Tatami wisdom.
In Walter Mosely's noirish Leonid McGill detective series, a 50-something ex-boxer-turned-gumshoe-cum-philosopher muses over what he calls an ancient Samurai expression about resilience:
Nana korobi ya oki. “Fall down seven times, get up eight.”
Even if it loses a bit of the romance being more Jota Sixpack than Samurai or Sumo in provenance, I can't think of a timelier set of operating instructions for the lives we’re living and living through.
Like so:
Worried about a nation led by what Graydon Carter in his "been there and you weren’t invited" memoir calls a "sado-populist” — someone who inflames rage with no intent to do anything but point fingers?
Nana korobi ya oki.
Or maybe it’s the institutionally destructive, democracy-erosive, maddeningly arbitrary, nationalistic, kleptocratic, and cruelly oppressive forces coming at us from every direction. Every. Damned. Day.
Nana korobi ya oki.
The brilliantly pungent cartoon you'll find below.
Nana korobi ya oki.
Of course, there’s always a Democratic Party veering from a missed opportunity to own-goal error, with a generous helping of self-inflicted distractive wounding; all while ignoring the clear-as-the-donkey-on-your-ass chance to stage a powerful and effective challenger comeback.
Nana korobi ya oki.
The 1366 days are still on the presidential election calendar, assuming US elections don't become the victim of a new kind of cancel culture?
Nana korobi ya oki.
Meanwhile, speaking of turds landing in pockets closer to home, the silence of the advertising songbirds — always canaries in the economic coal shaft — has become palpable. Whether it’s a full-on sector recession, clients frozen by fear, ongoing evisceration of the core value proposition, or something equally toxic, we all know what usually comes next: seppuku by a thousand pink-slip paper cuts.
Nana korobi ya oki.
And lest we forget: AI, AI, AI.
Nana korobi ya oki.
But then there’s this. Call it the sharp tip of the Samurai sword that penetrates to the heart of the conflict and contradiction, yielding the kind of strategic and creative answers that let us take all the punches and still get back up off the floor. It’s a one-word name: clarity. And that makes eight.
Nana korobi ya oki.
