Hi, my name is Tomomi.

This week in France and across Western Europe was all about the heat wave. It dominated the news and our conversations, with enthused sharing of news, tips, and commiseration, against the backdrop of a slow acceptance that this is the new reality for summertimes.

I stayed home as much as possible, keeping calm and reading as attention allowed. A friend mentioned that it was not unlike the lockdown. We are privileged, then and now, to be in a position where that comparison is not an entirely negative one.

After a big thunderstorm on Saturday night, and we woke up Sunday to a blissfully cool breeze.

I had the first of what I hope will be many years of regular group calls with four other Gestalt practitioners. The intent is to continue practicing together, providing support and accountability, and the way I see it, to become part of each other’s lives. We will meet online every three weeks, with a shared desire to gather in-person at times, too. Such self-organized peer configurations have become critical pieces of social infrastructure for me since 2020, when I deepened my commitment to learning as a social practice. I look forward to nurturing this one, and being part of what unfolds.

Weeknote title is from the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, as quoted in Tara Brach’s book, reminding us to make ourselves available to whatever life is offering us in each moment.

It’s been a rough week, physically, as I battle jetlag, a heatwave and tree pollen allergy. The heatwave will continue next week, so I’ve changed the duvet and dug out the fan, ice cube makers, ice pillow etc. The pollen is a huge energy suck - it makes me feel dazed and weak - so I’ll be more conscientious next week with meds, the air purifier and changing from outside clothes. Time to get pro-active.

Nevertheless, it’s been super nice to be home and back in Paris. My highlight was the Hilma af Klint show at the Grand Palais, titled “Paintings for the Temple (1906-1915)”.

I’ve been captivated by her life story and the “discovery” of her work in recent decades, and even read the excellent Julia Voss biography last year with faith that I would have a chance to see her work live one day! And as is the beauty of living in Paris, I encountered exhibition posters at the metro station on Monday and promptly booked a ticket for the next day.

On the way home, I picked up another book, also by Voss, which draws the parallels between af Klint and Kandinsky.

Started a book club on Fritjof Capra’s The Systems View of Life, with a friend who’s gone through Capra’s course on the book. Looking forward to spending a few weeks with it.

I added a new Fitness section to Weeknotes, below Books, as part of developing new routines for my health. It’s time for new perspectives and behaviors that are aligned with my travel and being a body in its fourth decade on this planet. I’m tired of feeling so easily weakened, and feel it’s critical to start improving my baselines while it’s still relatively easy to do so.

I’m curious what’ll happen when I start putting my attention toward this domain. The “reading books” piece has deep-enough roots now that I think I can let it be, and direct my attention to new topics. That’s my hypothesis, anyway. Let’s see!

I started the week by co-hosting a small event at the AQ Studio with my friend Michael. We ran a light version of his game, “Cowtopia”, for a fun mix of his network and mine. I always enjoy running small events in a familiar setting, introducing something light-hearted and useful to peers after work. Glad that we were able to pull this off!

Then, the AQ team had our summer retreat on Enoshima (photos below). The last time I’d been on the island was 2007 - I dug through my old Flickr account to find evidence - and it was a blast to stay overnight. We were super lucky with the weather, and thanks to excellent planning on the part of a colleague, we enjoyed many delights that the island has to offer, and more.

After nourishing time with family, I flew out Saturday night to get back home. It’s been a full five weeks away and I’m glad to be back.

Monday: Movie night with French and Singapore friends. I was initiated to La Cité de la peur.

Tuesday: Relaxed work day from Yatsugatake

Wednesday: Sent out a Postcard (yay!) and travelled back to Tokyo. Pretty tough, with a cancelled train due to typhoon, and a delayed train because it hit a deer…

Thursday: Normal work day, with a nap and 10pm call.

Friday: Another normal work day, then drinks with friends.

Saturday: Left Tokyo at 6:30 in the morning to spend the weekend with a friend who had moved outside of Kyoto. I got to explore the new neighborhood, and then we drove up the coast to Tsuruga.

Sunday: Continued the drive up Echizen to Kanazawa, including a stop in Sabae, and hopped on the shinkansen home.

I wanted to do all these things but it was a bit fragmented, and in hindsight, too much logistics to enjoy properly.

