In the past, the life expectancy was shorter than now. Also, the life expectancy of some countries such as Uganda are in the case. It is said that the life expectancy was determined by yourself. The factors related to a longer life are outlook, exercises, an active mind, diet and genes. 80 percent of the factors are depend on your lifestyle.
Then we calculated how long we can live. Some questions of the calculator seemed strange…Do you have daughters? Are you left handed? But I thought that most of the questions are about the joys and motivations of life.I live my life trying to achieve my goal and taking care of my important people. For me they are the meanings and motivatons for living. And I am happy that I don’t have enough time to do all the things I want to.
So I think it’s good to smoke or eat bad foods if they satisfy you…to some measures.
Anyway I want to live meaningful life rather than long life.
I am satisfied with my life these days because I have got to challenge myself in everyday lives. And I found some essential factors to make your life better and enjoyable.
What changed my life fundamentally was dancing. I had wanted for a long time to begin something through which I can achieve a goal with my own efforts before I enrolled in college. I started krump dancing. When you move in the style of krump, you can express your emotions and energies much more than any other style of dancing. Krump dancing itself is of course very good to do, but its important characteristic is that krump is a dance of battle. You express yourself and improve your skills through battles with other dancers, and in fact I can see most of krump dancers are very earnest. You have to be so earnest that you keep up with or beat your rivals.
But when battling or competing, you cannot help thinking of being defeated. If someone defeats you, of course you will get depressed, and have a hard time. Though at the same time you can have many ways to deny your lose, by making excuses, sometimes such fears of defeat put you away from trying, making efforts or competing with others.
I was also scared of competitions and defeats. The fear of defeat was, to me, too big to compete with others because I had never experienced defeat. I often made an excuse of lose and my lack of efforts. But through krump dancing, I changed. Now when I’m in face-to-face competition with the rival in dancing, somehow I do never want to lose and despite the fear of loses, I can feel like challenging the rivals. What did make me change?
I think that is because I met many people who are better at dancing and I lost many times, then my arrogance was swept away. Now I can also see the enjoyable dimensions of things more than the fears of failure. I think I have got more active and satisfied with everyday lives than before. I try things, and then, whether I succeed or fail, learn many things from them. If you are scared of failure, you may also be scared of challenging yourself, then you cannot learn anything from your life. I think it is a waste of lifetime.
I believe what is important in life is the experience of failure, and the passion to learn from and get over it.
We talked about the news that is about the security at the airport in the US.
The US announced new security measures in response to a terror threat. But the US gave no details about this decision.
After 9.11, we all are forced to deal with the security issues and improve the securities against terrorisms. And they seemed quite natural for us to undergo the very strict security checks when we get on a plane. For me, this seemed natural too, because 9.11 was happened when I was 6 years old. Since then, the time I have little intelligence, it was insisted that we needed to make security checks more and more strict.
But in fact, we hardly see the terrorists be caught at the airport. That may be because the authorities usually check their behaviors, and they get caught before the incidents occur.
Now I can think of this announcement that this is a kind of political performance by the US government. Whatever the truth is, they might have the people feel safe, and this is the key of this announcement. As a matter of fact we don’t know how to conclude the problems of terrorisms, yet people in the Middle East is bing endangered. We can feel safe in some measure when we know some measures are taken, which I think is very important.
I heard the news which is about bribe. Former Guatemalan President was sentenced to five years and ten months in jail for taking bribe from Taiwan.
Our discussion group talked about whether bribes are wright and, when it is wrong, how to prevent from taking bribes.
For example, you may say that hospitality – we Japanese sometimes call them Omotenashi – can be a kind of bribe because hospitality and bribe are both used for negotiation. But I think what is essential to both of them is the size of society they contribute to. Even the word bribe sounds bad, I think they are good when they contribute to large societies and many people. On the other hand, I cannot say hospitality is good when it enriches the very small number of people.
And then, how we prevent from bad bribes? This will be a very, very difficult problem. I think we cannot prevent perfectly at all. But if we give up them all, bribes and corruptions will increase much, which can violate our human rights. I think indeed we have to give up some bribes being taken, but keep an eye on the people disposed of our money and rights. We have to make effort to reduce bribes and punish the people who take bribes.