| Tank Top |
September 26, 2017
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| After retiring from his job, he lived life busier than before. He had to listen to classical music. When he worked, he didn't have enough time to listen to classical music in a silent and still environment. He had to watch DVDs of movies and TV dramas. Since he was young, he liked movies and foreign dramas. He had many favorite directors. He had to read mysteries and science fictions. He had bought a lot of those books at secondhand book stores but he hadn't read almost any of them. He belonged to a social dance club, a tennis club, and a Yoga club. He sometimes went out for drink with his friends. He couldn't live more busily. But ... sometimes he felt an unsatisfied feeling. "Why?" He had no idea. One day, when he took out the garbage to the collection bin, he realized a white shirt on the hedge. It was a sports tank top with a logo of a famous sports maker. A medium-sized for men. "Did somebody who was jogging change his clothes and forget this  tank top on my hedge? No chance!" He remembered that it was very windy the previous day, so maybe the shirt was blown from somebody's house. He put the shirt back on the hedge thinking that the owner might find it. Two days passed. The shirt was still there. He was washing his clothes in the machine. He thought a little and he took the shirt from the hedge and put it into the washing machine. The next day, the shirt was dry. He wondered what to do. One: Take it to the police station, Lost & Found. But ... maybe nobody would claim it. It is not an expensive shirt, so no one would go. Two: Throw it away. Three: Take it to a second hand shop which was run by a NPO. He couldn't decide and left it for the time being. Two days later, he remembered it. When he started to rethink, he got an idea, number four: Use it himself for jogging. He thought that the tank top might be a present from God. God must have known that he had been feeling unsatisfied and gave him a chance. Originally, he didn't have any clothes to wear to run. He was the type of person who didn't like to just run or swim. If he played tennis, there was a reason to run, in order to win the game. If it was Yoga, one's movement can release one's distracting thoughts, meditation is good for one's mental health. But just running without reason seemed inefficient. When he saw runners on roads or in parks, they looked stoic. But, this time he felt the tank top was waiting to be worn. He wore the tank top. It fit him. He put on his tennis shoes and started to run. At first, he thought the owner of the tank top might notice his shirt. But this is just a plain white tank top from a major company, there must be thousands of these shirts. There was no chance that someone would recognize this shirt to be his or hers. He ran 20 minutes or so. He realized that running was not so bad. He felt his body start to have some momentum, like a pendulum of a clock. When he was a child, there was a wall-clock with a pendulum in his house. The pendulum made a frightful sound and when he was alone in his house, it sounded like "・" "・" "・" and he would feel afraid. After a while that type of clock disappeared. Now he felt nostalgic. "Pendulum ..." He realized that he was being released from some obsession. "Maybe I was thinking that I have to use time efficiently too much. Now I am consuming my time for nothing, just running. I can't understand why I thought that way before. I don't need to always do, do, do." He thanked God a lot for this present from the sky. |
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*distract :気などをそらす
*meditation :瞑想
*inefficient :非効率な
*pendulum :振り子
*frightful :恐ろしい
*obsession :取りつかれること