As planned, I retreated to the AQ Cabin after 10 days of non-stop activity in Singapore, to rest and read, while catching up on work and life admin. My hiking ambitions for the Yatsugatake Range will have to wait until next year - right now, it’s more the mood of hammocks, fireplaces and long walks.

Japanese bush warblers (uguisu) and woodpeckers (kitsutsuki) fly through our front yard, visiting the fruit tree saplings we planted this spring. It’s delightful to see them flitting about, to be able to put a “face” to the sounds.

So grateful for the downtime.

I holed up in hotel conference rooms by day, and huddled with colleagues at hawker centers and bars at night, for the fourth of five modules of my “Gestalt in OD and leadership” training.

Haven’t processed it, so I won’t attempt to write much here, but it was a fabulous week. I then had 2.5 days for a marathon of coffees, lunches and dinners with friends. Strangely not that tired, and not sick, thanks to a timely injection of propolis spray and all kinds of things that friends supplied me with. All is good.

I worked out of my Tokyo office for the better part of the week.

It was nice and peaceful. Tokyo in May has early summer weather, with cool mornings and evenings. I enjoyed meals and spontaneous conversations with my colleagues, and working to the sound of our neighboring middle school practicing for Sports Day.

I also visited my sister and baby niece, who’s growing into a spunky kid, and then did a big shopping spree before taking an early flight out to Singapore on Saturday. It’s my first time back since May 2024, when I participated in the “System and Self” course.

The adventure continues.

It was Golden Week in Japan and another three-day weekend in France, which made for a quiet week overall. I set aside the vague hiking plans I’d made earlier this year and happily spent five days seeing friends and coding.

I continued on the “Emotion Visual Builder”, to bring generative art to the Emotions at Work tooling. I’m having fun with CSS animations but haven’t nailed the aesthetics yet. In parallel, I prototyped a demo site to invite a potential partner into conversation. Very keen to see their reaction… it’d be a clear signal that validates (or not!) a business hypothesis we’re pursuing.

More and more friends around me are navigating grief, career stagnation, unequal partnerships, burnout, or endless life admin. And maybe these aren’t really “difficult seasons” so much as just life. As we get older, everyone carries more — more responsibility, more worry, more invisible logistics. The grace and steadiness with which people carry themselves through it all is humbling.

It’s been about five years since I started building friendships with older people, and one of the gifts they’ve given me — especially the women — is the understanding that everyone has something going on. And still, you show up, for yourself and for others.

In that vein, Rhaina Cohen’s “The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center” was an insightful read. The title is a bit mis-leading, in a good way. The book is less about elevating friendship in opposition to romantic partnership, and more about imagining broader forms of mutualism and interdependence that decenter marriage as the default unit for walking through life in our modern world.

Here’s something that a new acquaintance said, which I want to remember:

We are never too old, and it’s never too late.

France has a string of long-weekends in May, and this was the first. With Japanese bank holidays also coming up, things felt nicely slow and spacious, once it was clear what had to get done and what could wait.

I had a second meal with new friends and caught up with half a dozen old ones. I schemed with different sets of collaborators for an upcoming retreat, a new initative in South East Asia, an event next month in Tokyo, and a potential new project in the UK. On the media front, I consumed way too much commentary on the British royals visit in the US, and binge-watched three seasons of Hacks.

Started working on two apps:

• A simple membership site for coaches and their clients, which I will demo to peers soon
• An Emotion Visual Builder that generates CSS animations in response to a user’s description of how an emotion feels to them. Mildly optimistic that it will work!

Oriana was in Paris this week, so that we could run in-person Emotions at Work workshops for a client team. This was a long awaited moment, on many fronts, as we had been planning and looking forward to this since the end of 2025.

We converted our online module to a fully offline experience - no deck, as per my long-standing policy - with music, flipcharts, dot stickers, patafix, Time Timers, all my favorite pens and the whole shebang. We were happy delivering together, and very pleased with how the experience was received. We had opportunities to share a few lunchtimes and drinks with the team, too, which is always a huge benefit of being onsite at a client’s office. Lots of rich exchange about our work on emotions and team culture, as well as the pressures of AI in business.

In between the client work, it was wonderful to walk around Paris together, meeting up with NEAW alumni and friends. And having established hiking as a thing we do when we’re together in person, we spent a long weekend with friends in Nancy and the Vosges, exploring a part of eastern France that was new to me. Here are some photos: