When the health goals you set for yourself don’t go as planned
A Japanese perspective on determination and resolution
When my friends and I just graduated college, for a lot of us it was a very confusing and unsure time. We didn’t quite know what we wanted to do, how we wanted to do it, and we didn’t really know what to make of the opportunities presented to us.
We did our best to apply to positions we found interesting, but most of us just ended up accepting the first offer that didn’t sound awful.
As a young person who didn’t quite understand what they wanted to do, you can imagine how these jobs turned out for us a year or so later — we ended up quitting. And every time someone in our friend group quit a job they hated, we all celebrated.
We celebrated because in our hearts we understood that our friend was not a lazy bum who had no grit, but that they were looking to find something that suited them better. And the next job they found would be much better. We’d see them grow a lot happier.
There is a Japanese proverb that roughly translates to, “To let go is nourishment for the soul”.
