I seem to have forgotten, but regular exercise is such an important part of being a human. I had forgotten that this is not only physical. Maintaining mobility and fitness levels helps immensely with your confidence which in turn helps immensely with your mentality. This means you can be more useful to those around you, …

An excuse to explore your options Read More »

Ordinary is boring. Ordinary is not extraordinary. Ordinary is fine for some, but those people never do or become the extraordinary. We need the extraordinary. They remind us that we are ordinary. They also remind us that we can be extraordinary. Otherwise, we’re just ordinary, and ordinary is boring. Enough of this. I’ve been living …

The importance of being extraordinary Read More »

On the All Blacks’ youtube channel, they posted a video about the Hurricanes maintain their mental strength. This appears to be part of a push in recent years to take a proactive approach towards mental health in New Zealand, and it has my strong backing. We never know what life will throw at us. Part …

Real courage comes through mental strength Read More »

Yesterday marked the beginning of my 32nd time around the sun. I was 16 when I realised what I wanted to do with my life, which was simply to live in Japan. That was the first time I came here on a school trip back in 2005. I remember looking out of the plane as …

Why do you like air? Read More »

Whose standards? Whose values? When we do things, we do things based on standards and values. However, standards and values are very much a cultural thing. The standard at which you are to wrap a present, for example, vary wildly between Japan and New Zealand. In New Zealand, you can get away with wrapping a …

Whose standards? Whose values? Read More »

Ask yourself: what’s the importance? Very often when writing or describing things I find that I don’t do a good enough job at answering this question. I just give out information, that without an answer to this question, makes it simply isolated. It’s interesting because in the west we have a mantra of telling the …

What’s the importance? Read More »

During yesterday’s swim I had a chat with Mr. Konno, the jolly lifeguard there. Mr. Konno was telling me that a friend of mine who I saw at the pool the other day, and was there longer than me but was slower, had swim 6k that day. That’s double what I did. Mr. Konno was …

Sustaining the habit Read More »