"Wind, Light, and My Twenty-Year-Old Self" by Ango Sakaguchi: Thoughts on Letting Go

After school, I liked to linger in the teachers' room for as long as possible. Once the students had left and the other teachers had gone home, I would sit there all alone, lost in thought. The only sound was the ticking of the grandfather clock. The fact that there were no shadows or sounds in that noisy schoolyard made the silence feel strangely profound, leaving me with a sense of emptiness, a feeling of detachment as if I had vanished somewhere. As I sat there in that daze, I would have a fantasy of myself emerging from behind the grandfather clock, saying, "Hey." Suddenly, I would realize that I was standing right next to myself, as if I had been talking to me. I loved that hazy, absent-minded state, but in return, I would sometimes talk to the 'me' standing there and get scolded. "Hey, you shouldn't be too satisfied," I would glare at myself.
"Is satisfaction wrong?"
"Yes, it is. You must suffer. You must torment yourself as much as possible."
"For what purpose?"
"That, the suffering itself will provide the answer. The nobility of a human being lies in tormenting oneself. Anyone can enjoy satisfaction. Even a beast."
I wondered if that was true. At any rate, I was certainly wallowing in satisfaction. I had become somewhat like a drifting cloud or flowing water, rarely getting angry, happy, or sad; despite being twenty, I seemed to possess more composure, maturity, and enlightenment than the teachers in their fifties and sixties. I did not desire to own anything. Because I did not want my soul to be limited.

When I quit being a teacher, I was quite conflicted. Why did I have to quit? I had studied Buddhism and thought about becoming a monk, but that was a longing for "enlightenment," a nostalgia-like yearning for the rigor of seeking the path. There was no reason why the same thing could not be applied to the life of a teacher. That is what I thought, and although I spoke of a longing for enlightenment, it was ultimately driven by a desire for fame, and I lamented such baseness in myself. I was not burning with hope at all. My longing was in the form of "forsaking the world," and deep down, I was anxious about forsaking the world, and I continued to feel the awareness, anxiety, remorse, and despair of abandoning the right kind of hope. It is still not enough. Let's throw everything away. If I do that, won't things work out somehow? I watched myself, with a mad, desperate feeling, trying to hurry to throw away, throw away, throw away—anything at all, just desperately trying to discard everything. Just as suicide is one of the means to live, I continued to feel that this desperate orientation toward throwing things away was, in fact, just one of the footsteps of youth. I had wanted to be a novelist since I was a boy. But I was convinced that I lacked the talent, so perhaps that resignation from the start toward such a proper hope was working in the background.
The strangely fulfilling year I spent as a teacher feels, in my history, like something that wasn't me, a strangely hollow feeling that seems like a lie every time I remember it.