> Yoyū
From Craig Mod's excellent walking travelogue Things Become Other Things:
So I walked. I walk. I walk and I walk and I walk and feel the air of our town leave my cells and be replaced by the air and ideas of a different time and place. The more I breathe this Peninsula air, the more I realize that it would have been so easy to have elevated my father as a child. This shocks me, the first time I feel this on the road: the space in my heart for forgiveness—forgiveness! The moment I felt that was like getting hit in the head with a basketball—a freakish pang, a dull ache in the skull. I almost fell into a bush. I was hyperventilating-realizing my heart had expanded in some immeasurable, beyond-physics way that hearts can expand, and in that expansion I had new space. There's a word in Japanese that sums up this feeling better than anything in English: yoyū. A word that somehow means: the excess provided when surrounded by a generous abundance. It can be applied to hearts, wallets, Sunday afternoons, and more. When did this happen to me? This extra space. this yoyū, this abundance. Space that carried with it patience and—gasp —maybe even … love? For a guy who provided almost nothing? These are the shocks of the walk. The walk makes me better than I ever imagined I could be (and in this, too, I see how good you could have been). Better than anyone showed us we could be. (Far better than who I was earlier on.) Stability, a bit of care, is that all it takes? The most basic of resources. But these were resources we didn't have, and guys like my dad never knew. How could my father's parents have felt yoyū when they themselves were pressed against the wall by economic circumstance, by political flops and failures? No one in their circles had seen a child elevated in decades. Enough time passes and you forget how to do that shit.
Seth Godin has a post defining yoyū too:
Finding the space to care an unreasonable amount is cultural and it often requires a system to nurture that sort of effort. We need room to spare. We need to stop being in such a hurry and focus on the work and the art in a way that’s generative, not frazzled.
The Japanese term for this is yoyu. 余裕 is effort and ease, time and passion.
The characters 余 (yo) means “surplus” or “extra,” and 裕 (yu) means “abundance” or “affluence.”
Yoyu has several interconnected meanings:
- Having spare time or room
- Being relaxed or composed
- Having financial leeway or resources to spare
- Mental/emotional capacity to handle situations calmly