Ready, Set, and Before That

This is a piece I wrote at the request of the organizers as a reference work for the "#TheMomentTheEngineStarted" submission contest held with Yamaha Motor.

There is an episode from my childhood that my mother often told me about. It was at my kindergarten sports day. When the starting pistol went off for the race, I stood at the starting line, slowly looked to the right, then to the left, then to the right again, and only after confirming that everyone else had started running did I finally begin to run. My mother would always laugh and conclude that I was a spacey child.

Currently, I work by sharing soup recipes and ideas to make cooking easier. I suppose it is because of my somewhat unusual title of "Soup Writer" and my background of entering this world from a completely different field, but I have been asked about how I became a soup writer in interviews with various media outlets, and I have shared my story.

I started making soup to wake up my son, who was an examinee and not a morning person. I continued to make it every single day, took photos, held an exhibition, approached publishers, and kept writing soup experiment reports on note, which led to my debut.
Such a success story might give many people the impression that I am the type to charge ahead once I make up my mind. In fact, for the past few years, I have been running forward with single-minded focus, involving others along the way.

But, as my mother repeated many times, I am naturally the type of person whose engine is very hard to start.

While I was making soup day in and day out, my friends and acquaintances would tell me things like, "Why don't you publish a book?" or "Why don't you make this your job?," but I just laughed and brushed them off.
Of course, it is not that I didn't think it would be nice to work with the cooking I love. It is just that I couldn't feel anyone's words as something that applied to me.

I had been working as a freelance writer since I was young. Most of the work was anonymous. I wrote about everything without any specific theme: interviews at corporate factories and sales offices, copy for mail-order catalogs for baby goods, and features on hobbies or savings in women's magazines.
Even without having a specialty, there are surprisingly many jobs like this. It seems that from other people's perspectives, it felt lacking, and I was even pressed with questions like, "What is it that you actually want to do?" But I didn't dislike writing, and I felt that to balance housework and childcare, it was better to do reliable work with firm deadlines than to pursue a single theme.

When you work in this way, standing on your own two feet under your own name seems like a world away. Let alone the fact that I had never worked in a restaurant, let alone a cooking job.
I was 50 years old, unknown, and had zero experience in the culinary industry. I had no colleagues to share a goal with, nor rivals to improve each other. I hadn't spent time meticulously planning to go this route either.
I can irresponsibly say to others, "Why don't you give it a try?," but when I was in that situation myself, how many people could have had an image of the start?

But in the end, one day I decided, "I will publish a book of soups." It came from an emotion so natural that even I was surprised.

I remember the kindergarten race.
To the people there, including my mother, I must have looked like a cautious child who observed my surroundings well, or perhaps a laid-back child. But that is a little different. I didn't want to run in the race. I hated running and competing. So I waited until I could run at my own pace.

When I start something big, I don't want the timing or the goal to be decided by others. That has been true from the past until now. I have decided important things at my own pace.
That is why I didn't want the big decision to make cooking my job to be decided by someone else. I didn't want to move until my heart said it was okay.
What it means for me to say it is okay is that rather than making a decision myself, it felt like there was no other choice—it was close to the feeling of a fruit ripening and falling naturally, or a wound healing and a scab peeling off on its own. I think the soup I had been making every day became a large mass and pushed my heart, which was trying to stay closed, out into the open.

From there, my body began to move. I went to talk to people I trusted, reached out to publishers I was interested in, and planned an exhibition. At first, there were many things that didn't go well, and I had some worries about whether it would be okay, but the fact that I had no option to turn back was the same as a fallen fruit never returning to the tree.

Once you decide within yourself that now is the time to run, you can run quite a distance and do your best. That timing shouldn't be too late, but it doesn't mean that earlier is better. For me, waiting for the timing to make a natural start, rather than running at someone else's signal or running by watching others, led to good results.

Unlike a race where everyone aims for the same goal, in life, you don't need to run toward someone else's goal, and you can sound the starting gun yourself. These days, I think that warming up your engine sufficiently before the "Ready, set" is the secret to a good start and running all the way to the finish line.

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