Hi, my name is Tomomi.

I was pretty flattened after three long days of training last week, and I ended up staying in for most of this one. Work is getting busy, but all those long, cozy hours at home meant I could curl up with books—recommendations from friends, books I picked up along the way, and those from my childhood.

One such book was the YA classic The Giver. I found it just as haunting as when I first read it as a kid, which may well have been my first encounter with dystopian fiction—thirty years ago! It’s crazy to me how the memory of particular scenes from the book came back to me. In that era of childhood, I was a real bookworm. I didn’t have anyone to discuss books with (it didn’t occur to me to do so) and I lived a parallel fantasy world in my mind.

Oh, what a treat to realize that Lois Lowry had turned this novel into a quartet. And as an adult, I can buy and read all of them at once! Ten year old me would have been over the moon.

The somatic dimension of coaching and personal development has been calling me for a while. In a conversation with a coach friend and mentor, I had a flashbulb moment when they declared the body as “the final frontier and the last mile” of development.

It activated me enough to sign up for a three-day workshop on somatic awareness that would start the next day: a spontaneous decision, following the energy in me.

Ironically, I misread the program description. The workshop turned out to involve far more hours than I’d initially thought. Had I realized that beforehand, I wouldn’t (couldn’t) have been so decisive as to sign up on the spot. And since it turned out to be an incredible experience, I’m glad I didn’t give myself the chance to overthink it!

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. — Anaïs Nin

Related: The Aeon essay, Deskilling the body, warns that “we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending”. This is a grave issue because:

The physical organisation of an organism is inherently evaluative. It is from this embodied evaluation that agency emerges. Yet the same unique qualities that make life-forms so causally special and intelligent can undermine us when repeatedly trained by harmful environments. Instead, we can acquire patterns or lose pathways that progressively weaken our intrinsic intelligence, which we need to flourish.

The cold weather has started to set in. I’ve been feasting all week on a big pot of soup, with slices of Wales cheese that I’d picked up in Surrey last week. It’s called Snowdonia Black Bomber and it’s delicious.

I also dug out my winter cycling gear out of the closet, and had a once-in-a-blue-moon 7am start to a long ride. It’s probably not going to happen any time soon, but look at that morning mist!

I had three highlights this week, and now that I’ve listed them, I’m noticing they all have to do with easeful, enriching friendships and collaborations. And a bit of 2027 orientation is starting to peek out from behind the curtains…

Debriefing ReConnect Retreat

I spent a few hours unpacking last week’s ReConnect Retreat with Kathleen—exchanging observations, decoding feedback, and discussing what to keep and what to change. We also brainstormed what we might do next year.

Supporting a Gestalt group intervention

It was my first time doing a “pure” Gestalt group intervention outside the context of training, and I upped the ante by doing it for a first-time client and in a hybrid setting where I was the only one dialing in.

But I felt secure in my collaborator’s trust and confidence in me/us. I was calm going into it, and it worked out really well. Participants leaned into the experimental spirit of it, swam in the rich data that the conversations yielded, and continued debriefing voluntarily afterwards. Our own debrief was insightful and energizing, as we recognized that our first official collaboration was built on the back of hundreds of hours of practicing together. How can I do more of this?!

Weekend in Surrey

I went to Surrey (southwest of London) to celebrate the milestone birthday of a friend and fellow Gestaltist. A younger me would have found it inconceivable to make a trip like that—to “give up” a weekend and the money for such an occasion, to want to go to a big party with so many strangers, or even to have a friendship that would warrant such a move. But this is an older, wiser me with different priorities. No regrets, only joy.

I spent the first half of the week co-hosting the ReConnect retreat in a beautiful forest estate in Hilversum, about half an hour away from Amsterdam. Kathleen and I welcomed eight UX research leaders—brilliant, generous and dedicated—to work on strategy, unbothered by as few commitments and daily frictions as possible, in a conversational space that nurtured trust, honesty, and connectedness.

I’m still marvelling at the breakthroughs and groundedness of clarity achieved. As coaches and facilitators, it’s what we design for, and dearly hope for… and it’s always an honor to witness the thrill of the realizations. This retreat is particularly gratifying for me because the participants are also industry peers. I also benefit from being uplifted, connected and inspired!

Prior to Hilversum, Kathleen and I had lunch in Amsterdam, where we also caught a retrospective of the Austrian filmmaker Ulrich Seidl at the Eye Filmmuseum. Seidl creates films of seemingly ordinary individuals, people who try to, in their own ways, make something of life in a late-capitalist society in which meaning has been replaced by consumerism. Indeed, that description is a perfect expression of what I saw…

After the retreat, I spent a few days in Katwijk aan Zee, near Leiden, with an AQ colleague. We took in the beach, checked out a windmill museum, and hopped over to Rotterdam to visit the Depot of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, the “world’s first publicly accessible art storage facility”. I’d gotten a combined ticket that included museum entry, a tour of some of the storage rooms and dinner. I’m so fascinated by this place.

