June 25, 2026

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perturbed, though you still get the same soaking.

Takuan Sōhō wrote letters to samurai during the early Edo period, a time when warriors trained for battle but rarely fought in one, leaving them to grapple instead with discipline, idleness, and the slow erosion of purpose. His core teaching was that hesitation itself is the enemy — not the opponent, not the situation, but the moment you stop and calculate. Tsunetomo's rainstorm image, from the same tradition, captures exactly what Takuan meant: courage is not the absence of difficulty, it is the decision made before difficulty arrives. What makes this land today is that most of us delay not because the situation is unclear, but because we keep hoping the rain will stop before we have to move.