On Being in the Water: Epicurus, Clinamen, and the Small Happiness of Hot Springs
From a nervous first soak in Osaka in December 2016 to the hinoki-scented bath at Kamigakure in November 2023 — on Epicurus, the tiny accidental swerve that changes everything, and the specific freedom of hot water, quiet, and nowhere to be.
On Being in the Water
Epicurus, the tiny swerve, and the small happiness of hot springs — a seven-year education in ataraxia that began with a locker key used as a hairband in Osaka.
I came to Epicurus recently, and my first instinct was to misread him the way most people do. Epicurean in common usage means indulgent — fine food, pleasure-seeking, the soft life. The actual Epicurus was something quieter. He lived simply in a garden in Athens with his friends and argued that the highest human good was ataraxia: undisturbedness. Freedom from anxiety, from the pressure of ambition, from the measuring gaze that compares your life to others'. Not ecstasy. Just peace. The temporary, deliberate suspension of everything that usually demands your attention.
When I read this, I thought immediately of onsen.
And then I thought about a concept from a different tradition — the Danish hygge, that particular quality of warmth and ease in small shared moments, the feeling of being temporarily released from the world's demands among people you trust. I had assumed the two were separate ideas. Solitude on one side, togetherness on the other. But I think they are the same river entered from different banks. And I think I have been stepping into it, in one form or another, since December 2016.
The Clinamen
Epicurus borrowed from Democritus the idea that the world is made of atoms falling through the void. But he added something Democritus had not: the clinamen, the tiny, unpredictable swerve. Atoms do not fall in perfectly straight lines. They deviate, slightly, for no determinable reason. And from that deviation, everything — collisions, combinations, the material world, free will itself — follows. The universe is not fate. It is the accumulated result of small, unplanned deflections.
The Latin poet Lucretius described it as the minutest possible swerve — barely a deviation at all. But without it, atoms would fall parallel forever, never meeting, and nothing would exist. The smallest possible deflection is the condition for everything.
My clinamen was a locker key used as a hairband. It was December 2016, my first solo trip to Japan, eighteen days, and I had an Osaka Amazing Pass burning a little hole in my pocket and a half-formed intention to try an onsen before I left. I had studied the etiquette carefully. I knew to wash first, to be thorough, to enter the water clean. What I had not prepared for was the specific social texture of a public bath full of women who had clearly been coming here for years and found my careful, anxious entry entirely unremarkable.
Six Waters, Seven Years
I stored my shoes, went upstairs, and stood in the changing room slightly unsure of what to do with the locker key until I looped it around my wrist like a bracelet. I washed my hair and body as thoroughly as I could manage with the specific difficulty of slippery hands and a small wooden stool. Then I walked out into the bath area and found it full of aunties — probably from the pachinko downstairs, I thought, and found this funny and calming in equal measure.
I couldn't soak for long. I felt too visible, too tall, too new to the whole thing. I moved from bath to bath — cold, outdoor, a reclining one with water flowing over you, a sauna I left within a minute because it was stuffy and the silence felt pressured. But I stayed until something shifted. The aunties were not looking at me. Nobody was. The water was warm and I was in it and nobody required anything of me, and that feeling — small, preliminary, not yet named — was the clinamen. The swerve that started the whole thing.
A few days later, on the same trip, I went to Spa Suminoe. I was noticeably more comfortable. I knew, by then, that I did not need to carry the anxiety in at least that space.
I had a voucher from the tourist information centre and paid a ¥500 entry fee. I soaked in different baths and found myself a private one, and I soaked in it for too long — which is perhaps the most honest evidence that by this point I had found something I genuinely needed, because I had planned that day so meticulously that every bus connection was accounted for, and I still missed the last bus back to Ise Station.
To be precise: the supposed last bus was cancelled, and I had already missed the one before it because I was still in the water. I panicked. I bought a limited express train from Toba to Ise Station and cried quietly about the cost — a sudden unplanned expense for someone who had calculated every yen of that 2019 trip. I was worried and embarrassed and slightly pruney. Thinking back, the miscalculation was worth it. If I were to visit Toba again, I would give myself another soak with no hesitation, the bath had been worth it—and actually, I'd even consider planning a night's stay next time. This is also something that perhaps Epicurus might have recognised: small pleasures worth small disruptions, and the anxiety of the disruption fading faster than the memory of the warmth.
I was in Hokkaido on a business trip. The night soaks were with other women from the group — easy, social, the particular warmth of shared water with people you are becoming comfortable around. But my daytime soaks were alone. Nobody else was there. I had the outdoor bath and the view entirely to myself.
At Lake Akan, it was almost 10PM when I got into the bath, the ryokan quiet, the lake somewhere in the dark beyond the window, yet I chose to set my own futon and slept by the giant glass window to wake up to its view. I remember thinking that this was the specific quality of happiness that is hard to explain to people who have not felt it: not the excitement you get on your first flight, not glitz and glamorous like the streets of Ginza—just completely, unusually, present.
