Hi friend,

Hope you’re enjoying the last few days of 2025.

I’m in Japan for a couple of weeks, bookending the new year break with time in the Tokyo office. I love this time of year here. There’s a collective focus on turning the page and even if you’re not into that kind of thing, you get swept along. It’s a steady sequence of closing all the things that I take quite seriously—cleaning out the gunk, resting, and resetting.

I’m at the AQ Cabin for two blissful days of solitude, chasing mountain views and journalling by the fireplace. Family will descend in a few hours, and I want to send this to you before then, to share a bit of what’s on my mind.

2025 was the year I started to reclaim my attention.

I’m reading books again—actually reading, without dozing off or grabbing my phone. And not just scanning for ideas or information either. Whether it’s for twenty minutes or two hours, in English or Japanese, paper or screen, I can step into a book and stay there. The long-abandoned bookworm in me is doing somersaults across the lawn with glee. It’s determined not to get left behind again.

I’m also writing more, much of it by hand. Writer Anne Lamott recommended “stop NOT writing” and that’s what I did. I work out ideas, organize notes from books and calls, and journal in an evolving system of notebooks and stationery bits and bobs. Along the way, I started sending Postcards again (hello!) and write for Emotions at Work with more ease. What a Jedi mind move. The idea of “publish more” sent me spiralling, “start writing” spurred some baby steps to nowhere, but “stop NOT writing” gave me the kick I needed. I realized I had, in fact, been “not writing” (and not procrastinating, avoiding, resisting the algorithm or whatever). This thought was so distasteful that I made a change.

Better owning one’s attention seems to lead to more compassion and generosity, too. It’s a chicken-and-egg dynamic that I haven’t gotten around to teasing apart yet.

What confounds me, the piece that I’m turning around in my hands to understand, is that none of this was planned. It was just an almost-daily huh, I wonder if… that I caught and tinkered with. Maybe it’s my fledgling Gestalt practice of attunement starting to bear fruit. Maybe it’s the malaise of not wanting to “AI, AI, AI” and secretly suspecting this is a better way to #win. Maybe it’s looking for refuge in this crazy world. I don’t know.

What I do know is that these changes brought more meaning to the past year, and bring more hope and spaciousness into the next. That seems like a good place to end the year.

Thank you for spending part of your day with me. Take care, and see you on the other side.

Tomomi

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p.s. For a work version of year-in-review, please check out the EAW newsletter that I wrote a few weeks ago.

→ Looking back on 2025 at Emotions at Work