2194“So my sister and her husband came to visit me in Japan, and I took them to a shrine in Tokyo,” Michael says in his audio clip. “They have these wooden tablets called ema that you write wishes on, and you hang them up. You write your wishes and desires and your hopes and your dreams on these things.

”Foreign people have written a few too, and we were looking at them. They were things like ‘I want to be healthy,’ ‘I want my family to be healthy,’ ‘I want to pass this exam ‘or ‘I want to pass my driving test.’

”We wrote ours after reading all these. I remember what my brother-in-law wrote, and he wrote ‘Peace of mind,’ that this was all he wanted. I asked him about it and he said ‘Well, even if you have a big house and a big car and success in your job, lots of money, if you don’t have peace of mind, you’re not happy. But even if you don’t have all those things, and you do have peace of mind, you are happy. So peace of mind is everything, that’s all you need.’

”Ever since then it’s always been like ‘peace of mind is the main thing’. It made a big impression on me, and I’m very thankful to him for teaching me that very simple truth.” Taken in Kyoto, Japan on the SOTM World Tour.

Michael runs the Deep Kyoto blog about that city, and also asked to be photographed while sat on this ram in a local playground, because his surname is Lambe.