Tuesday afternoon, I’m spending my final day of the year wandering through an art gallery with my oldest friend and when we part ways, I walk through Hyde Park by myself to catch the bus. The park is full of singing kids and sun-burnt tourists, brimming with noise and activity, but when I look up at the sky, there’s a really nice, still moment where it feels like it’s just me and the sunlight leaking through the trees. The Japanese word komorebi (木漏れ日) comes to mind. It’s a term that describes the delicate pattern created by light and shadows and foliage, as the sun gets filtered through the leaves—a temporary pattern, a fleeting moment that only exists once.

I know about komorebi because of Perfect Days (2023), directed by Wim Wenders, which I watched last year in early June. In the film, the protagonist Hirayama is a toilet cleaner for the Tokyo Toilet, a real set of seventeen, modern public bathrooms designed by sixteen architects, part of an urban redevelopment project that first opened in 2020 in Shibuya. Hirayama moves through life with deliberate simplicity: he wakes up, reshelves the book that he’d been reading the night before, trims his moustache, waters his plants, puts on his Tokyo Toilet jumpsuit uniform, buys a coffee from the vending machine near his home, and listens to a casette tape in his van as he drives from site to site. At work, he scrubs the public toilets meticulously, almost lovingly, like a worksman dedicated to his craft. During his break, Hirayama sits by himself at the park and unwraps a simple, packaged sandwich. He takes a photo of the foliage above with a 35mm camera, which he gets developed later in the week, and then returns to work. Sometimes, afterwards, Hirayama bathes at a public bathhouse; sometimes he dines at a casual restaurant where he’s greeted as a regular; sometimes he visits a bookstore and buys a title that the storekeeper recommends. And then he goes home and reads, lying on the floor next to a lamp, squinting through the shadows from the pages of his own book. When he awakens to the sound of a bamboo broom and a street sweeper, the rounds start again.

The rigidness of this daily routine is both familiar and unfamiliar. It’s not uncommon in the fast-paced world of today to see people living a life that’s just as mundane, repeating tasks with little to no variation. Yet, for Hirayama, no two days are ever the same. His routine, though rigid, is laced with intention. Whether he’s cleaning public toilets with a precision that most people wouldn’t give their own bathrooms, or pausing to appreciate a patch of sunlight filtering through the trees, the film suggests that even the most mundane kind of work, the most repetitive, the kind of manual labour that holds no social value in Japanese culture, can be meaningful and can indeed be perfect.

Hirayama’s existence isn’t marked by towering ambition or the need for recognition. Instead, it’s a gentle meditation on the dignity of routine and the joy of being present.

Perfect Days resonated with me the most in 2024, a minimalist counterpoint to the stream of Hollywood media and ideas about Ambition with a capital A. Hollywood—and by extension, much of contemporary hustle culture—celebrates a relentless grind of self-improvement and a never-ending pursuit of greatness. This distinctly modern anxiety to chase the next best thing pervades our lives: every success is quickly overshadowed by the next thing we need to do, the next improvement we need to make to get to where we need to go. Even in literature studies, a world that feels so far away from the capitalist grind, the idea of constantly working harder so as not to fall behind has underscored my entire degree.

Komorebi. The mundane. Finding meaning in smaller, quieter moments. I’m standing in Hyde Park, looking at the trees, thinking about Perfect Days and perfect days and the upcoming new year, and I decide that I want more of this.

Stepping into the new year, I want to fight against the usual start-of-year impulse to make long lists of resolutions for 2025, because I only have my eye set on one thing: to finish writing my thesis. Along the way, though, I’m going to try to notice all the things that often go unnoticed in the rush and chaos of ambition.

My days go like this: I wake up, drive to campus, sit at my desk, write, read, research. Keep writing. Keep reading. I watch a lot of good films and do a lot of fun things with the people in my life, like I do every year. And that’s good. And in my perfect days: I slow down. And that’s even better.