Treasuring the Unrepeatable Nature of a Moment. 🎋
Exploring ichigo ichie: one chance, one encounter.
📍 Coordinates: Temple Room, The Nest – Argentina. 🪺
🎧 Music Pairing: Ancient Sands – Peace Sine.
📖 Reading Time: ~3 minutes.
🧉 Housekeeping: (1) Welcome to all the new members! Thank you for trusting me with your inbox, I’ll do my best, I promise. (2) You can comment on all my articles, please do! (3) Substack is bringing out a fun thread/chat feature, but you need the app to use it. Check it out and I’ll turn it on for my next post this week. (4) I love you, breathe.
Missing Out On My Own Life…
I had the pleasure of meeting a new friend over Zoom yesterday.
An introductory “get-to-know-each-other” call before we jump in on a podcast together.
We jumped right in. Riffing on medicine work, psychedelics, integration, and more.
Inevitably, we got on the topic of the fear of death.
My response was something like “Of course I still have a resistance to pain, I’m not looking to leave this life. But my experiences have led me to believe that the other side of physical death is extremely beautiful – I don’t have the same core fear/resistance to it that I once did. I don’t seek it out, but I don’t run from it either. In reality, what I fear most now—if you can call it a fear—is missing out on the life that is happening here and now, right in front of me.”
Sitting with this, it’s reminding me of one of my favourite Zen idioms: ichi-go, ichi-e — one chance, one encounter.
“[…] a cultural concept of treasuring the unrepeatable nature of a moment.”
One chance, One encounter.
Just over a year ago, I released a video on Instagram speaking about this: The Fear of Death x Ichigo Ichie.
Reviewing it again 70 weeks later, I’m glad to say it’s standing the test of time.
The term can be traced back to the 16th century to an expression by tea master Sen no Rikyū: "one chance in a lifetime" (一期に一度, ichigo ni ichido).
His statement was a direct pointing—a persistent reminder—of a very basic Truth: no moment in your life will happen again.
While you may do something many days in a row, you will never do it again on that day, in that state, during that moment.
“The term reminds people to cherish any gathering that they may take part in, citing the fact that any moment in life cannot be repeated; even when the same group of people get together in the same place again, a particular gathering will never be replicated, and thus each moment is always a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
Ichigo ichie is pointing to the transience of experience, but it’s also a doorway…
Walking through the wisdom of ichigo ichie leads you to a miraculous wonderland of Presence.
I think many in the nomadic world, in the “collect experiences, not money” camps fall prey to this. The idea isn’t to collect as many experiences as possible, it’s to be as fully present in every experience as possible. You’re not missing out because you’re not experiencing everything, you’re missing out because you’re not fully experiencing anything.
It is the lack of attentive presence that you feel.
Ichigo ichie reminds us that each moment is a sacred gift. A glimmering jewel of meaning in motion. Whether that flavour of experience is enthralling, disheartening, heartbroken, ecstatic, boring, monotonous, disgusting, overwhelming, awe-inspiring. All experience is one chance, one encounter.
Get intimate with your existence.
It reminds us that the overwhelming beauty of life isn’t in some transcendental realm far away, it is profoundly immanent. It is this breath, this view, this emotion, this article, this thought, this conversation, this walk, this word.
Your entire life is ichigo ichie.
Your existence is one chance, one encounter.
Don’t let it pass you by chasing fairytales of something better somewhere else.
With love, EB. 💛
If you’ve read this far, thank you! Could you take a second to vote for your preference below? What kind of content do you want to see more of from me?
I’m done mooching Eric! Too valuable to keep getting pro bono emails :)
This posts reminds me how a man can’t stand in the same river twice; not only does the water constantly change, so does the man. Love this perspective, makes EVERY moment uniquely special. Excellent article my friend ❤️
Would love to see some comic storytelling powered by midjourney ;)