Today, some new members arrived at BeeCamp.
Their names are Poccha-kun and Ramune-kun.
They’re actual turtles.
In all my many years, I’ve never really had the chance to spend much time playing with turtles, so this was something special.
They were fairly big turtles, so I had assumed they would be slow and kind of absent-minded.
But I was completely wrong.
They were full of energy.
Walking as fast as if they were training for a race, they marched along with surprising determination.
And once they set their sights on something—
once they became interested in something—
they never forgot about it.
They just kept going.
And going.
And going.
Even when we casually picked them up and turned them around to face a different direction, they would put their considerable horsepower into it and head right back toward whatever had caught their attention.
At that point, I seriously thought,
“No wonder rabbits don’t stand a chance.”
The night before, I met someone from Okayama at Mayudama,
and he gave us some Kibi Dango, the famous millet dumplings from Okayama.
So, naturally, we had become his loyal followers.
And during our conversation, he said something that really stuck with me.
We often ask children,
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
But apparently, very few of the adults asking that question could actually answer it themselves.
Maybe those of us with less of our lives ahead of us should be thinking more seriously about what we want our own future to look like.
The turtles, apparently, can live for 40 or 50 years.
Not ten thousand years, perhaps, but still a pretty long time.
And someday, I’m told, they can grow to about the size of a beehive box.
I found myself thinking that if they lived out in the wild, moving along with that determination and that horsepower, they could probably travel quite a long way.
And somehow, their single-minded determination became intertwined with thoughts about the future I have left in front of me—
a future that may, in fact, be shorter than theirs.
It was a day when those two things somehow crossed paths:
the turtles, marching ahead with such unwavering purpose,
and me, feeling strangely moved by their wholehearted little journey.