Spring announces itself with the ever-new wonder of flowers adorning trees that, until yesterday, were bare.

It is a spectacle, every time. It fills the eyes with beauty and the heart with joy, after months of darkness and hardship -this year marked by a few too many bouts of the flu.

It is a powerful sign of life that never ceased to pulse, hidden beneath the cold.

Philosophers, poets, and people of all ages have paused in awe before such a marvel. Some time ago, we dedicated a post to the Japanese tradition of hanami, the contemplation of flowers.

Today, we return to an haiku by Matsuo Bashō, perhaps the greatest poet in Japanese literature:

夏草や (Natsukusa ya)
兵どもが (tsuwamono domo ga)
夢の跡 (yume no ato)

Summer grass…
All that remains
of the warriors’ dream.

Faced with the fleeting glory of a flower and its beauty gazing steadily at the sky, the pessimist will say that striving for anything is pointless. Every dream, even the greatest, will end like flowers in a meadow, cut down to make hay.

The optimist, on the other hand, will look at nature’s cycle and trust that the flower’s beauty will return precisely because the flower made way for the fruit, the fruit for the seeds, and the scythe will serve to scatter those seeds and restart the cycle.

The martial practitioner can be neither excessively pessimistic (otherwise, he/she would never rise after a fall) nor an optimist at any cost. Rather, he/she is a realist.

Martial artists accept that tomorrow the flower may be less fragrant. Less radiant. Less beautiful than it is today.

But in the meantime, today, they care for their flower as best they can.

They do not look back with regret at a past that will not return. They prepare for tomorrow, but without obsession.

What remains is this eternal present, in which everything is fundamental, yet nothing is important.