Day 1/2
One of life’s all time highs…sitting in your own sento (Japanese communal bath) with your wife, dark chocolate and umeshu (plum infused liquor) after a hard day of unpacking (well, guess one could forgo the unpacking part). The move is complete; got out of Osaka is one piece, stayed for one night in the family’s house in Takuma, Kagawa, landed in Matsuyama on the 6th of January, 2012. I do believe, if 2011 is any precedent, 2012 is going to be pretty amazing and challenging. We know somewhere deep in our bliss-filled minds that we have tons and tons of work to do, but we’re just going to have to deal with that some other time. Now, just let us be with our dreams and our big ideas as we watch the steam come off of the surface of the water, making the most mysterious of shapes….
Day 3
We spent all day cleaning the kitchen. I didn’t really think it was going to be soooo difficult, but good lord, we were scrubbing oil and rust that haven’t ever experienced the joy of a sponge. And of course just to top it off, it appears that we cracked the sink, (yeah we actually broke the metal around it) meaning we’ll have to replace the sink now. We’re hoping that the owner of the building will go ahead and pay for it being that all we really did was fill the sink full with water and placed some hopelessly dirty stove parts in it.
Strangely, I really enjoyed today. All my life I’ve only worked for someone else, with the goal of my toil only equaling whatever money I could make. This endeavor is really changing my impression of “work” and my relationship to it. Really the last 20 years of my life in work, my goal has been to try to pass the time as quickly as possible so I could get “off” of work, and start to live. Now, I sort of feel I’m flipping that equation, now this work is my life and a big part of my happiness. The concept of searching for and acquiring a job, usually in some sort of service industry or education in my case, means that I’m limited to what is being offered, that part of my life, my thoughts and actions must cater to someone else’s ideas and desires. In essence, that part of my life is being defined and controlled by someone else. Why not create your own job??