Must…Finish…Writing…

2 min readOct 13, 2025

A Haiku About Habit & Persistence

A night some months ago, before going to bed, I wrote:

目が重いでも終わらせるこの俳句
me ga omoi demo owaraseru kono haiku
eyes heavy
but I must finish
this haiku
— Tenjōka

As I’ve written before, I try to make myself write at least one haiku everyday. I don’t really think most of them are very good, but I write anyway. That’s not me being modest, just realistic.† Even the best baseball players rarely hit much above .300 (that’s a 30% hit rate for the baseball illiterate). To continue the baseball metaphor, I don’t take so many swings because I’m expecting to hit them all, I take them mostly just because want to stay in the habit — and I enjoy writing them too.

[†: For every haiku I think is ok enough to share here, there are dozens that will never leave my haiku notecard files once they enter them.]

The other night I was tired and ready for bed. It had been a long day. But then I realized I hadn’t yet written any haiku for that day. So I pulled out a notecard and … sat thinking. And thinking. And thinking. I might have nodded off a few times in there.

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Then, it came to me, and I wrote down the above. And almost immediately went into the bedroom and fell asleep.

A little meta, perhaps, and playfully, but some haiku are both those things. Issa, who is generally considered the one of the greatest haikuists of all time, wrote some 20,000+ haiku in his life (which works out to several every single day of his adult years) and many of them were meta too, so I’m in good company.

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