"I will always be someone who is trying to become better"
About this Quote
A vow like this sounds modest until you notice how absolute it is. “I will always” shuts the door on arrival. There’s no promised finish line, no future self who gets to retire into being “good enough.” For a poet, that’s a creative credo and a moral stance: improvement isn’t a phase, it’s an identity.
Miyazawa’s phrasing is carefully self-effacing. He doesn’t claim he is better; he claims he is trying. That single verb smuggles in humility, discipline, and a kind of persistent dissatisfaction. The subtext is that the world is too damaged, too complicated, too alive for complacency. To stop trying would be to harden into ego, to treat the self as a completed work. Poets, of all people, know language is never finished; revision is the honest version of faith.
Placed against Miyazawa’s early-20th-century Japan - a period of rapid modernization and social strain - the line reads less like a motivational poster and more like an ethical anchor. He was deeply engaged with questions of labor, rural life, and spiritual responsibility. “Trying to become better” can mean sharpening craft, but it also hints at compassion and service: a continuous recalibration of how to live among others.
The intent, then, isn’t self-optimization as performance. It’s a refusal to freeze the self into a brand. He frames becoming as perpetual, which is both comforting and bracing: you’re allowed to be unfinished, but you’re not allowed to stop.
Miyazawa’s phrasing is carefully self-effacing. He doesn’t claim he is better; he claims he is trying. That single verb smuggles in humility, discipline, and a kind of persistent dissatisfaction. The subtext is that the world is too damaged, too complicated, too alive for complacency. To stop trying would be to harden into ego, to treat the self as a completed work. Poets, of all people, know language is never finished; revision is the honest version of faith.
Placed against Miyazawa’s early-20th-century Japan - a period of rapid modernization and social strain - the line reads less like a motivational poster and more like an ethical anchor. He was deeply engaged with questions of labor, rural life, and spiritual responsibility. “Trying to become better” can mean sharpening craft, but it also hints at compassion and service: a continuous recalibration of how to live among others.
The intent, then, isn’t self-optimization as performance. It’s a refusal to freeze the self into a brand. He frames becoming as perpetual, which is both comforting and bracing: you’re allowed to be unfinished, but you’re not allowed to stop.
Quote Details
| Topic | Self-Improvement |
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