To really enjoy the taste of water you must be dehydrated.
To really enjoy a good onsen you need to first exhaust yourself.
To really enjoy a good sleep you need to be very sleepy.
To really enjoy your self-time you need to really enjoy your people-time.
One cannot live without the other. You can't enjoy the downhill if you don't go uphill first. Try to enjoy the bad parts of life, because they will help you appreciate the good parts even more.
For the longest time I have been living my life as if everything I know would disappear after one year. If you know the environment that I live in I think that's not too hard to imagine. Every year interns come, and every next year those interns leave again. Every year that I'm in Japan I'm not sure if I want to stay or leave, and in the past I have felt very strongly about leaving this country and never looking back, essentially starting a new life somewhere else. When I first came to Japan, that is exactly what I did. I left behind everything in Holland. No friends to help me, no language skill to fall back on, not even social standards were the same. It was all fresh and new, and it felt great. I'm sure this single extremely positive event is what drove me to see every year as a closed chapter. Until now.
'It never ends'. It's actually a quote from the Watchmen comics and/or movie. Life is not a movie. There is no easy ending, no grand finale, no big explosion that ends it all. Life goes on and we need to learn to live with that. After messing up your life in a grandiosely epic way never before seen, there is still a tomorrow, and you still have to consider the consequences of your actions. Similarly, you can tell yourself all you want that this 'chapter' in your life ends here, right now, but it doesn't. It doesn't ever end. There's always a tomorrow that connects you to yesterday, no matter what kind of lifestyle you've got.
Recently I've been trying hard to accept this part of life. I am by nature a person who loves the epic and the dramatic, and as such I look for epic events in my life. Closures. Grand finales. Things that blow up, end, and then never come back. But it's never quite like that. Even if you think that something lies in your past and will never come back, you're never quite sure. Since I've come to Japan I've had more than seven or eight 'endings', or what counted as endings in my brain, after each of which I was sure that this time my life would change. Life didn't change, but I changed. I became more 'normal'. I've come to accept that life always connects one event to the other, and that there is no clear ending or beginning anywhere. It's a rather un-epic reality that all of us aspiring world-changers will have to accept.
I don't mean to say that this is bad. Not at all. In fact, I have been feeling great recently because I'm embracing this fact. Case in point: company party tonight. I really did not want to go. I've been spending a lot of time with other people and I am really missing a bit of self-time, so I wanted to keep tonight to clean up my life a little bit, both physically and mentally. So I was planning to silently back out of the party altogether, but just when I was about to leave work my boss came to me and asked me if I would join tonight. "Will you join tonight? You'll join tonight, right? You'll definitely join!". Argh... So I went. And I had fun. It was a great night, in fact. Of course the fact that my boss tried so hard to convince me is part of the reason I went, but another part has to do with the never-ending part of this post. I figured that since I'm going to be here for a while longer I might as well go and enjoy myself, cause I'll be around these people for who knows how long. It's a change in time-perspective.
I remember blogging once, long ago, about how I was proud of myself not to have any idea of where I would be five years from now. I can still understand why I felt that way, but there is an underlying way of thinking that made me feel proud to think that way. The premise is very simple: if you know where you will be five years from now, then your life is boring. It's the way I thought about it when I first wrote those feelings down on my blog, and I think I still feel the same way. But boring-ness or exciting-ness is only the surface layer of the real issue. What's below is your goals and convictions; it's what you really want to do with your life. Sometimes a clear goal will make your life boring, at least to some people's standards. And similarly, a lack of goals altogether could make your life so random that it's in fact quite exciting. I think it's important to not only focus on the boring/exciting aspect of this, but also to look at the lower levels, and to look at how we perceive ourselves and our goals. If looked at from this perspective the boring/exciting can be seen as the effect of a cause, and if the cause can be analyzed and altered then a different effect can be achieved.
This may sound a bit vague. What I am trying to say is that, when considering one's perspective on life, one cannot think of life as the current 'chapter', or the current moment, because that would blind us to the long-term causal relationships that can be seen when looking at life as one long continuous string of events. It all stacks up. No information is lost, even if it might not be available to you at a specific moment. Life never forgets, and you shouldn't either.
(Side note: I have noticed several times now that my posts might be seen as religious if one replaced the word 'life' with the word 'God'. Peculiar?)
A small follow-up to the post I made a couple of days ago about making money by converting currency. I did a little comparison of the currency conversion rates of two years ago compared to now, and what would have happened if I had exchanged 1000 euros into local currency two years ago, and back again to euros today. The results were not very exciting..
For about 85% of the currencies I would have lost money had I exchanged from euros to that currency. Of the remaining 15% most currencies are not interesting because the gain is very small and would likely be lost in the transaction fee, so the only remaining currencies that are profitable are Switzerland Francs (107.5 euro profit), Silver Ounces (228 euro profit), Japan Yen (254 euro profit) and Gold Ounces (350 euro profit). As you can see two out of four are not even actual currencies but raw metals. I guess I am really fortunate to be earning money in JPY, cause out of all the currencies in the world it was the one with the highest increase in value for the past two years.
I still haven't found the bug in the system! But I'll keep searching :D
Photo straight from my old (t)rusty Canon G7, albeit with a custom white balance that I cannot remember where I set it.
Bicycling + time-lapsing = cyclolapsing? The idea sounds simple, but in practice it's not at all. I've tried it before about a year ago and the result was not pretty. At the time I attributed it to a combination of the camera being attached to the front wheel and me choosing a mountainous route, which caused me to zigzag alot with the steering wheel, making the movie very wobbly. So today I figured I'd try again, this time mounting the camera on the back of the bicycle, and choosing a flat route instead. The result is marginally better, but still not really worth showing. However! As an added side effect I managed to take the pictures of many Japanese people looking back in surprise at the weird gaijin passing them on a bicycle! So I decided to make a collage of the various Japanese people I've encountered instead.
And finally, here's a youtube vid of the entire trip. Be warned, as it may cause insanity.
The weather was interesting today, and I felt kind of guilty after messing up the placement of the camera yesterday, which caused an annoying flare all over the second half of the video.. So here's another try :D
The air is always so wonderful after a ty. It really feels like there's not a speck of dust or dirt left in the sky. It's clean and empty.
The anti-newspaper-person-protection-paper fell off!
The balcony door is shaking. The sound of rain on my window has only been increasing in volume. It's been raining for two days on end. A ty is coming.
