the pathos of things

and how to live with it

I exist in a constant haze of nostalgia, deliberately enveloping myself in memories. My room is adorned with dried flowers -- some from old lovers, some from friends, and some from myself. Each book shows its wear: tattered covers from being shoved into my purse, pages imprinted with creases from dog-earing. I have movie tickets dating back years ago, hair dye stains on wooden floors, stickers on spots once too high to reach and now too low to notice.

Even stepping onto the outside world, the same sensations of memories cling to me, as if my own. Pastel yellow house around the corner; bricks crumbling with years, and colour fading under the sun’s kisses. The same corgis on the same walk they’ve taken for the past decade, same leashes but different hand holding them. New park with five slides on the same sand as the previous smaller playground with one slide.

How do I not drown?

"Who knows the heart of another's heart?

Our lives are the length of a struck match,

And our days are sure to end in a dark confusion."

- Charles Wright, Buffalo Yoga

Mono no aware is a Japanese idiom that directly translates to “the pathos of things”. It refers to the quiet, emotional beauty, or sadness, found in everyday objects, moments, or experiences. It also often points to a kind of melancholy or tenderness in the way things are, especially in their fragility. In easier, empath terms: it’s the quiet ache of appreciating something because it’s fleeting.

While there will always be a sad undertone when talking about topics under this category, we are looking for a solution closer to ‘sweet and sour’ than ‘bittersweet’. In Aristotle’s Rhetoric, he describes pathos as appealing to emotion, aiming to persuade an audience by evoking emotions that influence or motivate. He emphasizes that it is most effective when playing to pity, fear, anger, sympathy, and joy (but usually only when often contrasting with sorrow). Obviously, I am not stating that pathos is used only for negative connotations, but I am implying that first impressions are everything, and the word literally directly translates to ‘suffering’, along with ‘feeling’, ‘experience’, and ‘emotion’ .

So, instead, we will say Mono no aware: An empathy towards things. A sensitivity to ephemera.

The ability to understand and share the feelings of another living being is one of the most profound pleasures we are gifted to experience internally, and when extended to inanimate objects, the blessing only deepens further.

Our world is made up of items that are made to be temporary, some longer than others. From those one-use tickets to the annual fair melting into the folds of a wallet, to that one necklace that hugged previous generations in the warmest support. From grandfather clocks, to old cars, to shirts that went out of style then came back. Things that just simply existed kept preserved, retained, and collected, even when not designed so. That is proof of living, this is humanity at its core.

The awareness of impermanence, the transience of things, should not put you in a state of wistfulness. Breaking will always be inevitable. This is the reality of life. And it is serene, it is melancholy, it is longing, it is yearning, it is silent, still, gentle. It is beautiful.

To live with mono no aware is to hold joy and loss in the same hand -- to find meaning not in resisting time, but in bowing gently to it.

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Thank you for your time,

Nico

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