What a Privilege

It is a lazy Saturday in Sapporo. Dusty rain simmering outside the window. One of those days where boredom and restlessness arrive together and there is nothing useful to do with either of them except sit with it and see what surfaces.

I will be honest: I don’t like Sapporo.

It was probably the one significant planning mistake we made this year — a city that sounded appealing in the abstract, recommended by enough people over enough years that it accumulated a kind of borrowed appeal. Ten days in and I have moved through the full cycle: hating it, accepting it, arriving at a flat indifference that is perhaps the most honest response of all. It bores me. The concrete is grey. The rain is persistent. The city has not offered me the thing I always search for in a new place — that particular corner, that coffee shop, that human encounter that makes somewhere feel like it was waiting for you.

And so I am left, on this rainy Saturday, with the thing I often prescribe to my children when they complain of boredom: sit with it.

Let it do what it came to do.

What it has done, this time, is remind me how profoundly privileged I am.

A few years ago we spent a week at a friend’s house in Denmark — a beautiful home with a warm indoor pool. Our children never used it. Not once. I barely thought about it.

This is what happens when something extraordinary becomes ordinary. The pool that would have been a once-in-a-lifetime thrill for many families became, for us, background — another amenity we walked past on the way to other things. I notice this now with swimming pools in the houses we rent, with ocean views, with access to mountains and markets and the kind of food experiences that people save for years to afford. They have become, if I am not careful, like warm water from a tap. Present. Unremarked upon. Expected.

And yet I know — in my body, not just my mind — what it feels like when those things are not there.

Many years ago, in our life before this one, we were renovating a very old house. A house I loved, deeply and impractically, despite everything it put us through. At one point the renovation consumed our kitchen entirely — not just the appliances but the sink, the water, the most basic infrastructure of daily domestic life. I set up a temporary cooking station in the living room. We washed dishes in the upstairs bathtub, carrying everything up and back, hunched over the porcelain in a posture that was both physically uncomfortable and quietly humbling.

What we believed would take a month lasted five.

The day my husband turned on the kitchen tap for the first time — the day the water ran again where it was supposed to run — I cried. Not dramatically, not in a way I had planned. Just tears arriving from somewhere deep, from the part of me that had been quietly enduring something for five months and had not fully understood how much until the moment it was over. Clean water. From the right tap. In the right room.

One of the most common things in the world, in the places I have been lucky enough to live, and I had never once felt it as a gift until it was gone.

I think about that moment often. I think about it specifically when I find myself complaining about a kitchen that lacks proper knives or adequate counter space — because I do complain about that, regularly and with feeling, having cooked in every imaginable configuration over the years.

The kitchens with dishwashers and proper ovens make my heart genuinely sing. And I try, when I notice myself singing, to also notice the gratitude underneath — the understanding that this is not given, that it is never given, that everything we call ordinary is only ordinary because we have been fortunate enough to encounter it with enough frequency that we forgot it was something.

My husband reminded me this morning, gently and with love, of something I had half-forgotten.

Years ago — in a different version of our life, when Japan was something that existed on a screen and not something we could imagine actually reaching — I used to watch Chef’s Table and Jiro Dreams of Sushi on Netflix and feel a particular kind of longing.

Not just for the food but for the whole sensibility — the dedication, the craft, the particular Japanese understanding that the ordinary can be elevated into something sacred through enough attention and enough care. Japan felt like a dream of the distant and improbable kind.

This is our second time here. Three months each time. And at the end of this stay I have arrived at a place I did not expect and am slightly embarrassed to admit: I am tired of Japanese food.

I say this not to brag. Not to perform a sophisticated weariness designed to signal that I have had more than most. I say it because it is simply true, and because the truth of it illuminates something important: abundance, in sufficient quantities, becomes its own kind of weight. The thing you longed for becomes the thing you are sated by, and then the thing you are indifferent to, and sometimes — if you are not careful, if you are not paying attention — the thing you are quietly resentful of for no longer surprising you.

This is not a failure of gratitude. It is a feature of being human. We adapt. We normalise. We absorb extraordinary things into our baseline and then begin scanning the horizon for the next extraordinary thing.

Understanding this about ourselves is not the same as accepting it uncritically — but it is the beginning of something more honest than pretending we are immune to it.

The harder question — the one that sits with me most persistently on rainy grey Sapporo Saturdays — is how to give this understanding to my children.

They have never attended school in the conventional sense. They choose their interests, follow their curiosities, are allowed to try things and fail at them and quit and try again without the external pressure of grades or comparison or the institutional rhythm of a school year. For most of their lives they have not been forced to do anything that did not align with where they were. When things become hard they push back, as children do, wanting to move on immediately to something more comfortable. We try to hold them in those moments — to guide without forcing, to encourage without pressuring, to help them understand that the threshold of difficulty, crossed with enough patience, often leads to the particular internal reward that no external prize can replicate.

But how do you make a child feel grateful for white-water rafting in Japan on an ordinary Sunday when they have already white-water rafted before, when the extraordinary has become, for them too, simply Tuesday?

I have not solved this. I am not sure it is solvable, exactly, so much as something to be tended — an ongoing practice of pointing toward the gift rather than assuming it will be seen.

What gives me hope is the do you remember moments. They arrive unexpectedly, usually in the middle of something unrelated — a quiet evening, a car journey, a meal — when one of my children surfaces a memory and holds it up, shining, as if they have been carrying it carefully and are only now showing it to me. The memories they choose to keep are rarely the grand gestures. They are the specific and the small: the dog we walked in Australia, the sheep bones we collected in a field, the way the light fell on a particular morning somewhere we have long since left.

In those moments I see it — the gratitude that does not yet know its own name, living quietly inside them, waiting to be understood. The way I understood the kitchen tap the day the water came back.

The rain continues outside. Sapporo continues to be grey and uninspiring and entirely itself, indifferent to my feelings about it.

And I continue to sit here, cup of coffee growing cold beside me, thinking about water from a tap and sushi on a screen and what it means to have been given so much that you occasionally need a boring Saturday in a city you don’t like to remember that you have been given anything at all.

Privilege is not always comfortable.

Sometimes it looks like a grey window and a slow rain and a restlessness you can’t do anything with.

And sometimes, if you sit with it long enough, it becomes the clearest mirror you have.