"From this experience I understood the danger of focusing only on what isn't there..
What if I came to the end of my life, and realized that I had spent everyday,
watching for a man who would never come to me?
What an unbearable sorrow it would be to realize:
I never really tasted the things I had eaten,
or seen the places I had been;
because I thought of nothing but the Chairman,
even while my life was drifting away from me.
And yet, if I drew my thoughts back from him,
what life would I have?
I would be like a dancer who had practiced since childhood,
for a performance she would never give."
- Sayuri Nitta; Memoirs of a Geisha -