Having a break time in the afternoon, I read an interview of Miwa Seki who translated a bestseller by Jeff Bezos into Japanese by a chance. She told us a severe answer to our eternal mission, "How can we get fluent in English?". "It needs over 20 years even if we learn it two hours a day concentrated every day"... I had learned English literature at a university but I wrote papers in Japanese and basically I had not been a good student there. And I have a blank in learning so I can't say I have learned over 20 years. Seki's words are severe for me too. Although I had learned English to concentrate on, I wouldn't be fluent...
Yes, I'm just a beginner so these words I'm going to say are too much, but I think the clue of becoming good might be 'loving ourselves'. Accepting the fact that our English must not be good, and loving the progressing ourselves step by step with struggling. Feeling pleasure for every day's progressing... this pleasure might lead us to the great steps half a year, or one year later. I also think that language is not spoken by our heads. It is spoken by our nerves or bodies I guess. Let us speak by nerves... that's enough I believe.
At night, I had a meeting with friends. I talked about my addiction, terrible stories about alcohol, and the 'stop-drinking-alcohol' meetings. We did a deep discussion about what was an addiction. People get addicted to various things... not only alcohol. Works, love, smartphones, games... This is just an opinion by me but we have to think about how to handle our lives with various addictions (not think about how to get rid of addiction). We need to learn how to get the clue to 'handle' or 'get along with' addiction. Alcohol might give us better communication or uplifting mind if we control our drinking.
Learning English and attending the 'stop-drinking-alcohol' meetings... Both of them tell me that I should accept the 'imperfect' myself who can't speak English well and also can't control drinking. With accepting these 'imperfect' myself, I learned to accept 'progressing' myself who gets progress about speaking English or stopping drinking day by day. The 'imperfect' myself get 'progress'... This might not be a good idea because we need to get better results rapidly in this era. But these steady efforts must not be banal.
