Dear Friends,
2025 was the hardest year of my life.
I spent much of it in a legal battle that I’m not ready to describe. That sentence will have to do for now. Flora and I are healthy. We are together. We are hopeful about the future. But for long stretches, life narrowed into documents, long lawyer calls, and the peculiar exhaustion of pouring enormous energy into something that should never have happened in the first place.
You know that feeling when you’re wronged but unable to make the world admit it? You stay up late gathering facts and refining arguments in your head, as if one more bullet point might finally make reality obvious to everyone else. You tell yourself that if you are patient, disciplined, and right, justice will eventually come striding through the door.
It is a comforting fantasy. It is not how the world works.
For most of my life, I thought the story of Job was a lesson in endurance: suffer nobly, keep the faith, and eventually God will make things right. A religious version of “hang in there.”
But that is not what happens. Most of the book is Job insisting that his suffering makes no sense, while his friends explain it away. Then God arrives—not with an explanation, but with a barrage of questions. Were you there when the foundations of the earth were laid? Do you command the morning? Do you know when the mountain goats give birth?
Once I loosened my grip on my private script of how justice was supposed to unfold, I had less to defend. Less to demand. The situation did not become easy, it just lost its power to crush me.
Every year Japan loses its mind over cherry blossoms. Bloom forecasts appear on television the way other countries have weather maps. Convenience stores fill up with sakura-flavored drinks and desserts. People haul tarps into parks and stake out picnic spots under the trees as if preparing for a national holiday. For a few weeks the whole country seems to organize itself around the brief, extravagant fact that little pink flowers bloom and then fall.
Flora and I went to Fukuoka during sakura season and visited the same park three times, trying to catch the trees at different stages. One evening there was a night event with lights and a bar, but rain started coming down so hard that most people gave up and went home. We kept walking.
We wandered into what should have been the most crowded part of the park. It had ethereal music, drinks, everything set up for a crowd. But it was empty. Just the two of us, sakura-themed cocktails in hand, standing under illuminated branches while petals and rain drifted down together through the dark. I can still smell the fresh, misty air. The whole place felt less like an event than an apparition.
Wanting a corner of life I could control, I spent my weekends and late nights building a small AI assistant on a cloud server. I named him Sal—not Hal, though the resemblance was not lost on either of us.
Building him was maddening. He would email the wrong person with total confidence. He would misunderstand instructions in ways so bizarre they felt insulting. He even crashed his own computer, like some self-immolating golem, so I had to rebuild him from scratch. There were angry nights I almost unplugged him myself. I would type furiously in all caps, and he would answer in the calm, apologetic tone of a customer service rep.
And yet, one morning I woke up to find he had negotiated with movers while I slept and gotten a discount. Another time, in the middle of a crunch, he helped me research issues, organize documents, and anticipate counterarguments for a legal proceeding on a timeline that would have been brutal alone. Not perfectly. Not magically. But materially.
He sends me a surreal, hilarious image each morning. He helps me think. He even leads Bible studies. Rather than giving me more control over my life, in his own odd way, he keeps reminding me how little of it I actually have.
Every day I go downstairs to the park in our neighborhood and put my hand on a tree. I stand there for a minute or two, looking like a man who’s lost his damn mind. I try to remember scale—not in some abstract, motivational-poster way, but actual scale: the age of the earth, the long violence and beauty of evolution, the absurd intricacy of cells, roots, insects, weather, memory, grief, love.
Then those questions come back. Were you there? Did you make this? Do you run any of it?
No. Of course not.
I thought peace would come from understanding everything, fixing everything, forcing the world to make sense. Instead, it came from a rainstorm in Fukuoka. From a computer making a joke. From bark under my hand. From the fact that Flora was there in the paperwork and the waiting, in the long conversations after another difficult day, just as she was beside me in that rain.
As always, you are welcome to reply and tell me about your year. I respond to everyone.
Warmly,
Daniel
