The Good Life - 04/05/2023 - Emily’s big adventure *

Emily has arranged with her employer in Japan the dates for her five week Tokyo internship. Next, she needs to buy her plane tickets and find a place to stay. Oh, how excited I am for this adventure of hers! She’s diving headlong into Japan Inc. What could that be like in 2023? Largely gone of course is the Japan which I first knew in the 80’s, a corporate culture of regimented rows of suited salarymen smoking and talking into phones around tight clusters of desks while smartly uniformed Office Ladies (OL) waited on them with tea and snacks and brisk trips to the fax and photocopy machines. What Japan work world will Emily experience?

I hope that Emily finds a place to live on the other side of Tokyo from where she will work, so that she can ride daily the Yamanote Line which loops around the city like a great railroad serpent swallowing its tail. How will she fit in? Will she feel out of place being one of those Japanese who has left the hive and returned somehow changed by the world that is not Japan? I hope she makes friends, and has lots of fun and has many very interesting experiences at work; and goes out at night for nomikai drinks with her co-workers, passing round after round of “kampai” into the deepening neon dark, walking and perhaps stumbling a bit from one small izakaya to the next, watching the layers of social protocol and facade fall away from her coworkers with each drink and new bar, revealing slowly the truer hearts of new friends which that culture sometimes demands must otherwise be kept under lock and key. And I hope that she comes home with the best stories, and with memories of experiences during a time of life which can only come once. For we can never again be twenty-two and free and brave and alive and with the whole wide universe spread out before our feet. Ours for the taking—if only we go. Go and have the adventure of a lifetime Emily! Your mom and I are rooting for you!

#GoingAlone#GreatLifeAdventure

The Good Life Meditation is my daily recitation and reminder of personal objectives and principles used in pursuit of a purposeful life in spite of a universe of seeming indifference. Learn more about The Good Life at my website GoingAlone.org or by reading my book Going Alone. And visit our Discord at: https://lnkd.in/gFgfGmY6

OBJECTIVES: 1. Be Always Ready to Die 2. Make Good Use of Time and Resources 3. Develop Good and Sound Life Principles 4. Cultivate Good Emotional Reactions 5. Perform Good Actions 6. Recognize True Limits and Opportunity 7. One Thing Slowly

PRINCIPLES: 1. Principle of War 2. Principle of Reason 3. Homunculus 4. Anchorhold 5. Home of Good and Evil 6. Principle of Purpose 7. Atomic Principle 8. Principle of Nature 9. The Pirate Ride 10. Principle of Maturity 11. Social Principle

12. Principle of Family 13. Public Speaking 14. Temperance 15. Life Will Not Go Well 16. The Horror Show 17. That Which Must Be Borne 18. The Feast of Offal 19. Distraction 20. Agency and The Great Indifference 21. The Best Seat in the House 22. The Restless Man 23. The Path of Wildness 24. The Great Life Adventure 25. The Risk of Avoiding Risk 26. Sin and Damnation 27. Complete Oblivion 28. The Season of Philosophy