Hi, my name is Tomomi.

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:

I finished the migration of this website and cancelled the Squarespace plan. It’s a big deal to me, since this is a site I’ve had since I was a college kid. After the beloved Wordpress era, there was a practical Squarespace era, and now I’m on Astro, editing markdown and writing little scripts with the help of Claude Code.

I figure it’s not particularly interesting news to anyone else, as 95% of the changes are under the hood, but it was a nice surprise to get a lot of positive reactions on LinkedIn.

Filled out the project page on the Build.ripplet.org site, too, so now I feel complete.

Another nice, quiet week. I revisited Donella Meadow’s Thinking in Systems and was very pleased that I understand the concepts much better than the first time I read it, prior to studying ontological coaching and Gestalt psychology.

My brain seems busy, as my recent daydreaming looks like mapping Gestalt and system thinking concepts to novels and TV shows.

Like applying Kurt Lewin’s equation B = f(P, E)—behavior is a function of the person and environment—to The Other Bennet Sister. This starts as the story of Pride and Prejudice through the eyes of Mary Bennet, Elizabeth’s “boring” sister. In the second half of the book, Mary leaves the clutches of her overbearing mother and their small community. She exists this Environment and moves into her aunt’s loving household and the cosmopolitan environment of London i.e. a new Environment, which shapes new Behavior, which eventually leads to a new sense of self and finding happiness.

Or thinking about Robert Harris’s historical fiction, Pompeii, through the lens of feedback loops—specifically, the delays in feedback loops, both natural and manmade, and how information flow throughput is impacted by social hierarchy and greed. Which goes for the Netflix docuseries Trust me: The False Prophet about an FLDS polygamist sect, too.

Open vs closed systems, compounding feedack loops, and information flows, everywhere I look…

Conversation topics with peers and friends:

• Different moments in a professional arc to invest in structured learning
• What kind of work do we want to be doing in our 40s vs 50s vs 60s
• Seeking impact vs contact
• Increasing awareness of what’s happening at different levels of system (self / interpersonal / group / system)
• What are the characteristics of entrepreneurs that just go for it
• Key leadership moments in a project arc and the general lack of feedback loops we have in place to recognize them as such

This week had: a successful project delivery, two enriching workshops (one as a participant, the other as host), one dog, one cat, two potential new coaching clients, an excellent deep dive on the overlap between Gestalt and ontology, a new restaurant find in the neigborhood, plenty of interesting reading, and Josh Groban in concert.

It was a wonderful show, and I hope he tours in Europe more often in the future. He welcomed Monroe as a surprise guest, so we can say we’ve seen the 17 (!) year old singer who’ll represent France in Eurovision this year :P They sang Hymne à l’amour, a beautiful nod to Celine Dion and Paris-here’s someone’s phone recording.

Forgot to mention, last week I migrated this Weeknotes blog from Squarespace to a static site generator. Added a little Weather widget and ISBN-lookup tool for richer book information, too. It’s working well, and in fact, I find myself tweaking the code over writing, which is a familiar dilemma. Haven’t decided what I want to do with that yet…

This week I had a string of long, 1-1 conversations with peers in professional transition - people who’ve made quite drastic changes to their working environment, sometimes their living environment, too, after stewing in it for years. Is there something in the air? I feel a lot of optimistic, exploratory energy from them, a sense of reveling in the open sea ahead.

Most of them have asked about AI, in a kind of obligatory way, like they feel they should ask just to make sure they’re not missing out. This is a conversation I’m actually interested in having, but it is not the moment. Their true interest is in savoring their newfound sense of options and their journey of identity transformation.

Reflecting on that pattern, I’m noting to myself to lean into what Fernando Flores calls “conversations of possibility”.

Here are lines of inquiry that would be supportive:

• What’s become possible for you lately that wasn’t before?
• Where are you noticing something new?
• Sounds like you care about that a lot - where does that come from for you?
• Where does that go, do you think?
• Is that new, or has it been there for a while?
• What’s it like, to say that out loud (to me)?

Now that I’m tinkering and publishing on a near-daily basis on my Build site, Weeknotes has tumbled down the list of things I pay attention to — the new container is custom-built for how I want to think, and therefore it’s way more fun there.

As tempting as it is, I’ve decided it’s not a good idea to fully migrate ripplet.org from Squarespace to Astro. The technical workload is more than I want to be investing, and more importantly, I’d be tempted to re-design everything. Let’s not go there.

But good news, I learned it’s possible to switch over small pieces of it. I could re-build just the Weeknotes blog with the same styles and URL structure, and be free to extend it with dynamic elements and structured templates. This would be great —a smaller scope to work with, and future-forward in the sense that it would breathe new life into the weekly publishing habit.

Quickly, on Week 12 — it turned into a conversation-heavy week, I’m counting eight of them on my Gcal, two in-person and six online. By conversation, I mean conversations that were not meetings but a lot of exploring, debriefing, practicing etc. Some of them were 2-3 hours long. So that’s where the week went, actually…! It was enriching, and I spent the times in-between in silence, recovering :D