Of Being

“In my new robe 

This morning 

Someone else” 

 Basho speaks of the eternal paradox within us: No one is just one. We are fragments of time pieced together by memory, each of us a mosaic of moments that refuse to stay still. Each morning, we wake as someone slightly different from who slept the night before. 

What defines us? The smile we wear or the one we hide? No one is just one. We carry multitudes in our silences, in our screams, in the space between who we are and who we think we should be. Time doesn’t heal but transforms. No one is just one. Yesterday’s scars become today’s stories - not because they hurt less, but because we learn to read them differently. We are all rough drafts of ourselves, constantly being rewritten. The beauty lies not in becoming better, but in becoming more true. Like Basho in his new robe, we discover versions of ourselves we didn’t know existed. No one is just one. 

We are the questions we haven’t answered, the words we haven’t spoken, the lives we haven’t lived yet. Each moment offers a new version of ourselves, which is not an improvement, but just a variation on the endless theme of being. To smile is to acknowledge this complexity, this beautiful burden of containing multitudes. No one is just one. We are all unfinished sentences, stories still being told, seas still learning to be seas. What else is there but this endless becoming? This constant state of flux where we are both the change and the changing? No one is just one. 

And perhaps that’s the only truth we need to hold - that we are infinite in our incompleteness.