moment.

The blossoms are not an accident. They are the outcome of patience that stretches beyond any single lifetime. Someone planted the tree knowing they might never see it mature. Someone else pruned it knowing the bloom was still months away. Someone else will replace it when it finally fails.

At every point, a person decided that a week of beauty was worth years of invisible work.

The Ginkgo and What Returns

If the sakura teaches that beauty requires patience, the ginkgo teaches that patience requires something harder, stubbornness.

The ginkgo is an ancient tree, older than almost anything else we live among. It has survived ice ages, extinctions, fire. It was among the first living things to grow again in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb, blackened trunks sending up new green shoots within months.

It endures.

For most of the year, it asks for no attention. A steady presence along avenues and temple grounds, its fan-shaped leaves blending into the background. And then, in late November, something shifts. The leaves turn all at once, over the course of a few days, into a yellow so vivid it feels almost unreal.

Where the cherry blossom whispers, the ginkgo insists.

I have walked beneath them on the Komaba campus in that brief window, when the avenue becomes a tunnel of gold. The light catches in the leaves overhead and seems to glow from within. The ground below is covered so thickly that your footsteps make no sound. It feels less like walking through a place than through a memory.

And then, just as quickly, it is gone. The leaves fall. The branches empty. The tree returns to stillness.

What moves me is not just the beauty, but the contradiction. Here is something that can survive almost anything, and yet its most luminous moment lasts only days. All that endurance, all that quiet persistence, in service of something fleeting.

The tree does not endure in order to remain beautiful. It endures in order to become beautiful again.

The Months Between

This is the part we rarely talk about.

Nothing is beautiful all the time.

The cherry tree in July is unremarkable. The ginkgo in February is bare, almost austere against a pale sky. If you saw them only then, you would never guess what they are capable of. You would pass them without thinking.

And yet the care continues.

Someone is pruning in the cold. Someone is watching the soil, checking for disease, clearing what needs to be cleared. The monks at old temples still sweep around the roots when there is nothing to admire. The city workers still tend the trees when no one is looking.

The care does not pause when the beauty does.

This, I think, is the most important lesson.

The things we love will have long stretches where they offer us nothing visible in return. Your work will have winters. The people you love will have seasons when they are distant, tired, dimmed. You will have your own months of bare branches and grey sky.

The temptation is to mistake these periods for endings. To assume that what is not currently beautiful has lost its value. To walk away.

But beauty was never a permanent state. It was always a recurrence.

It comes, and it goes, and it comes again, but only if something sustains it in the meantime. Only if someone stays.

Without that care, nothing collapses all at once. It simply stops returning.

And maybe this is where we struggle now. Not only with letting things go, but with staying when there is nothing immediate to hold onto. We have learned how to appreciate the bloom. We are less comfortable with the waiting that makes the bloom possible.

The trees suggest a different way.

They do not resist the empty seasons. They do not try to hold onto the moment of flowering. Instead, everything is oriented toward return. The soil is kept right. The roots are protected. The work continues, quietly, without spectacle.

There is a kind of faith in that. Not abstract, but practiced. A belief, built from repetition, that what has come before can come again.

A Small Lesson in Gold and Pink

I am writing this  in Yamashina, where the cherry trees are open. The canal path will become briefly, almost impossibly beautiful. I walk through it, and try to pay attention while it lasts.

I will not take many photographs.

And months from now, the ginkgoes will turn. The same pattern: the long quiet, the sudden brilliance, the soft collapse back into stillness.

Between those moments, there will be ordinary time. Green leaves. Bare branches. Days when nothing calls for notice.

And somewhere in those days, someone will still be tending the roots.

I think more and more that this is what it means to love anything honestly. Not just to show up for the moments when it shines, but to remain when it does not. To keep your hands in the soil during the long, uneventful stretches. To trust, not blindly but patiently, that the cycle is not finished.

Anyone can love the tree in bloom.

It takes something quieter, and steadier, to love the bare branches; to stay, to tend, and to believe, even then, that the season will turn again.

There is a particular kind of silence that arrives without warning. No explanation, no farewell,  just absence where a person used to be. We have a word for it now: ghosting. And increasingly, I notice it being dressed in the language of spiritual wisdom, detachment, letting go, and protecting one's energy. As if disappearing from someone's life were a form of inner peace.

I have been on the receiving end of this silence. After a breakup, I found myself replaying the logic my ex had often shared with me, ideas borrowed from Buddhism about non-attachment, about releasing what no longer serves you. For a while, I wondered if maybe he was right. Maybe the inability to say a clear goodbye was, in some way, the more evolved response.

It isn't. And I think it is worth saying why, not out of bitterness, but because a beautiful and demanding philosophy is being flattened into a convenient excuse.

What Non-Attachment Actually Asks of Us

In Buddhist thought, non-attachment, upādāna in Pali, often translated as "clinging", refers to the grasping quality of mind that binds us to suffering. The teaching is not that we should feel nothing or owe nothing to others. It is that we should learn to hold experience without clutching it, to love without demanding that love preserve us from pain.

