Komorebi

In the 2023 film Perfect Days, directed by Wim Wenders, the main character, Hirayama, cleans public toilets in Tokyo for a living. He wakes before dawn, tends a small collection of plants, then drives to work listening to cassette tapes. He eats his lunch alone in a park. He reads paperback novels before sleep. He does not own much. He does not seem to want much.

And he is, without question, the most content person in the film.

One of Hirayama’s habits is photographing the way sunlight filters through the tree canopy above his lunch spot. The Japanese have a word for that specific phenomenon—komorebi. It describes the interplay of light and shadow created as sunlight breaks through leaves. It is not quite sunlight. It is not quite shadow. It is the beautiful, fleeting thing that happens in between.

We operate in an industry where the pressure is real, the margins matter, and the pace does not slow down because you are tired. Difficult seasons come—supply chain problems, personnel challenges, market swings, and the general weight of keeping several hundred people moving in the same direction. In those stretches, it is easy to put your head down and grind through, waiting for conditions to improve before you allow yourself to notice anything good.

But komorebi does not wait for the absence of difficulty. It happens specifically because something is in the way. The light needs the leaves to create it. The beauty is a product of the obstruction, not the absence of it.

I think about people I have watched do their work with real care in the middle of hard stretches. The machinist who runs a clean setup on a complicated part—not because anyone is watching, but because that is simply how he works. The customer service rep who stays patient with a frustrated caller long past the point where patience would be forgiven for running out. The supervisor who remembers to say thank you on a day when everything else went sideways.

Those moments are komorebi. They do not require perfect conditions. They are actually made more visible by the difficulty around them.

Hirayama understood something that took me a long time to figure out. The meaning is not in the what. It is in the how. He was not content because he cleaned toilets. He was content because he cleaned toilets with attention, with care, with a kind of quiet craftsmanship that had nothing to do with the task and everything to do with the person doing it. Strip the job title away, and what you have left is someone who chose to be fully present in whatever was in front of him.

That is available to every one of us. Not as a personality trait—as a decision.

One of the things I believe most deeply about this place is that every person here has real and equal value regardless of what their badge says or how long they have been here. That is not a motivational poster. It is a load-bearing wall. And the practical expression of it is this: the work you do matters because of how you do it. The attention you bring. The care you take. The standard you hold when it would be just as easy to let it slide.

Komorebi also carries something else inside it. Impermanence. That flickering light through the leaves only lasts a moment. Fail to notice, and it is gone. The beauty and the transience are inseparable. The only way to see it and enjoy it is to be present in that moment.

The hard season you are in right now will not last forever. Neither will the good one. Both of them are offering you something that will not be offered again in exactly this form. The colleague sitting across from you today, the problem you solved together last week, the small moment of recognition that landed better than you expected it to—these are not guaranteed to repeat. Noticing the light coming through in all our conditions is the Bison Way.