One of the fascinating expressions is 晴耕雨読 (Seikō-udoku) in Japanese, the term itself originated from Chinese classics like the Confucian and Daoist traditions. It is a sentiment describing an ideal life.
晴耕 (Seikō) means when it is a fine sunny day, you should work in the field like plowing or farming, or the implication is more for any practical jobs and errands in life. And 雨読 (Udoku) means when it is a rainy day, you can stay home and read books, the implication is that you can spend time on your intellectual tasks or philosophical reflections as “reading books” could be overarching.
The message is saying if you can live like this, which is ideal and you can keep your mind peace. This idiomatic expression is used as a synonym for “peaceful life.”
A Balance of Life
The point is a balance. To support your life, you need to work in the field, which means you can devote activities to produce anything tangible, which should be done on a sunny day symbolically. Sunny days activities are the foundation that supports your life and family, and more to move society and civilization forward.
On the other hand, it is important for us to nurture and develop the inside of us, our mind, heart, even soul and spirit. Reading books symbolizes these perspectives. And that should or can be done on a rainy day. That means that it is a moment of reflection and contemplation; you can step back and reflect on your life and life in general. An activity like writing is a crucial part of this activity.
Knowledge Work
Now, as our civilization becomes complex, our activities can no longer be described as this simple binary. Yes, we have a term like “knowledge work.” There are numerous systems to be maintained and developed not only physically but culturally, socially, even politically, and economically. The portion for knowledge work has exponentially increased after the Industrial Revolution towards the Information Era. Ironically, the more things get automated, the more our lives get complex, hence, the demand for knowledge work becomes tremendous.
We can no longer afford “reading books” on rainy days, but every day we have to spend long hours on “reading materials,” and not for your reflections but for your financial support. In a way, ironically enough, we no longer have days for reading books if it implies our reflection as the original meaning of 晴耕雨読 (Seikō-udoku) tells us. We are “busy” at every moment of life, not because of the field labors like plowing or farming, but “processing” and “consuming” tons of information and knowledge and we get drained.
An Ideal Guidance
We can no longer be on the classic days where 晴耕雨読 (Seikō-udoku) could become ideal. But we can keep it as our ideal guide. It must be the one to restore the balance between practical and reflective, even for the act of writing. The act of writing should be under the category of rainy day represented as “reading books.” It should not be an activity for earning money.
It sounds strict, but it’s worth keeping it. Let’s reflect on this principle:
Why do we write?
It is because of our intellectual, even spiritual reflections under the category of the rainy days, which is different from our practical work in the field, while we can learn a lot from sunny days’ practical activities for our reflections on the rainy days, both are intertwined.
While we must understand the reality that the majority of our practical work for supporting life has become knowledge work involving reading and writing, that’s true, but then, writing is for reflection, not for earning. That is confusion.
In the days of the attention economy, we see tons of online content that seeks to earn money. And AI is making the situation worse. It is supposed to enhance our intellectual activities like the convenience of using a car for traveling. But then, tons of content are being generated, and mass-produced, to seek views and clicks for profit-driven purposes. While it is inevitable as the reality of marketing and sales activities, and yet, from time to time, let’s reflect on the truth of why we write.
We write for our rainy days, not for sunny days. We can learn a lot of lessons from our sunny day experiences, and we can reflect on them on rainy days. The former is for earning and supporting life, the latter is more fundamentally for life itself.
Writing as Meditation
Let me make this humble proclamation. In this perspective, to be ideal, writing should be an act of meditation. It is our writing meditation like we spend quality time during rainy days for our reflections on life by stepping back from the daily busyness to stand at the meta-perspective.
When we say “rainy days,” this is metaphorical. At every moment of our day, like early in the morning when James Allen spent his time writing, or at night when we can relax, even at a small moment in the cafeteria amid working hours, we can find time for writing meditation.
The result of writing should be like an output of freewriting session, similar to a stream of consciousness. That should be fine. Our purpose is not to create nifty, marketable content to gain more views and clicks for earning, but the process of writing itself is the goal. Even if we use AI tools to avoid spelling and grammar errors, the involvement should be minimal for further refinement in this particular case, there must be the best value for this raw, rough writing itself, not the filtered refinement.
Image: Photo captured by the author.
Tom’s Blog 