Days in Niseko

A few days ago I lay on the turquoise blue bed of my acupuncturist Masashi-san at Dome Therapy Niseko, long needles placed with quiet precision in various parts of my body, listening to the rain insisting against the windows and the gentle melody of the Totoro theme drifting through the room.

I thought about writing. I thought about the future just ahead of us, still unformed, still full of the particular combination of possibility and anxiety that the future always carries when you are trying to shape it for five people with five different sets of needs and wishes.

Outside, the Japanese rain continued its argument with the world.

Rain in Japan is something entirely its own. I learned this first on Okinawa two years ago and have been reminded of it every day for the past ten days in Niseko. It does not suggest. It insists — warm and heavy and utterly persuasive, the kind of rain that makes staying indoors feel not like a choice but like an obvious truth. The heat and humidity these past weeks have been extraordinary: the kind that sits on your chest, that builds pressure in your head through the day until by late afternoon the body feels like something that belongs to someone else. My mood, on those days, has moved from fine to unreasonably irritated within the space of a single hour and then back again, the way weather does, the way bodies do when the climate is asking too much of them.

The days inside have been slow and thick and not always comfortable.

And yet — if you ask me what we have been doing, the honest answer is: nothing and everything. Which is perhaps the most accurate description of what the interior life of this nomadic family looks like during its planning seasons.

One of the hardest things about this life — the thing that doesn’t make it into the photographs or the blog posts about moss temples and green pigeons and Bachata dancing — is the mental burnout that arrives, reliably, when the planning begins.

Because planning this life is not simple. It is not a matter of choosing a destination and booking flights. It is the sustained, complex, often exhausting work of trying to find the intersection of five completely different human beings’ needs, wishes, limits, and dreams — and then building something liveable inside that intersection.

From one side: the wish to return to something known, to winter sports, to new countries never visited. From another: the need for slow travel, for staying long enough somewhere to actually arrive. Weather conditions. Air quality. Access to nature. Food that supports our health. My own non-negotiables — an Ashtanga shala, a proper gym, the possibility of meeting locals rather than only other travellers. Good internet. No mould. Reliable community. A kitchen worth cooking in. Space for five people to coexist without going quietly mad.

Budget or spacious? Known or unknown?

Together with others or on our own?

We have been all over the place. Thrilled one morning. Exhausted by afternoon. Dreaming something into existence and then, an hour later, dismantling it because one element doesn’t work, and then rebuilding it again slightly differently, and then dismantling it again.

This is the work that happens behind the beautiful photographs. It is unglamorous and sometimes demoralising and entirely necessary, and I am learning — slowly, imperfectly — to hold it alongside the beauty rather than letting it eclipse it.

Here is where we have arrived, for now.

We are entering the last month of this Japan chapter. Soon — sooner than feels possible — we will be on our own again, just our family of five, as the Traveling Village gradually disperses toward Europe and other lives. In a week our closest travel companions head back. We have three more weeks in Sapporo before Seoul and then Croatia.

Japan will not be the last time. I already know this with the certainty I reserve for things I have felt rather than decided. I want to spend a winter here. We dreamed, for a while, of skiing in Japan in January and February — and while that dream has been set aside for now in favour of a worldschooling hub in France followed by Goa and India — Mysore has been on my list for years, the yoga part of my soul calling toward it — Japan remains on the horizon.

Patient. Waiting. Knowing we will be back.

For the social architecture our children need, we have arranged a reunion with three other families, larger chunks of travel together to give them the consistency of familiar faces. Vietnam may return to the itinerary. Georgia and Uzbekistan have been appearing in our conversations with increasing frequency — fast travel through ancient landscapes, something different from the slow soaking-in we have been doing this year.

Maybe is a word we try not to keep for long. It has a way of becoming inertia if you hold it too loosely, and anxiety if you hold it too tightly. What we are trying to find is the middle space — the planning that is detailed enough to feel real, open enough to absorb what life actually delivers.

I need predictability. I need the comfort of knowing, even while knowing, as I always do, that certainty is not available and never has been. I am learning to hold both of these truths simultaneously — the need and its impossibility — with something approaching grace rather than resistance.

What makes this planning season feel particularly charged is the awareness, arriving with increasing clarity, that our children are not small anymore.

They are racing toward their best teen years at a speed that does not consult me before accelerating. One of them will be eight, then nine, in the time we are planning toward. The eldest is already becoming a young woman in ways I catch myself watching with a mixture of wonder and the particular bittersweet awareness that accompanies watching someone need you differently than they used to.

Where do I even begin with that? I am not sure I do, not yet. I simply notice it, and hold it, and keep planning the year that will hold all of us while we all keep changing.

Today the sun is shining.

The rain that has been arguing with Niseko for days has, at least for this morning, relented. It is warm and clear and Mt. Yotei — the volcano that watches over this valley with the patient authority of something very old and entirely unconcerned with human plans — looks particularly beautiful from where I am sitting.

I look at it and feel something I have been searching for through all the planning and the burnout and the humid sleepless nights: a settling. A reminder that we are very small and the mountain is very large and the green goes all the way to the horizon in every direction and that is, somehow, enough.

We will figure out the year. We always do.

And in the meantime: the sun, the mountain, the green, the quiet that has returned after the rain.

It is enough to be here.

It has always been enough.

I just need the rain to stop, occasionally, to remember it.