How Do You Live?

by Genzaburo Yoshino

be nothing more deep-rooted and stubborn than the human tendency to look at and think of things with themselves at the center.

put it a slightly more difficult way, you must make a habit of thinking honestly, with your own experience as a foundation, and—Copper, this is very important!—if someone fakes this part, no matter what kind of great-sounding things they think or say, they are all lies in the end.

nothing more beautiful than people nurturing goodwill toward their fellow beings.

because we are human, must live with only our value as human beings in mind, not thinking we are unimportant if we happen to be poor or that we are great because we lead a wealthy life. Someone who feels inferior because they are poor can never be much of a human being.

a human being who doesn’t understand the essentials of being human, in other words, is a pitiful fool.

the sad truth is that in today’s world, the people who will be in the most trouble if they get hurt are the people who are in the greatest danger of getting hurt.

When you think of the things you need in your daily life, you don’t produce any of them, so you are definitely a consumer. But while you may not have noticed, there is something else, a big thing that you produce day after day. What could that be?

The world is full of people who are not bad, but weak, people who bring unnecessary misfortune upon themselves and others for no reason but weakness. A heroic spirit that’s not devoted to human progress may be empty and meaningless, but goodness that is lacking in the spirit of heroism is often empty as well.

Yes, that’s right. Regarding the mistakes he had made, Copper had already thought everything he could think, regretted as much as he could regret, suffered all there was to suffer. Now he needed to face straight forward and think about how to live his life properly from now on.

“Jun’ichi, dear. Even when we become adults, it often happens that we think back on things with regret. We wonder, Why didn’t I do what was in my heart that one time? When just about anyone takes a serious look back at their lives, we all may have one or two things like this.

But it is thanks to sadness, hardship, and pain that we come to know what a true human being is.

thanks to that pain and suffering, we can clearly grasp what a human being should naturally be.

Copper, we must find a way to draw knowledge from all our suffering and sadness!

can’t we always draw fresh confidence from these painful thoughts in return?

We have the power to decide on our own who we will be. Therefore, we will make mistakes. However— We have the power to decide on our own who we will be.

Therefore, we can also recover from mistakes.

How will you live?