Kaizen - Day 1

I haven’t written in a long while. Not unless you count the occasional postcards, letters and emails. My fingers have been aching to write (or type) but every time I sit with my laptop, my mind is as blank as the screen in front of me.

A couple of nights ago a friend and I sat under the moonlight talking about issues of gravity. Our conversation, as is the case of most late-night terrace conversations, meandered from our personal definitions of happiness to the economics of love and the cusp of change that our generation is at. I don’t remember how we then meandered towards discipline but we did. Like most people who like to call themselves creative, we despised terms that had anything to do with organised structure. But after many years of low artistic productivity, we had resigned ourselves to the fact that discipline is not just an art, but a requisite for all art.

“If only it weren’t such a boring word – discipline,” I said.

That’s when he told me about the Japanese term - Kaizen. He didn’t do a great job of explaining the term and neither did I bother looking up the exact definition. But he did give a brilliant way of implementing Kaizen in daily life.

Pick a thing to do and a time to do it. And every day, at the exact same time, do that thing for just one minute.

Sounds easy right?

That’s what I thought, except that I woke up an hour after my “scheduled” time on the next two days and instead of going ahead and doing it, I pushed it to later telling myself that I would be breaking the rules of Kaizen if I didn’t stick to the time.

Today, I have decided to give it a shot without falling back on excuses. So even if there isn’t much written here, consider this my first day of kaizen.

And for now, the goal is to get to Day 23 without any misses.

Fingers, toes and elbows crossed.