On the weekend, we moved to Eindhoven for Dutch Design Week. I’d visited in 2024 and was looking forward to the injection of inspiration. We primarily toured the grad shows and it didn’t disappoint. One more day would have been nice, to visit some of the other sites, but it’s time to go home.

It’s been a huuuuuge week.

I had a magical time at Fête de la Carotte at Maison Jaune, a theater-garden and artistiс residence about an hour outside of Paris. A bonus was tasting pelmeni, Russian dumplings, for the first time.

Speaking of food experiences, I have a new favorite fruit: green figs. Tasted fresh for the first time in Greece, after our Airbhb host plucked a generous bagful from his backyard. I bought home dried figs (long gone now!) and a jar of fig jam. As often happens when you notice something for the first time, I started seeing it everywhere. I spied fresh green ones at a fruit-and-veg shop in my neighborhood. Biscuits with figs. Amuse-bouches with caramelized fig on mascarpone. It’s been fun.

I sat down with my Kindle as I was winding down one night, and it opened on a Japanese poem that had spoken to me a while back. On a whim, I decided to try my hand at translating it into English, as a way of grapping with the material. I really enjoyed the worthsmithing process, and feel pretty satisfied with how it turned out!

The poem is called “Your own sensitivity, at least” (自分の感受性くらい) by the postwar poet Noriko Ibaragi. She wrote it as a message to herself.

Your own sensitivity, at least

Don’t blame other people
for your heart drying up, crumbling.
When you yourself aren’t watering it.

Don’t blame your friends
that you’re becoming a grump.
Which one of us is losing our grace, anyway?

Don’t blame your family
because you’re irritated again.
It was I, who was clumsy in all of the things.

Don’t blame your day-to-day
for your youthful aspirations fading.
It was but a frail ambition from the start…

Don’t blame the changing times
for all that isn’t working.
The abandonment of the last glimmer of dignity.

Your own sensitivity, at least!
Protect it yourself.
You fool.

Also posted, optimistically, on LinkedIn.

After time away, people typically re-enter their home and work systems with brute force. Jumping head-first into enormous to-do lists, we deprioritize re-connecting with loved ones and colleagues, let alone tend to our physical health.

My re-entry game was already quite mature after a decade of going between Paris and Tokyo. But it was mostly about passive recovery, and my Gestalt training experience, with weeklong modules in a different country every 3 months, elevated it to be meaningful and rejuvenating.

After the Athens module, I spent a week on the open road and sea, catching up on sleep, and enjoying time with my sister. Coming home and starting the work week in Paris, I felt grounded and healthy ☺️

No matter that I’ve barely read any books the past month, and sadly lost my Weeknote publication streak of a year! I’ll soon get back to both, in the meantime, happy to catch up with friends and appreciate the beautiful city that I’m lucky to call home.

I’ll write up a trip report soon enough, just to note here that my sister E and I went on a cycling adventure in the east-most “finger” of the Peloponnese peninsula and the island of Spetses.

I had such a good time!

It was a very enriching week outside of Athens, in a happy bubble for the fifth and final module of the International Gestalt Organization & Leadership Development Program that I started in September 2025.

We trained on how to facilitate and lead organizational and social transformation in large, complex systems from for seven days straight. It turned out that I’m already quite familiar with the theory and practices (hint: it’s participatory and emergent) which gave me confidence in my seemingly disparate experiences of the past decade. We closed all of the official configurations that we’d been in, and celebrated our graduation.

In between, I went for daily dips in the beach behind the hotel, enjoyed Greek cuisine, partied at the pool bar, and hung out in my spacious Airbnb living room-turned community space.

It was a tremendous week, filled with laughter and tears. I’m ready to be done and have space for other pursuits and I will miss being in the program very much.

This was the biggest energy and financial investment made in my personal and professional development since graduating university in 2007. I’m proud of myself for making it happen (whereas uni was driven by parents/teachers) and know that this experience will shape who I’ll become in the coming decades in ways that I can only imagine now.

Highlights:

• I meandered along the Seine, from the Eiffel Tower to the Louvre, and got to see the beloved Paris Olympic Cauldron just as it was rising above the Tuileries. It was a magical moment, esp since it’s often grounded by weather.
• A new designer joined us at AQ ‘s Tokyo office. Someone joining our small, tight-knight team is a big deal, so we are excited!
• I spent an afternoon planning a 2hr workshop called “Enoughness and Money” as part of a team-building arc with new collaborators. It was energizing to get creative about bringing this topic to the group, building on 5 years of work on money practices at Greaterthan.
• On the weekend, I flew out to Athens. On Friday I had a fab dinner with a fab friend and on Saturday, joined a morning stand-up paddle session before our training module started.

It’s been a calm week at home in Paris.

I’m drained from untangling various messes at work and uplifted with an evening at the Philharmonie, a picnic on the Seine, and an impromptu purchase of an autumn coat that I saw in a shop window—among other joyful highlights like publishing my cycling trip report for Estonia, two Sundays in a row of long rides, and several solid book recommendations, given and received.

Someone asked me this question, to which I didn’t have an immediate answer and I’m intrigued to explore:

When you’re reading novels in your native language, what emotions are accessed or amplified (in contrast to English)?