Diary entry #5 - Birthday, Region Beta and Sakura

Hello hello!

It has been a while since I last posted a diary entry, but I had a good reason for that. For the last two months, I have been focused on my career. Nevertheless, it should have not taken me so long to write this.. However! My job hunting days have come to an end and I have started working at my new company at the end of April. Starting at a new position can be quite busy, but I am doing my best to keep up. One thing I can say for sure – I am glad that I made the move.

Have you ever heard of the “Region Beta Paradox”? I only came across this term recently, but found it incredibly interesting. The example that often gets told when explaining it is as follows:

John is thinking about whether he will walk to his new work place or go by bike. He decides that if his company is up to 1km away, he will walk, and if it is further than 1km, he will go by bike.

As his company is 2km away he goes by bike and gets that much faster than if it was less than 1km away and he would have walked.

It might be a bit hard to comprehend by the example above, but what it means is, sometimes, a thing that might seem to be worse for you (the office being further away), can in the end be better (getting there faster).

This can be the case in many situations in life for example, if your job is just bearable – not terrible enough to make a change, you can be stuck there for a longer time than you would have wished. Same would go for relationship, an apartment that you are not the happiest with or your health even - if you feel bad, but not bad enough to go get checked out, it might have some bad consequences.

I guess what I mean to say is, we only have a limited amount of time in our lives and we should be careful not to waste too much of it. I do strongly believe that “the time you enjoy wasting is not time wasted”, but let us always check in on ourselves to see if we are moving in the right direction.

Maybe I am feeling so strongly about this because I have just recently celebrated my birthday. And although I am happy to jump on any opportunity to eat cake, the older I get the faster time seems to be going by. It makes me realize that it truly is all on you how your life turns out. Yes, there will always be things outside of your power that will have some influence for you, but in the end we to have to take ownership of our own life.

As I was searching for a new job the Sakura season has come and gone. It was actually the second earliest sakura season in the history of Tokyo. But just our luck – now that the covid restrictions have been lifted and everyone could freely go out on hanami – to party under the blooming flowers, the weather has decided it was not meant to be. It has rained for a whole week as the cherry blossoms started blooming.

While it was still raining, I went for my annual Meguro – Nakameguro walk. I think this is one of the most magical places to enjoy the blooming Sakura in Tokyo, but it can get quite crowded, especially on the weekend and in the evening. I would always take this walk in the early morning, starting at about 6:00 AM, before the crowds get here. However, as it was a rainy day, I though that I could take it a bit slow and visit right before noon. Apparently, I was not the only person to think this way and many people were not discouraged by the rain either. The walk was not too crowded at first, but by the time I reached the Nakameguro station it was hard to even move around, let alone take pictures. I hopped on the train home and ended the cold day with a nice cup of warm tea.

I was hoping to explore some new Sakura places this year, I ended up going to all of my old favorites – Aoyama Reien and Sakurazaka in Tamagawa. I have some notes about them in my Sakura gallery from last year, so If you are interested, have a look here:

Tokyo Spring

I also was lucky enough to be able to take about a week off to travel between changing jobs. During this time, I was ablet to visit 4 prefectures – Kyoto, Fukui, Ishikawa and Toyama. I am going to write more about this trip in a next post but .. it was awesome. It reminded me of how much I love travel and I hope to do more of it.

So that is it from me for today. If you are reading this – thank you so much! I hope you have a great rest of the day, and will see you again soon!