I recently read an article on Hokuoh Kurashi no Doguten
about Noriko Nagatsuka.
The words she shared stayed with me—
they felt so close to where I am right now.
Noriko loves plants and flowers.
But it wasn’t something she had always been aware of.
She said that it was only in looking back
that she realized how much she had loved them all along.
When she was younger,
she often felt that she was “half-hearted in everything.”
Perhaps one reason was that she lived alongside her husband, Seiji,
who had devoted himself wholeheartedly to his work in photography.
As I read her story,
I found myself thinking about my own mornings.
Moriyan wakes up at 4 a.m. every day.
As soon as the alarm rings, he gets up and goes out for a walk.
After about an hour, he comes back home
and studies English vocabulary.
His day has a clear rhythm—
everything is planned,
and he quietly builds consistency, day by day.
When I watch him,
I can’t help but think,
“That’s amazing.”
And me—
I hear the alarm.
I hear him leave the house.
I hear him come back.
And still,
I can’t peel myself out of bed.
Half awake,
I play an affirmation video,
turn on the air conditioner,
and wait for my body to wake up on its own.
We have breakfast together at 7.
After that,
he goes back to his desk.
And me?
What should I do?
What do I want to do?
There’s a small sense of guilt
in not having anything decided.
Maybe I should be more disciplined.
Maybe I should plan my days better.
It was around that time
that I came across Noriko’s words.
When she lived in Tokyo,
she worked many different jobs.
At a sake brewery,
launching an apparel shop,
running a sculptor’s gallery,
working at an antique store,
and eventually supporting her husband’s photography work.
She kept changing jobs as opportunities came her way,
because she felt she had never fully committed to any of them.
During that time,
her husband would often say to her:
“Everything you’ve done will come together one day.”
Back then, she wondered,
“Will that day really come?”
When I read that line,
I thought about my own career.
Since becoming a physical therapist in 2016,
I’ve moved from place to place—
hospitals, home-visit rehab, orthopedic clinics, home nursing.
Each time,
I thought that maybe the next place
would bring me closer to the way I truly wanted to live and work.
But it never quite worked that way.
Looking back now,
I feel that I was simply searching for a place
where I could at least keep myself together.
At that time,
I often thought of Steve Jobs’ words:
“Connecting the dots.”
The dots only connect when you look back.
Someday,
I wanted to be able to say,
“Because I went through that,
I am here now.”
Believing that,
I kept moving forward.
But to be honest,
there was always a quiet voice inside me asking:
Will that day really come?