Anne Lamott, one of my favorite authors, said in her TED talk that one of the things that she knows for sure in her life is

Over the holidays I received a small book as a gift, it was my birthday…

There is a great line in The Hobbit, when Gandalf is talking to Bilbo about going on an adventure with the dwarfs. You see, Bilbo was not only a Baggins, there was Took on his mother’s side, and the Tooks were adventurers.

In a recent article in HBR, it stated that organisations now need to move from building Minimum Viable Products, to Minimum Virtuous Products.

In a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, VUCA, world the demand is for integrity, transparency and virtue.

I’ve been musing lately about the speeches and the actual physical movement of the civil rights protestors under the leadership of Martin Luther King jr.

Thomas De Quincey call it the formidable curse of life, taedium vitae - the tedium of life. In other words the ordinariness of life, boredom. Boredom is the least tolerable of human states.

Here is a little jewel I picked up, you expand by relaxing. It seem counterintuitive almost, but makes complete sense when you think about. If you want more, wider, bigger, then relax.

Yesterday was rough, people close to us’ son passed away. He was just a few days old. The day before

At the beginning of the year I always want to decide what I want to be, not so much what I want to do.

The question that I have been asking myself over the last two months is do I want to be safe, or do I want to be strong?

Happiness is largely dependent on our circumstances, let’s face it. More specifically this often elusive feeling of contentment is based on feeling safe, filled, secure, having enough.

Our shadow selves, the side of us that we like to believe we are not like, but in fact we are.

Here is something that I picked up lately, and it has had a major effect on my mood, and mental health. It took a while to get right, but once it got going it is hard to stop.

“The gods seem to think that we have a choice” - Anon

We live in a society that values being calm and collected over being aggressive and violent, and this is a good thing of course, most of the time.

The problem is that we then end up often valuing passivity more than activity. Violence and aggression are necessary elements needed to make decisions, especially difficult ones.

It’s been called the secret essence of the Samurai. If you have ever seen a Samurai, perhaps even in a film, you will have seen Tomaranu Kokoro.

Samurai, like all great warriors, live with a constant awareness of death. That today might very well be their last day, their last battle. So, it is best to give it all you’ve got.

Samurai choose to wear only lightweight armor, offensive armor. Defensive armor is heavy and difficult to move in, but light offensive armor gives one the advantage of speed and agility.

These two are completely different attitudes in life,

The samurai is always taught, “Test your armor, but only test the front.”

We all face battles, attacks, from the inside and the outside. Yet, very few admit it and most prefer to either ignore the attacks or just take them lying down.

The Samurai, the elite japanese swordsmen, had a very specific code that they lived by called the Bushidō . There was a saying about what was important when training to be a Samurai; Zen 7 and Ken 3. Zen is spirit and Ken is sword.