To Japan

Oh man, I’m really tired. Ready for bed. I’m headed off to Tokyo tomorrow for TGS. Guess it doesn’t matter if my sleep schedule gets screwed up by going to bed early, since it’ll get all screwed up when I get to Japan. 🙂
I’m looking forward to seeing lots of friends while I’m there, in addition to doing a few meetings at Sony. Looks like there is an IGDA party Friday night, and I hope to pay a visit to Ninja as well.
I attended a Landmark event on Friday night. It’s the first thing I’ve done with them for about three years, and I was a bit apprehensive about it. Turned out to be about 1300 people, at the Masonic Center. Holy crap!
It felt good to be around so many happy, smiling people. But for awhile I was thinking to myself that this must be how it feels to go to church. 😉
The event opened up with a lot of intimate sharing at the microphones and one-on-one, and it seemed weird to me at first. The sharing at the mikes seemed a bit too intimate and whiny, but when I started talking to my seat neighbor, we had a really nice discussion about the issues being discussed. After about an hour (of a three hour event), my concerns about being there all drained away, and I found myself really enjoying being part of the conversation.
Most Landmark courses have a particular arc to the education, and this was no exception. It was your typical “my life sucks” and distinguishing past-based conversations for the first few hours, lots of sharing, and then about 2/3 of the way through we shifted into distinctions about “empty and meaningless” etc, and followed it up by creating new possibilities based on what moves and inspires you. If you’ve done Landmark courses, you know what I’m talking about. All of the courses seem designed this way. But that’s not a bad thing – actually, the repetition of this technique seems to make it more powerful each time.
This event wound up basically being an overview of a variety of the courses I took almost a decade ago. It had the Forum, the Advanced Course, and some of the Communications courses (CAP, CPP), all wound up into one nice package. It was an excellent review for me, and it was completely without sales pressure (wow!) If this class was illustrative of the new Landmark, I’m pretty happy about it.
At the end of the night I felt pretty positive, and full of thoughts about my life and whether it’s going how I’d like it to go. I may hop over to the Landmark office and sign up for a seminar like I’ve been thinking about doing for quite some time… it really does help me clear my head and stay on the path I design for myself. Good stuff.
Joe Bob says check it out. 🙂