Seasons mark the end and the beginning. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about seasons in nature, life, or even seasons of your favorite TV show. The fact that there is a beginning and an end, together, between spurts of time remains.
Some seasons, like the seasons in nature, are more predictable. Beautiful and appreciated, we know the blooms always bloom in spring. We feel the sun’s warmth more intensely in the summer. Fall, or autumn, gives us crisp mornings and warm colors, changing, greeting us like the year before. Winter, adored and despised, is a season of contradiction, with the contrast of the bitter cold and warm hands surrounding cups of hot cocoa topped with marshmallows.
Like seasons in nature, life has its own seasons, changing with less predictability and more fluctuation, but with the same sense of renewal and hope. As a season of life comes to a close, it feels like a cozy, warm, soul-hugging novel gently approaching its ending. There might be some sadness about saying goodbye, but a sense of well-being radiates from within, a hopefulness for what is to come, a satisfying ending for the characters you love. Bittersweet.
What do we call the time between, where one season is ending but another is on the horizon? Limbo? The meaning fits, but it seems too harsh, and it lacks the nuance felt when between seasons of life. Suspension? Being untethered? A season of waiting? Is there even a word that simultaneously allows for sadness, nostalgia, hopefulness, yearning, memories, and the promise of what’s to come?
Nagori.
A Japanese concept of noticing, honoring, and enjoying a fleeting moment even though you’re acutely aware that it’s ending. It’s being present with full knowledge that what is, is temporary. It’s to savor the last of something, remnants of what was and is.
Nagori comes from nami-nokori, beautifully translated as “remains of the waves”. Have you ever walked along the beach, in that magical place where the water glides over the sand, where you can feel the coolness of the water on your toes? By the time you register the sensation of the cool, salty water on your skin, the water begins its journey back to the depths from which it came. It’s relaxing, it’s welcome, there’s a wish to freeze time while also knowing that time only moves forward, you pause, you notice, you honor the moment, it’s over.
Nagori.
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What a lovely post. Thank you for introducing me to this term!
Thank you for visiting and taking the time to comment. I think it’s such a beautiful concept, and the more I slow down, the more instances of it I notice.