Lovely morning.Do you keep a diary? I’ve got an app called 10 Year Diary. When I opened it this morning, the contents were too funny. Five years ago today, I found my diary. “It was just before dawn, when I heard a woman’s voice calling me from the doorway. I woke up in a panic and heard loud snoring coming from the doorway. I wondered what it was, but it was my husband snoring.” That was the story. My husband, who had been drinking too much, had fallen asleep when he was just a few steps away from home.I was so relieved because it was in Japan and not too cold, but at the same time it was a bit funny and I remembered how surprised my friend must have been and how grateful I was that she had called out and helped my husband.
I’ve often heard people say that it’s better to compare yourself now with your past self, rather than comparing yourself with others, in order to improve your self-esteem as a way of life, and I actually agree with them. It may be difficult for you to feel your own growth, but you should not compare yourself with others because it is difficult.This is because there are as many people as there are stars in the sky when you look up, so comparing yourself to others is never ending.
If you are working hard and doing your best for something, something is growing. You have to look at that and compare yourself now with the past. Of course, the past is a good rival because you are competing against each other.So to feel that you are a little bit better than you were yesterday, or than you were in the past, is a good way to boost your self-esteem.
That’s probably why I started to keep a 10-year diary, but it’s interesting to see myself 5 years ago, as if I were someone else, but with an objective point of view. In my diary from five years ago, after the incident of my husband sleeping on my doorstep, I wrote about lunch with a friend, how my students were doing that day and what I should be teaching them in the future.
I felt a little bit like praising myself for thinking that way, even though it was about me. From there, it was quite interesting to look at the diary from four years ago today, three years ago today, two years ago today, and one year ago today. The feeling that it’s about me but not about me. And that I am the person I am today because of the things I was thinking about in the past.I also felt that there are a lot of things about me that I have forgotten. And I felt a strange feeling overflowing inside me. And I still think. I felt that I am not living in the past, but I am living in the present.