It was 6 AM and I was the only person at the temple.
Well, not exactly. There was a monk somewhere, because I could hear the soft sound of a broom against a stone floor. It seemed irregular and unhurried. I also heard a few birds in the pine trees nearby. There was the smell of something burning, incense maybe. But for all practical purposes, I was alone.
I had walked there from my hotel before the crowd would start coming in. The town of Kanazawa was still asleep. The streets were narrow. I passed a man arranging flowers outside a shop that wasn’t open yet. He didn’t look up, and I didn’t stop.
I reached the temple, found an unlocked gate, and went in.
I sat on a stone step and did nothing.
This is harder than it sounds. Doing nothing, I mean. Not meditating, not reflecting, not composing the newsletter article in my head. Just sitting. And what happened, slowly, was that the noise inside me became audible.
The temple, like most of Japan, was quiet. The noise I mean here is the other kind. The low-grade hum that follows me everywhere and that I have learned to mistake for thinking. It’s often the replaying of a past conversation or someone else’s opinion from a few days ago that disturbed me. Sometimes, it’s the half-formed worry about something in the future.
In Mumbai, where I live, this noise is drowned out by louder noise. That’s the bargain. You don’t have to face what’s inside because outside is relentless enough to hold all your attention. Japan doesn’t offer you that bargain. The outside, even in crowded places, goes quiet and suddenly you are left alone with yourself. This is, I suspect, why some people find it unsettling here without really knowing why.
I think we fill our lives with activity, noise, opinion, and entertainment, because silence is frightening. The noise, on the other hand, is a defence… against seeing things as they actually are.
I thought about that sitting on that stone step in Kanazawa.
An investor who cannot sit quietly is an investor who cannot think. And I don’t anymore believe it’s mere philosophy. We don’t lack information in today’s world, and even if we do sometimes, it’s not that lack of information that causes damage to our portfolios.
The damage happens because we cannot bear the discomfort of uncertainty without doing something about it. We want to buy something, sell something, read one more opinion, or call one more investor friend to confirm what we already half-believe. Worse, we equate activity with diligence, but it is really just noise management.
In the Kanazawa temple, I did not find any altar to approach or a priest to acknowledge. Instead, what I found was just space and silence and the slow return of my own mind to something resembling stillness.
It took maybe twenty minutes before my monkey mind slowed down. I’m not sure it ever stopped completely. But it slowed enough that I noticed a mild anxiety about a particular life decision I have been contemplating for weeks, and I saw it clearly for the first time. I am not talking about the life decision itself, but my anxiety about it. I noticed where it was coming from, what it was exactly about, and how much of it I did not control.
I think that’s what quietness does to us. Instead of handing us answers, it shows us what we were actually asking, underneath the question we thought we were asking.
Now, you don’t need Kanazawa or Japan for this. Because if you need to book a flight, travel across seas, to walk the narrow streets, to sit in a quiet temple, that would simply be an escape. In fact, as much as I love travelling, I have come to believe that going somewhere to find peace is just another form of avoidance. It’s because the moment you return, the noise returns with you, because it was never outside you to begin with.
But what Japan offered me is not peace. It offered me contrast. The outside became quiet enough that the inside became visible. And once you’ve seen it, and once you’ve actually heard what your own mind sounds like without the noise of the world covering it, you can’t entirely unhear it.
Anyways, as I was about to leave the temple, I saw the monk with the broom. He glanced at me without surprise, and continued sweeping. I stood up, bowed slightly for no particular reason, and walked back toward the hotel.
The city was beginning to wake. And the restlessness of my mind was beginning to wake, too.
But for almost twenty minutes on a stone step in Kanazawa, I had seen it for what it was. And that, I think, is enough to change how you listen to it.
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