The word’s been stuck in my head for a long time now, but I was only hearing it in English. Then weirdly, some time yesterday, I saw its kanji, 美 … and in a sudden moment of recognition, realized that it was a part of my own name. Funny how I’d never really liked it, a common Japanese girl’s name. But a welling of tears at the thought of my mother’s consideration seems to have changed my mind.

I guess it’s my word.

Some time last year, a friend who I’ll call “John”, brought up the idea of summing up one’s life in a single word. In a kind of ultimate reduction of the proverbial “six-word-story”, he suggested that everybody has some singular idea that describes the overarching theme of her or his life – a single word to describe what lies at the center of a personality. He also thought that it might not be a good idea to share it if it exposed something a person didn’t particularly like.

John’s word for himself, however, was “ingenuity”. He said that he had no problem coming up with it, that nearly every important moment that he could recall from his life had revolved around some form of successful problem-solving. And from what I know of him, I thought it seemed a good choice.

As the conversation moved around the table, a few others in our group came up with words as well, though it was suggested that they might change over time. Among two whom I know fairly well, the words were “perseverance” and “tough”. In both cases, I thought the choices were perhaps revealing, but seemed to fit. Most everyone else either waffled, or simply elected not to share.

I was in that latter group, the word having emerged almost spontaneously. But… it seemed somehow inappropriate and pretentious… and just not me.  Still, that single word has been bobbling around in my head for several months now.

“Beauty.”

Let me be absolutely clear that as a short, black-haired, Eurasian girl growing up in a California beach town during an era that would give rise to TV’s Baywatch, or “Boob-Watch” as my Vietnamese, college house-mate called it, I never saw myself as particularly “beautiful”. And this was only amplified by coming-of-age in the shadow of my much older, far more refined, and truly beautiful sister.

I went off to college thinking that I’d go into medicine. Never mind that I had neither any idea what the occupation actually involved, nor of the academics. Fortunately, I resolved the mistake early in my second year, perhaps sparing myself from Mark Twain’s assertion in, “Life on the Mississippi,” that knowledge is the enemy of beauty. That’s to say that at least I can still view the beauty of a human form without the filter of a clinical eye.

When I look back on the times in my life when the happiness had slipped away, it was always in those moments of that clinical eye… when there was an absence of beauty. And it’s not that the beautiful didn’t exist. Rather, it was that it went unnoticed.

Beauty is an experience.

In the US, I live in what is probably among the most spectacularly beautiful places in the country.  And yet, I pass tourists and residents alike on my running route through town, surprised at how many are staring into their phones. It reminds me of the summer beach-goers of my youth who would blast some obnoxious radio-station over the sounds of the sea before leaving their beer cans and fast-food wrappers in the sand. I’ve seen incredible beauty in some of the most miserable places on earth. But it’s always required actually paying attention to what was there.

Presently back in Japan to take care of some ceremonial duties to my family, the environment has encouraged a bit more meditative take on things. Watching coverage of the transition of the Chrysanthemum Throne, it struck me that the now Ex-Empress Michiko remains a tangibly beautiful woman, even at eighty-four. Much of my impression had to do with how she carried herself, a graceful recipient of the palpable but dignified display of love and respect from her husband during the abdication ceremony.  Lament yielded itself to a beautiful moment.

My mom once explained to me that we left Japan in the mid-seventies because she and my dad wanted their children to grow up in someplace beautiful. As a child, I never much understood the sentiment; my memories of Japan were beautiful.  I never really noticed the pollution, or the competition, or the nationalism. These were the concerns of adults. I was just a kid… still discovering the taste of a cold ice cream on a hot day while looking for patterns in the gathering clouds… just happy to be a part of it all.

Maybe my brain is simply hardwired to feel this way. I feel overwhelming beauty in music of all kinds, and in sunrises, in falling snow – its cold seeping into my skin, the mountains and the sky, and the earth under my feet as I run a trail. I saw beauty in the eyes of my elderly aunt, and smelled it in her requisite shot of Jack Daniels before dinners. There was incredible beauty in a tough young girl who lived on a dump in Cambodia. I’ve never asked myself why.

A physics professor once cautioned me not to be seduced by the thought of finding truth in beauty. The universe has no impetus to work in beautiful ways, he warned. But someone else once told me that I’m Shinto, because I believe that what I experience is real.  I believe in beauty.

Recently trying to explain this to someone was difficult, like describing the experience of a color or a sound with words. But I’ve come to the conclusion that not everything that we can know is explainable through words… nor through the physics of nature. Experience is a vapor. Its requisite motions are perhaps quantifiable in the workings of a brain. But its being emerges like music from the patterns in a billowing cloud.

Others tell me privately that their words are “loneliness” and “hope”. I think about them, and I understand the stories they tell. Maybe we just learn these words when we’re young… learn to make them our own. So I remember my parents, and speak the traditional Buddhist words of a final goodbye to my mom.  Then I write my own name, making the shapes instinctively.