When I was a “kid”… and it was summer… and I was staying with my grandparents
in a remote rural village in Hiroshima…. it was a normal sweltering summer and
I remember my family surrounding the television set late at night and I asked my
grandma what was going on….
it was a news story about an entire family dying in a fire that was caused by a malfunction
in an old electric fan… where the fan was on while the family was sleeping and the fan started blowing fire.

It took me many many years, but I eventually grew out of a fear of sleeping with a fan on.
In fact, it just rained yesterday, and I have a fan on right now.
I don’t know if I had to work at it, or I just eventually forgot about this fear, but somehow,
I got over it.

One of the most frequent questions I get as a musician, is …. “do you get stage fright?”…
My answer is… “no!”… I haven’t played in many months, so, who knows what will come at the
next performance, however…. no, not really, I don’t…. but, it took a lot of work to not let my
nerves get the best of me. Probably 20 years! Not kidding. I always loved public speaking, I am
a social person… but nerves always came into play. Sweat, shaky voice and hands etc… and I
hated that part of it, but, I would still do it always hoping that someday, i would just snap out of it. It’s kind of masochistic that I put myself through it, but somehow, I got
to a point, where I forgot about the nerves and just took control or lost control, however you want
to put it… I think that mostly, the biggest changes came from performing my own music and playing
guitar while singing my music. It got too busy to be nervous. Also…. right before I started performing
and sharing my music, I had pulled myself out of a big hole where I was super high on that… “well, if
I could get through that, than, I can do anything” -thing.

So, I’m not really handing out advice, but it just came to mind… at 520am, to ride those waves all the way
out to the shore, follow those instincts and those faint whispers of intuition that you’re on the right path and just keeping going and follow through—life has meaning, but it’s not necessary to know what that is, right away it is necessary, to keep going. If you want to do anything in life, forge the path.