• tumbl a few more passages from The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• give away beauty
• read half a book for class tomorrow
• read Japanese blogs about walking a 1,400km pilgrimage
• write a thesis topic

“[When men lost their jobs in the] Japanese recession, […]some had lost their families as well. One particularly poignant case[…] is a man, aged, it would appear, in his early fifties, whom I met near Temple 7 in April 2000. From his clean white pilgrim’s clothes, new bamboo hat, and staff, I could tell that he had not been on the pilgrimage long. Indeed, he was wearing shoes more suited to an office than to a fourteen-hundred-kilometer walk, had no guidebook, and was unsure whether he was on the right path. The story he told me was that he had lost his job and thus spent more and more time at home, where he had begun to get into recurrent arguments with his wife, so that the marriage began to fall apart. He had walked out in the middle of one such argument and gone to stay with his daughter, but she had given him short shrift, telling him that if he wanted to rescue his marriage he needed to sort himself out first. Feeling he was the primary cause of his marital discord, he wanted to do something that would demonstrate his repentance and improve his state of being. Having seen a television program about the henro and heard that people did it was a way of improving themselves, he had come on impulse to Shikoku, arriving the day before and going straight to Temple 1, where he stayed overnight and purchased his pilgrim’s “uniform.” Now he was, as he put it, coming face-to-face wit himself and his problems and was trying to work out a new way forward by getting rid of his internal anger and, through his, finding a way to repair his marriage.

His initial departure was, in other words, impulsive rather than planned[…] (indeed, his shoes were so inappropriate for walking any distance that he knew he had to get better footwear as soon as possible) and that spontaneity, especially in reaction to personal circumstance, may also be a factor leading people along the henro path. It was brought about because of despair and personal misfortune coupled with the desire for repentance[…] and the wish to reform his life so that he could make a new beginning by returning, renewed, to his wife.”