Didn't Use My Brain Sooner

7:35 a.m.

That's when the boys and girls on our street meet outside and start walking to school. Up until today Kenzo and Osamu were usually still eating breakfast or if they were fast already brushing their teeth. Kenzo loved looking out the window and even opening it on non-winter mornings to say bye-bye to the "big" elementary school kids as they set off on their walk to school.

Today was the day Kenzo got to meet outside at 7:35 a.m. and walk to school with his neighborhood friends.

A while back I kept getting asked if we were going to send the boys to an international school. There are a couple here in Sendai and one I think is pretty well known. Eri and I talked about it. Of course there are benefits to sending your kids to an international school (there better be for that price tag), but in the end I made the call based on my values and what I am trying to establish as part of our family's values; namely, take care of your neighbors and choose valuable experiences over opportunistic ones.

For me that automatically made the decision easy. Kenzo walking to the local elementary school with our neighbors' kids, who he loves and plays with all the time, and whose parents are our friends and partners in raising good people, was the obvious choice. I know there's the path where Kenzo and Osamu take the bus to the fancy international school and have amazing experiences there with students from all over the world and solidify their bilingualism, but the lens I looked through showed me Kenzo as an adult thinking back on his childhood and remembering looking out the living room window and wishing to walk to school with his beloved neighborhood friends and then having to close the curtain and get on a bus to go across town to a school where everyone is amazing and cosmopolitan but... something is missing.

I am not making a case for mediocrity. I simply value human relationships and the so-called "mundane" over... well, nothing. I also value having faith in my beliefs without comparison to others' beliefs. Strongly.

So Kenzo goes to Japanese public school now. And he's gonna have the time of his life simply because of the joy that is naturally derived by living life with meaning and avoiding the "get ahead" mentality. I believe that getting ahead naturally happens when you establish clear values, live by those values, and ignore the ones who would steer you away from that.

I haven't always adhered to that, so I am a hypocrite to a certain extent. I'm doing better these days, taking positive steps fueled by regret that I didn't use my brain sooner.

Aaaaand then there's this guy.

Osamu tagged along for the first walk to school wearing his sunglasses and being super aloof.

Comments

Mr. Blue Sky

Man, I conked out so hard on the living room floor tonight. Right after bath time, before story time. I barely remember. Completely exhausted. Big adventure day. Another in a long series I hope the boys will remember when they’re older... our first IMAX movie, a downtown city outing, and some life lessons in the game center. We left the house at 9:15 a.m. and didn’t get back until nearly 6 p.m., totally spent but full of pizza and memories. The Wild Robot in IMAX was totally stunning. The scale, the colors, the sound. We could feel every gust of wind and rustle of leaves. I made sure we had prime seats, row G, right in the center. Two big buckets of popcorn too, which, according to Kenzo and Osamu, I absolutely should not be sharing. “You should get your own!” they kept saying. I think a little bit of popcorn thievery is well within my rights as the papa. After the movie, we headed through the cold and wind across to the game center on the other side of Sendai Station. Being...

Not About Baseball

I stayed up past my bedtime again last night. I almost made it. I watched a couple of episodes of Ted Lasso and came to a good stopping point where I was satisfied with myself for enjoying some quiet TV time with my favorite show and even though it was after midnight, I was confident I could still get a pretty good night's sleep. But no. For some reason I decided it would be a good idea to just lay on the living room carpet and put on a movie. I saw the first seven or eight minutes of Goodfellas and then I woke up when the end credits were rolling with Sid Vicious' is cover of My Way . I brush my teeth and I can see the light of day already shining in through the bathroom window. "It’s almost the longest day of the year," I told myself, to at least rationalize why I'm brushing my teeth and crawling into bed at this hour. I was trying to minimize the mental anguish I regularly put on myself for not just going to bed like I should. I told Eri that I was thinking a...

Sendai vs. Tokushima

Osamu said he had to go pee, and I make it a habit to believe him most of the time. Another habit I have is taking him to go pee, much of the time. When we came out of the restroom I decided it was time for a beer, so with Osamu holding my hand we waltzed over to the food concession and I was checking out the selection, and the prices. Seven hundred yen for a draft beer. I had a feeling. It was only 500 for a whiskey cocktail (whiskey with water on the rocks) but I wasn't about to be that much of a derelict this early with my four-year-old son in tow. The tickets were free, the seats aren't bad, might as well spend seven bucks on a beer. The problem was that the dude next to us with his little boy about the same age as Mumu-chan loudly and with braggadocio you don't often see in these parts ordered a Blue Hawaii snow cone for his kid. I heard this and panicked. Last weekend at Michinoku Park I got a Blue Hawaii snow cone for Osamu and he loved it. I looked down at my l...

This'll Just Take a Minute

Search This Blog