Hello all you beautiful and amazing readers. I hope you are all doing wonderfully! This will just be a quick update post. A ulog, I suppose. You all may have noticed that I haven't been posting as often recently. There is a reason! Read on to find out.

Sleep

Friends and folks who have talked with me for any length of time know I don't tend to get a lot of sleep. My kids usually get up around 5 or 6am. The Japanese way is to sleep in the same room as they do, which is fine most of the time, but it does mean when they wake up I don't have many options beyond waking up myself. Not their fault: they are kids and being filled with so much excitement and energy that they don't want to sleep a minute more than necessary is what kids do. My fault: because despite knowing I have a hard wake-up time, instead of going to bed around 9 or 10pm, as I should, I delay and procrastinate and push back bedtime as far as I dare, then push it back even more for good measure.

It's not that I dislike sleep—no, no, I love it! But I also love reading, writing, practicing my Japanese and Italian, researching the best ways to make coffee, working on some DIY project or another, meditating, practicing yoga and tai chi, jogging, inhaling wikipedia, playing steem monsters, and a dozen or two more things. Too many hobbies, basically. So when my kids finally fall asleep and my wife is otherwise engaged, I try to cram all of this stuff in.

10pm rolls around and I think "I should go to bed" then I go back to reading.

11pm rolls around and I think "I should go to bed" then I go back to whatever project has caught my attention that evening.

Midnight comes and I think "I really should go to bed!" then I go back to writing my Steemit post of the day.

1am comes and I think "ok, now I really need to go to bed". Then I might listen. Sometimes.

It comes as no surprise that I only get, on average, about 4-5 hours of sleep a night. Which is usually fine, really. Coffee helps.

So far for 2019 however, I have been making myself go to bed at a decent time. Honestly, as far as restfulness goes, I am not noticing any difference. I'll keep it up and see how it goes. But one side-effect of this change is that it does mean less time to write for Steemit. I'm going to try to continue posting a few times a week, but I don't know if I can continue the daily posting. We shall see.

The Great War

One of my go to questions whenever someone asks for any questions is "What would Europe look like today if the Kaiser hadn't fired Bismarck?"

It's an open question. I certainly don't know the answer, though I can make a few guesses. I'm curious what people think and where they take that question. It's a good way to see how aware people are of recent history, also their answer will hint at personal political beliefs, biases, and so on.

Recently we passed the 100 year anniversary of the end of WW I. Armistice day. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is how I learned it. How many WW I films have you seen?

All Quiet On The Western Front is a fantastic movie if you haven't seen it. Joyeaux Noel is another good one, looking at the Christmas Truce of the Great War. One I haven't seen but is on my list is Paths of Glory, an anti-war WW I film staring Kirk Douglas. One of the few Kubrick movies I haven't seen.

Anyway, I have several other questions I can pop at people when they ask for random ones, but that Bismarck question is usually one of the first I turn to.

Meditations

Perhaps it won't surprise many of you loyal readers that one of my favorite books is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Stoicism is very compatible with Buddhism, and at any rate it never fails to fill me with a sense of wonder to be reading the emperor of Rome's private journal, his private thoughts that were never intended for publication or other eyes. What strange twists of history led to his writings being preserved where so many other works were lost?

I am reading the Gregory Hays translation this time, which is new to me. A friend recommended it after reading it himself, suggesting that the text gets new life with Hays' use of very modern, colloquial English. So far I agree.

If you've never read the book before and have any interest in philosophy, I fully recommend it. You can find many older and free translations online, but if you have ten bucks to spare, the Gregory Hays version is pretty good.

A Zen Tale

Well, that's about all, but let's end today's ulog with a zen tale which the part of Meditations I'm reading (Book II) reminds me of.

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"Suzuki Roshi, I've been listening to your lectures for years," a student said during the question and answer time following a lecture, "but I just don't understand. Could you just please put it in a nutshell? Can you reduce Buddhism to one phrase?"

Everyone laughed. Suzuki laughed.

"Everything changes," he said. Then he asked for another question.

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Title graphic based on this image, kindly made available for free by Zoran Gelev.

Thank you for visiting and reading :)

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	David LaSpina is an American photographer lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time. More?