F2F Class Notes (JJ)

Summer Colour Bath

One day when I opened the window, suddenly strong hot wind was blowing in my face, I realised that summer had arrived. At the same time, I regretted that I still had several new spring coats that had not been shown/been worn in front of my colleagues to my colleagues.

Compared to the summer a few years ago, this year hasn’t changed. The same temperature, the same amount of sunshine, and the same old parasol. As an office worker, we divide a year into two parts: workdays and holidays. There are no four seasons in the unchanging office buildings. The longer we stay there, the more we lose our sense of the nature.

I thought my summer would be the same as before. No good plan popped up into my mind when I was drinking a cup of ice coffee in a bookstore. I looked around the bookshelf, and noticed a small book with fresh green cover, it is called ‘108 Important Little Things’. The author is very famous in Japan, she claims that the simple life keeps us/you healthy, we should throw away all useless goods, not only for maintaining a clean and organised house, but also for decluttering our mind. On one page, there’s a word that caught my eye/attention, a word that picked my curiosity called ’Color Bath’. I came to the conclusion/realized that maybe I can do something new this summer.

Color bath suggests that you should decide on a specific colour in your mind first, and then look for things of the same colour in your daily life. Then you can observe different kinds of things that have been ignored before. We always complain that our life repeats itself every day, nothing changes even though we have enough break time to possibly notice these changes.

But when you keep a peaceful mind and observe things, you will see the shapes of clouds change/the clouds change shapes every second, black tea smells different every minute, watermelon tastes better on days when we have good weather. Everything is changing, everything is new!

Rather than to focus on some detailed plans, it would be great to improve our mind first. For some tourists who only want to take pictures to show off on WeChat Moments but ignore the wonderful scenes/landscape, or some people who like to follow other people’s plans, they have no idea what are the impressive things of life/how to appreciate the finer things in life. As a result, they lost the passion for adventure, discovery and connection. What a shame!

In the café, I was facing a huge glass window. A green tree was swaying in the wind, a pretty girl in a red dress was running by the river with a lovely smile on her face. I was making my summer plan: to pick a colour every morning, to discover something new, and to look for positive attributes to make my summer colourful.

Vocabulary

cactus: 仙人掌

cacti: 仙人掌们

ladder: 梯子