This year I wanted to grow natural-farming edamame again, so I sowed the seeds of a late-maturing soybean variety. Only afterward did I learn that this variety really belongs to a warmer region, and that in a cool climate like ours it would be hard to grow all the way to seed.
For a moment I fretted over what to do. But then I caught myself: this simply isn’t within my power to control. I’ll let the seed-saving go for this year, enjoy them as edamame first, and leave the rest to nature’s course.
The moment I let go, my heart felt strangely lighter.
The Harder You Chase It, the Faster It Runs
Have you ever noticed that the thing you want most is exactly the thing that won’t come — and then, once you’ve given up on it, it quietly arrives?
A Japanese thinker named Mokichi Okada (1882–1955) saw this pattern everywhere in life. And he believed the reason lies in something most of us never think to question: our own worry.
Worry Is a Kind of Attachment
We usually think of attachment as wanting things — money, success, status. But Okada pointed to a subtler kind that almost no one notices: the grip of worry itself. Anxiety about what might happen. Regret about what already did.
This quiet, constant fretting, he said, works against us. The harder we clutch at an outcome, the more it seems to slip away.
He gave everyday examples. Something you long for stubbornly refuses to appear — until the day you finally stop wanting it, and it turns up out of nowhere. A goal you strain toward stays just out of reach, then falls into place the moment you’ve forgotten it.
Letting Go Isn’t Giving Up
Okada’s point was not that effort is useless. It was that anxious clinging — the part of us that cannot stop gripping — quietly poisons the very thing we hope for.
There is a difference between working toward something and being consumed by worry over it. The first moves us forward. The second only tightens the knot.
The Quiet Relief of Release
Try it, and something curious happens. The moment you loosen your grip — the moment you accept that some things are simply beyond your control — a kind of lightness returns. What felt stuck begins, in its own time, to move.
Read the Original
This is a short introduction. The full text — written by Okada in Japanese in 1951 — is available on meshiya.jp.
👉 御任せする（meshiya.jp）
