Sustainability, being light and fuzzy like feathers, is a shapeless object. I’ve been trying to catch it with my own hands with certain special feelings. At times it forms a tangible shape, leaving me spark-joy; other times it goes through my fingers deceptively.

As far as I can remember it, I couldn’t help but come to view it again and again. Because that is what something beautiful makes you want to do. I just cannot leave it and look for something else for a long time.

Interestingly, I cannot define it as one particular thing. However, I can bring some successful examples which I was able to grab as something tangible. It’s when seeing an electric vehicle accelerating in the blink of an eye with its quiet three-phase alternative current, right next to a fierce petro one that cannot hold its fuel exploding inside. It’s when using a soft bamboo tooth-brush with its wood scent, instead of one with inorganic, artificial and colorful plastic. It’s when wrapping a gift with a furoshiki that is reusable, robust and uniquely patterned, instead of disposable wrapping paper that cannot erase its own past wrinkles.

The feeling is as if a droplet of water shapes natural roundness when falling with gravity. Sometimes my heart even dances, whispering how beautiful it is.

On the other hand, this may be myself being obsessed with “it” excessively. That is, it can be viewed as a perspective after many observations, or as persistence that grew too much. A man in the eyesight, may have different feelings on the same thing.

I think of this after seeing the history of people. People kept embodying beliefs with technology as stepping stones, and now with our civilization being cumulated over and over, we’ve received affluent wealth at our hands. Striving parallelly with an appetite for survival of our own civilization in this vast universe, passing us on with our love embodies sustainability in and of itself. And I’m sure, that not just a few people had a sense of attachment to or special feelings on the circulating lives.

Meanwhile, it’s indeed true that we keep undermining, destroying and stealing the environment, resources, and other lives. Here, it’s easy to find, even in the individual scale, a sense of arrogance and fierce trying to survive.

Yes, so these feelings upon sustainability is like a double-sided sword. And that’s why it sometimes may be necessary to discipline and remind ourselves that, while finding it beautiful, that is not absolute. If you realize this contradiction of it being right next to its fierceness, how can you gurantee its absolute sense of beauty?

Nevertheless, I observe snipped scenes along my journey with my own preference. It’s beautiful: It’s wonderful: It’s mesmerizing. There’re times that I ponder with those feelings. I cannot help but feel the spark-joy that remains at heart, when shaping this shapeless object at hand. It’s as if I’m casting light on the shapeless object and leaving the shadow at the front of me, like mapping a vector to a 2 dimensional plane from a 3 dimensional space.

And I believe that people like me contemplating the same may be out there too. Well rather, I’ve come to feel like this over times. Dropping the shadows, I certainly carve them on places that catch many eyes. “I want to carve ‘em!”, says my heart. Then I pose and wonder, over and over again.