At Shiretoko, I soaked at 5AM. I was at the open bath before anyone else arrived, in the particular quiet of very early morning, watching the light change. I almost missed breakfast. I was nearly late for the group meeting—thankfully didn't. I have not once regretted that soak, as it was truly one of a kind, and especially in a place with its unique UNESCO status.
By 2023 I was travelling with Friends A and B — an architect now based in Singapore and a lawyer, both with schedules that make ten days together a small logistical miracle. We see each other at Chinese New Year sukiyaki, and maybe once more in the middle of the year if Friend A can come back from Singapore and everyone's workload permits. The three of us in a car for ten days across Kyushu was not something that could be taken for granted. That is its own form of happiness — the hygge of people who love each other and rarely have time, and who took the time anyway.
At Shin-An in Beppu, after the girls' soak, and again in the following morning, I had the private rotenburo to myself, steam rising, open sky above. At Kamigakure in Takachiho, the bath was hinoki — Japanese cypress — and the scent of it was the specific scent that now, when I encounter it anywhere, takes me immediately back to that forest and that quiet. These were private baths. You do not need to negotiate space or silence with anyone. The philosophy is already built into the architecture, and you're just there, enjoying the open skies with birdsongs and the cooling autumn breeze.
At Saga City Hotel, there was no onsen — just a public sento, heated water, gender-separated, open from 5AM. I used it at 5AM before Kunen-an. Nobody else was there at first, and I soaked until I heard people coming in and realised it was nearly time to pack and get to breakfast. The same pattern as Shiretoko, four years later: alone in the early water, the world not yet started, the mild reluctance to leave.
What the Water Actually Is
I do not know how to swim. I am 171cm tall, which means that in a standard Japanese bathtub I have to choose between sitting straight with my legs fully extended or sliding down with my knees curled to get my shoulders under. I have almost fallen asleep in bathtubs and been fine because the geometry prevents drowning — you simply slide until you are sitting up again. I stay in until my skin goes wrinkly. I doomscroll on my phone sometimes, or listen to music, or simply sit and look at whatever there is to look at. None of this is glamorous. All of it is, for me, consistently and reliably necessary.
What happens in hot water is that the measuring stops. The comparisons stop. The question of where I stand in relation to peers, to expectations, to the version of myself I am supposed to be becoming — that question requires a certain kind of upright, dressed, functional posture to sustain itself. It cannot follow me into the bath. In every hotel I stay in Japan I check for a bathtub before I book, because the bathtub is where I close off from the world, not because the world is bad but because I need somewhere it temporarily cannot reach me.
This is ataraxia. Not the absence of care — I care about many things, probably too many — but the deliberate, time-limited suspension of the machinery of caring. The water holds it for you while you float.
The Hygge in the Shared Water
Hygge, as I understand it, is not about luxury. It is about the quality of ease that comes when you are with people you trust, in a moment that does not demand performance. The candles and the warm drinks are incidental — what matters is the lowering of defences, the permission to be present without agenda.
The shared bath has this too, in its own form. The aunties at Naniwa no Yu, going about their routines, entirely unbothered by my presence, teaching me by indifference that I did not need to carry my self-consciousness in there. The women on the Hokkaido business trip, the ease of moving through that nightly ritual together, the particular closeness that comes from shared physical vulnerability without any of it being dramatic.
And then: ten days in Kyushu, three women with complicated schedules who made it work. Friend A flying in from Singapore. Friend B managing her caseload from a hotel room. Me rebuilding my body clock between interpreting assignments. We drove through the highlands and ate Saga wagyu and stood in the moss under Kamishikimi's lanterns and found ourselves in onsen at the ends of days, and the fact that we were together for those ten days at all was already the happiness — the small, unguaranteed, Epicurean happiness of people who wanted to be somewhere specific and managed to get there together.
The clinamen is everywhere in this. Friend A becomes an architect in Singapore and comes home less often. Friend B takes on more cases. I take assignments that wreck my sleep for weeks — sometimes months. All of this happens and we still find ourselves in a car in November, driving past the Aso caldera, laughing bitterly about our lack of luck with volcanic activity, but also about something I cannot remember but that felt important to the other two at the time. None of it was inevitable. It required small deviations from the straight line of our separate, busy trajectories. Those deviations — the decision to take the time, to book the ryokan, to be in the car together — are not small. They are the condition for everything that followed.
I am still learning Epicurus — and until I can dive deeper, I suspect I will keep learning him through hot water, which is probably not the standard scholarly approach but seems to me the correct one for now. The garden he lived in — the one in Athens where he taught his friends and insisted that the good life was simpler and quieter than ambition suggested — sounds, from this distance, like somewhere with very good bathtub access.
December 2016 to November 2023. Six soaks, seven years, one recurring discovery: the world will wait. You can get out of the water when you are ready. Until then, the measuring can continue without you. And until I can dive deeper into more philosophers' teachings, I'll soak myself in the bath more often.
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