All good!

All good!

We have seven cats in our house now.

One of them is an approximately one-year-old female cat called Chibi. It means “tiny” in English.

Actually, she is blind.

She was able to see things normally up until about three months after she was born, when she suddenly contracted a viral disease (like a cold) and became drastically debilitated.

Believe it or not, both her eyeballs fell out.

She recovered miraculously at the absolute edge of death.

Her other body parts still function normally, and she walks around and sleeps relying on sounds and smells.

Although she seems to vaguely feel light and shadow, she’s lost the ability to see things.

When she was small, she didn’t know where the cat toilet was, so we held her and took her there whenever we caught wind of it.

Only recently, she’s learned to be able to go by herself.

She seems to know roughly where we feed the cats.

However, she tells us by meowing when she wants to be fed because she’s usually somewhere else.

Every time it happens, someone brings her to be fed.

She can’t live without our help.

On one occasion, we suddenly found that she’d disappeared. She was nowhere in sight in the house.

She’s gone outside the house without anyone noticing.

Once she goes out by herself, she can’t return home.

We split up and looked for her all day, but we couldn’t find her.

She may have strayed into the forest because our house is in the mountain and there’re few houses around.

Miraculously, we found her sitting on her own in the middle of the path about 300 meters away from the house next day.

She was safe.

If she had been missing for any longer, she would definitely have been dead within a couple of days.

I think I’ve given you an idea of what Chibi is like. Every time I see her, I think:

“All good.”

She has no sight.

This fact doesn’t make her lack a single thing, however.

She’s complete as she is.

Chibi is blind. So what? Are there any problems?

The same holds true for you.

And that’s all good.

Do it right away

Do it right away

When I was a child, I never used to readily get things done, even if I knew I should do them.

Against my better judgment, I used to postpone my school homework for quite a while, finally starting it at the last minute.

When it was over, I couldn’t help repeating the same sort of thing even though I ran into trouble each time.

These tendencies lasted until I was 26 years old, though one day I learned the knack of giving up my habit and sorted things out.

Come to think of it, human psychology is really troublesome.

For example, you might be thinking, “Whichever way I look at it, smoking is not good for my health. I want to quit. I should quit.” But then again, you end up thinking “I’ll stop someday before I get sick. But I’ll keep smoking until then. Anyway, I’d rather not to stop now.”

The same applies to thoughts such as “Drinking too much alcohol or eating too many sweets or too much meat isn’t good for my health, so I should quit.”

In addition to this, the same is true when you dilly-dally and put off things to do from day to day, like I did with my homework.

Getting rid of bad habits is also the same.

Even though you know for sure that you should do something right away, you can’t help but postpone whatever it is, thinking to yourself, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

Then tomorrow comes and you put it off again, thinking “I’ll definitely do it tomorrow.”

And you end up putting it off until the last minute and start it in a rush.

Rushing often leads to mistakes.

Sometimes, in the end you might not even complete it on time.

In the case of cigarettes, alcohol, and food, it is highly likely that it will be too late, and you may be prone to serious illness.

Such mentality represents what is known in psychology as “procrastination.”

I cordially advise you, from my own bitter experience, to severely reflect on how much you might be impairing your life by putting off what you absolutely think you should be doing from day to day, if you think this may be the case.

At the same time, one of the root causes of procrastination is that even though you think you know that you should do it and you have to do it, you may be lax about considering it deeply.

Another root cause might be that procrastination has grown into habit.

So, the most important thing to do first is thoroughly determine what will really benefit yourself and everyone else.

Next, thoroughly discern how foolish procrastination is for the things you think you should really do.

Then be resolute, put it into action right away, and keep it up, without being chained by any preconceived ideas.

In this way, your life will dramatically change for the better.