Happy New Year 2017!
Since the year 2010, I’ve made seasonal greetings web site where I combine Japanese culture and Canadian culture, which is, a combination of Christmas greetings as Canadian culture and New Year greetings as Japanese culture. I hope everyone likes my illustration!
No-one probably knows the similarity between the greetings web site and this blog. Both are also a message for myself. As I often write here, I know that no-one reads this blog, and I write this blog for myself. The greetings message is “basically” for my friends, but also partially for myself. This is what I wrote in the greetings web site.
it also made me find how busy my daily life is. It’s good to know there is room in my heart where I enjoy cultural experience. The Japanese character that means “busy” – 忙 – is a combination of “heart” – 心 – and “lost” or even “dead”- 亡 -. This implies that busy means a state in which heart is lost or dead. When people are busy, they are often unaware that they are losing their heart.
I was telling this to myself when I came back to Japan. Life in Japan is basically busy, and it is so easy to lose my heart while I always have some emotion whether it is positive or negative. New Year resolution of the year 2016 was to visit a historical site once a month. It turned out to be a good opportunity for me to find that I usually lose (or kill?) my heart.
It’s been a little more than a week since the year 2017 started, and I am still thinking of New Year resolution of this year. One of the “candidates” is to breath deeply. You probably thought “huh?”, which is understandable. But how often do you mind how you breathe? What this question really means is, how mindful of yourself are you? OK, this is one of New Year resolutions of this year; mind my breath to be mindful of myself.