As I headed toward my destination and walked straight down the street,
I noticed shide streamers and lanterns hanging from the eaves.
All around town were people wearing happi coats.
Farther ahead, I could even see a mikoshi that was still in the middle of being assembled.
It looked like a festival was about to begin.
Near the corner just beyond that,
I could hear the rhythm of drums leading the way.
They were probably practicing for the main event.
In contrast to the blazing summer sun,
a breeze typical of early summer was blowing through the street,
and the repeated drumbeats somehow sounded pleasantly soothing.
I stopped hurrying and listened quietly for a while.
Come to think of it, I’ve always had a strange fondness for the sound of practice.
After school, the blended sound of brass instruments from the wind ensemble drifting out of a distant classroom.
The tone of a saxophone in a nighttime park, playing the same phrase again and again.
The sounds of voices warming up and instruments being tuned, leaking from beyond the stage wings.
All of them are a little different from the sound of a fully finished performance.
Sounds that are not yet fully in place, sounds before they take shape.
Sounds that contain not only “right here, right now,” but also “what’s to come.”
There is something in that incompleteness that opens my heart.
The promise of beautiful days.
That phrase suddenly crossed my mind.
It’s the phrase we hold dear.
Beauty does not exist only in a finished form; it is already there in the signs that have not yet been named, and in the shape before it becomes a shape.
And the feeling that something awaits just ahead.
Perhaps we are more supported than we realize by those small signs.
With the sound of the drums fading into the distance behind me, I quickened my pace toward my destination.