Deep Breathing

As repeatedly mentioned, so-called business process outsourcing is one of the strategic approaches to generate demands in the third world countries. These countries used to provide cheaper factory laborers. That is why; a lot of industries used to build their factories there. It is a common sense. While this trend continues even nowadays, the more prominent one is the attempt that business process as such is going to be handled in these countries. There are two reasons for this tendency. The first is that in our computer age networking systems have been incredibly advanced and achieved the real-time global infrastructure such as internet based communication; and international courier services have been also incredibly sophisticated. In such futuristic circumstance it seems that we do no longer feel any distanced inconvenience or difficulty for our communication. In short, we can experience the worldwide wholeness simultaneously in both mass media and business networking. Not only h...

It has been almost one month since I stopped writing in this blog. Although there are many reasons and unexpected busyness for this. The mainly reason is probably the change of my job. If you read my previous blog entries, you can see I have been working in certain outsourcing company. And just a few weeks ago I was finally able to leave this company, though the turnover has not been completed. As everybody knows, the change of one's own job or resignation is a kind of big event, if not frustrated, in his or her life physically and psychologically. I submitted my resignation to the company almost several months ago, and yet due to lack of the replacement I had to have remained in the position until recently – a few weeks ago. During such extended period I started my blog diary, and then as you can see in my previous blog entries, during this extend period I was also involved with some other activities such as CMMI presentations , Spiral Dynamics related translations, and even t...

Today's entry is inspired by the question that was given by a friend of mine who visited my blog. Is it true that while happiness comes from outside, joy is from inside; while happiness is depending on the external circumstances and may not last persistently, joy can remain whatever his or her external situation may change as it is from inside? That is an interesting question. I understand the point and agree that there are two kinds of positive feeling -- one is something that comes from inside and the other is from outside. I am not sure if the former can be signified as "joy" and the latter as "happiness." But it seems to me that your signification can be helpful to explain each other's difference. For example, when we say that we seek for our happy lives, it seems that we always tend to pursue something external as if a typical happy life can be made of only the external factors such as beautiful houses, higher educations, promising jobs, compatib...

Have never thought of meeting again those adolescents whom I met a week ago during the debut party ; probably because I wrote about them in this blog or maybe because of some other reasons I do not know -- I was lucky to meet again their young vital spirits. As I wrote in the previous blog entry , contemplating upon life in meeting those angles is one of the good opportunities that I rarely have. Thinking about them can remind me of the time when I was just in their age (around seventeen or eighteen years old) and that inevitably reminds me of a sort of transformation that takes place from their age to my age. It is said that most of the so-called transformation of consciousness happens and completes by the age of twenty five or thirty; and until around fifty or sixty, one experiences the so-called translation alone, but no longer transformation. The transformation is the vertical deepening or escalation of consciousness level -- a kind of qualitative change of wisdom, while the tr...

Since we are surrounded by several kinds of writing task, once we have gotten busy with some writings such as emails, articles or business letters, we have missed some other wrings such as blog diary, private poetry and so on. In my case when I have received a lot of emails, then sometimes I have spent most of my writing time just to reply to them. Of course it is also enjoyable in one way or another. One interesting thing is that such email responding task tends to come to me not randomly but more "periodically." I do not know why, but it is like this: When I receive emails, I receive them more and more at the same time; and I get busy to reply to them. On the other hand, when I receive very few emails, I really tend to receive fewer. It seems that there must be a weird law behind – if I generalize it, looks like when you are busy, you tend to get really busier and busier, while when you are not so busy, you are not really so busy. If I use somewhat a silly example, ...

Visited my friend and attend the birthday party held in his house. He is also a student of community development. He can be also called Mr. O, but different one from another "Mr. O" who was mentioned in the other journal entry , though both know each other very well. It was not his birthday party, but the eighteenth birthday of his acquaintance; he offered the venue for her since his house is quite spacious. In this country your eighteenth birthday has the special meaning that you can be or have to be the responsible member of the society you belong. They call this occasion "debut." This is probably similar to the case that Japanese young people celebrate the January 15 of their twentieth year -- Seijin-no-hi . But, in Japan this celebration has been meaningless year by year. As every year reported, if you go to this celebration in any municipal halls as an observer, we can surely witness the noisy crowd of irresponsible young "adults" who seemingly ha...

What postmodernism has exposed is that there is no such thing as truth. What is called or recognized as truth is just a discourse derived from the particular context. Everything has been contextualized; hence everything is interpreted depending on each specific context. The positive side of postmodernism is that so-called marginal cultures or values are no longer oppressed or "marginalized." Relativism and multiculturalism have emerged. What is oppressed or alienated as "something wrong" has been re-appreciated. While people has started blaming the negative side of modernism such as materialism, rationalism, capitalism, destroying natural environment, or what is represented as Western rationalism and materialism, etc. in the post-modernism they have begun to appreciate that which is regarded as non-modernism or non-Western such as Oriental traditions, tribal cultures, tribal artifacts, and alternative values (that which used to be underground). Thus, since e...