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Hi all,
A very relaxed Sunday to you all. Just saying hello as I haven’t been in touch in a while. I’m still alive, and still very much writing away.
Going to keep this brief as I’m trying to observe the Lord’s day and do absolutely nothing, which is a rarety for me.
Sometimes the pursuit of leisure becomes a compulsion we strive to maximise, which is an entirely illogical, harmful and degenerate way of looking after your well-being.
The conclusion I came to - formalised in my thesis investigation - after a year’s of master’s study of psychology and how it pertains to well-being was that you can’t prescribe happiness to people, and that it’ll mostly arise from people doing whatever it is they want themselves (as long as it’s somewhat fundamentally healthy, or at least not chronically toxic or harmful). I’ll write more about that soon, hopefully.
This week I’ve got around to writing about Kyoto again, this time everything that didn’t include my pilgrimage to pay my respects at one of the longest-lasting cultural influences from my childhood.
Kyoto is the place that inspires the Japanophilia in all of those afflicted with it who never played computer games or watched anime cartoons, and to be honest my cynical self, who at the time and by that stage of my life had just presumed it’d be nice to visit to ‘tick off the list’ (rank), was blown away - or maybe swept away is a more appropriate phrase - by its beauty, its elegance, its relaxed pace and the general atmosphere of witsful yearning it inspires. It’s not all ancient temples and traditional costumes, obviously, but even the modern aspects of it are plesant and serene.
Or are they? Maybe my memory of the place just reflects my state of mind at the time, or perhaps we create these images of places before we even visit them. More on that next week.
Read it here: Travel Diaries #17 - Kyoto
On that note of philosophical riffing is another piece I threw together just yesterday, inspired by a commute to work in which I was blissfully unaware of the time, and thought it might make my journey pass quicker as a result. I’m kind of fascinated by the nature of time and how we perceive it, but I’m an artist not a physicist, so I don’t particularly care if it’s accurate, whether in a Newtonian or a quantum sense.
Read it here: The World is Breathing
Enjoy,
And go out and enjoy the extra hour of daylight, though looking out the window where I’m sitting it could be a few more days yet before we get to see it.
Gav.
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