This distinction matters enormously. The Buddha did not walk away from people in silence. He spent forty-five years in dialogue with students, sceptics, kings, and outcasts. The Eightfold Path, the practical heart of Buddhist ethics, includes sammā vācā, right speech. Right speech is traditionally understood through four qualities: it is truthful, it is timely, it is gentle, and it is beneficial. Silence, when someone is owed an honest word, fails on every count.

There is also sammā kammanta (right action), which calls for conduct rooted in karuṇā, compassion, and ahiṃsā, non-harm. Ghosting does harm. The particular harm of unexplained absence is that it leaves the other person without a reality to respond to. There is no argument to process, no reason to grieve against. Just a void, and the slow, corrosive work of filling it with self-doubt.

And then there is the matter of dukkha: suffering, or more precisely, the unsatisfactoriness that pervades conditioned experience. Ghosting almost always arises from a desire to avoid one's own discomfort: the awkwardness of a difficult conversation, the guilt of delivering unwelcome honesty. But Buddhism does not promise escape from discomfort. It offers a way to sit with suffering rather than flee from it. To use the word "detachment" while running from a hard conversation is, paradoxically, one of the deepest forms of attachment there is, attachment to one's own comfort, to a self-image that never has to face friction.

If we take the philosophy seriously, a more genuinely Buddhist response to a relationship that must end would look something like this: honest, compassionate directness. Acknowledging the other person's dignity. Accepting the discomfort of goodbye as part of the practice, not an obstacle to it.

The Japanese Silence, and What Lies Beneath It

I write this from Tokyo, where I have lived long enough to notice a second, distinct layer to the culture of disappearance. Japan has its own complex relationship with silence and indirectness, and it would be dishonest to conflate it with the Buddhist misreading I have described. But the two can look remarkably similar from the inside of a vanished conversation.

Japanese social life is shaped by a set of concepts that, taken together, create an architecture of indirectness. Kuuki wo yomu (空気を読む), literally, "to read the air", is the expectation that one will perceive the unspoken emotional climate of a situation and respond accordingly. To fail at this is KY (空気読めない), socially obtuse. A direct rejection, in many contexts, would be a far greater disruption than a gentle fade. The harmony of the group, wa (和), often takes precedence over individual clarity.

There is also the well-known distinction between tatemae (建前) and honne (本音): the public face and the private feeling. Tatemae is not dishonesty; it is a social technology, a way of navigating shared space without constant collision. When someone says "that would be difficult" (chotto muzukashii, ちょっと難しい), the expectation is that you will understand this as a no. The words do the work of refusal while preserving both parties' dignity.

I have come to respect much of this. There is a genuine care in it, a refusal to humiliate, an attention to the other person's face that more direct cultures sometimes lack. But there is a boundary where indirectness becomes something else. When the slow fade is not a gentle no but simply the absence of any signal at all, the care it was supposed to carry evaporates. The person on the other side is not being spared; they are being left to decode a silence that may mean anything or nothing.

And even within Japanese ethical tradition, there are values that ghosting violates. Seijitsu (誠実) (sincerity, integrity) is deeply valued. So is giri (義理), the sense of social obligation and reciprocity that governs relationships. To simply vanish from someone who has invested trust in you is, arguably, a failure of giri, a debt of basic human acknowledgement left unpaid.

The anthropologist Edward T. Hall once described Japan as a "high-context culture," in which meaning is conveyed more by context, relationships, and shared understanding than by explicit words. But high-context communication still requires context. Ghosting removes even that. It is not high-context, it is no-context. It asks the other person to read air that is no longer there.

The Convenient Collapse

What I find most striking is how easily these two traditions, Buddhist non-attachment and Japanese indirectness, can be collapsed into a single justification for avoidance. The logic runs something like this: I don't owe anyone an explanation. Letting go is wisdom. Directness is aggression. Silence is peace.

Each of these claims contains a grain of truth twisted just enough to become false. You do not owe everyone everything, but you owe something to someone who trusted you. Letting go is wisdom, but letting go is not the same as never arriving. Directness can be aggressive, but it can also be the most compassionate thing you offer someone. And silence can be peace, but only if the other person has been given enough to find their own.

The real work, in Buddhist practice, in Japanese social ethics, in any human relationship, is not the avoidance of difficulty. It is the willingness to meet difficulty with care. To sit with the discomfort of honesty. To say the thing that costs you something, because the person across from you deserves a world they can make sense of.

A Small Act of Presence

I do not write this as someone who has always gotten it right. I have avoided hard conversations. I have mistaken my own cowardice for calm. But I have also been the one staring at a phone that went permanently quiet, and I know which silence is worse.

If there is a lesson in any of this, it is perhaps the simplest one: that presence, even the painful, imperfect presence of an honest goodbye, is not the opposite of letting go. It is the condition that makes letting go meaningful. You cannot release what you never had the courage to hold.

Ghosting is not enlightenment. It is not even good manners. It is the quiet refusal to be a person in the presence of another person. And no tradition worth its name has ever called that wisdom.