What an Elderly Man in Okinawa Taught Yvette Timmins About Living for Today

Some lessons arrive through books. Others arrive through a single conversation with a stranger who happens to be living, quite literally, the thing you have only ever read about.

For Yvette Timmins, florist, educator, and founder of Bloom College, that lesson arrived on a honeymoon in Okinawa, Japan, in the form of an elderly man named Oidasan who ran a small campground on the water and offered something far more valuable than a place to park an RV.

A place outside Japan, inside Japan

Okinawa occupies a curious position in the world. Geographically and culturally distinct from mainland Japan, it was annexed in the late 1700s, occupied by the United States after the Second World War, and returned to Japan around 1970. Tropical, close to the equator, and recognised globally as one of the planet’s Blue Zones, regions with an unusually high concentration of people living past 100, Okinawa carries a different rhythm than the Japan most travellers expect.

For Yvette, it was her second trip to Japan but her first to Okinawa. Travelling by hired RV between free coastal campsites, she and her husband found themselves, more than once, the only people at a site for the night. It was in one of these quiet, water-side campgrounds that they met the man who would shape the rest of their trip, and this conversation.

The man who truly lived it

Oidasan ran the campground, and he wanted to do more than simply welcome them. He wanted to connect, in the deep, soul-level way that Yvette had read was characteristic of Okinawan culture but had never fully experienced until that moment.

What struck her was the difference between intellectual knowledge and embodied wisdom. She had read about Okinawan values around connection and presence. She understood them as concepts. But meeting someone who had lived those values for more than eighty years, whose entire bearing communicated them without effort, moved the knowledge from her head into something closer to her body.

His message was not subtle. He used his whole physical presence to communicate it. Do not take today for granted. Marvel in it. Look at the beauty around you. Bring nature inside your home and go out and be inside nature. Find the beauty in everything, and appreciate it simply for what it is.

It is the kind of advice that sounds almost too simple to matter, until you meet someone who has built an entire, evidently joyful, life around it.

Planning without worrying

The distinction Yvette drew from her time with Oidasan is one worth sitting with carefully, because it resolves a tension many people carry without realising it.

Okinawans plant. They farm. They clearly orient themselves toward the future in practical, deliberate ways. But there is a meaningful difference between planning for tomorrow and worrying about it. The future, after all, is something none of us can control. What we can control is how fully we inhabit the present moment, and what we choose to notice and appreciate within it.

There is a useful piece of psychological shorthand that captures this. Dwelling in the past tends to produce regret. Anticipating the future tends to produce anxiety. Presence, simply being here, in today, is the only state that allows for genuine peace, because it is the only place we are actually standing.

This is not a call to be reckless about tomorrow. It is an invitation to hold the future lightly while giving today your full attention, gratitude, and care.

The trust that took a decade to fully understand

Megan’s own reflections during this conversation trace a similar arc, though her path there was shaped by profound loss. Five years ago, almost to the day this episode aired, she left a twenty-year career in corporate HR, a decision many around her questioned, including a senior colleague who later told her he stood in awe of a leap he himself could never have made.

She describes an innate trust that things would work out, a trust she believes she carried as a child, lost somewhere along the way, and then rebuilt, particularly after losing both of her parents within a two-year window. That loss, devastating as it was, also opened a continuing connection that became the foundation for a deeper, more durable faith in the unfolding of things. Her parents did not disappear from her life. They simply changed form, and the trust she now carries day to day grew directly out of that ongoing relationship.

The first two years of her business were not easy financially. Short stints of consulting work, taken partly out of practicality and partly out of testing whether she had made the wrong call, ended up confirming the opposite. Returning to that old world made the misalignment unmistakable. Eventually she drew a line: no more one foot in and one foot out.

Reflection as a recentring practice

When asked how to actually build this kind of trust as a habit rather than an occasional feeling, Megan points to reflection as her primary tool. When she feels stuck or unfocused, she looks back, at the last week, the last month, the last year, and reorients herself within the trajectory of everything she has already moved through.

Gratitude, for her, is less a scheduled practice and more an instinctive, immediate response that happens throughout the day. Reflection is the deeper recentring tool she reaches for specifically when she feels she has lost her footing.

Yvette’s approach is similar but slightly more structured. Gratitude had to be built deliberately at first, anchored to specific times of day until it became automatic. Now, when she notices negative thinking creeping in, or the pull toward a victim narrative, she catches it and asks: what do I actually have to be grateful for right now? The shift, she says, happens remarkably quickly once the question is asked honestly.

Advice for anyone standing at the edge

For anyone contemplating a similar leap, sitting on the fence between a secure but unfulfilling path and something less certain but more aligned, Megan’s advice begins with a question rather than a directive: what is it you actually want to pursue? Distinguishing between a genuine purpose and a hobby that does not need to become a business is an important first step, and one many people skip entirely.

Limiting beliefs deserve scrutiny too. Many of the fears people carry about pursuing something different are not even their own beliefs, but inherited assumptions from parents, grandparents, or generational conditioning about what a responsible life is supposed to look like.

And critically, the leap does not have to be dramatic. It can be a side project. It can be something explored quietly before any public declaration is made. Sometimes that exploration confirms the original instinct. Sometimes it reveals that the thing was better left as a hobby after all. Both outcomes are valid and useful.

What matters most, in Megan’s view, is trusting your own felt sense over the opinions of people who were never going to walk the path with you anyway.

The inner circle that challenges rather than cheers

A theme that surfaces repeatedly in this conversation is the importance of a small, carefully chosen inner circle, and a clear-eyed understanding that family and close friends do not automatically qualify.

This is not a reflection on love. It is a reflection on identity. People closest to us often know one specific version of who we are, and when that version begins to shift or evolve, it can register, even unconsciously, as a kind of loss. The discomfort some loved ones express about a change is frequently less about disapproval and more about an unspoken fear of losing connection to the person they have always known.

Megan deliberately keeps her own circle small, just three trusted people, each one valued for a different kind of perspective. None of them are simply cheerleaders. All of them are willing to challenge her thinking, which she considers essential. A circle made entirely of agreement, she notes, is not actually useful.

What the Blue Zones can teach the rest of us

Beyond the philosophical conversation, Yvette offers a clear, practical breakdown of what Blue Zones, the regions of the world with the highest documented concentration of people living past 100, actually have in common.

Diet plays a significant role: clean, often home-grown or self-caught food, eaten slowly, socially, and without the distraction of screens. Movement is woven naturally into daily life rather than scheduled as a separate activity, walking, gardening, physical work, done simply because it is part of how the day unfolds. Community is treated as essential infrastructure, not an occasional nicety, with even those living alone maintaining consistent, meaningful connection with others.

Continued purposeful engagement matters too. Retirement, in the conventional Western sense of complete withdrawal from contribution, is not the cultural norm. People continue doing meaningful work, whatever that looks like for them, well into old age, often with visible enjoyment in the doing of it.

And running underneath all of it is the same thread that defined the conversation with Oidasan: presence over anxiety, simplicity over accumulation, and a mindset oriented toward today.

Minding your own energy

When asked to distil the entire experience into a single piece of advice, Yvette lands on something both simple and genuinely demanding: take responsibility for your own energy.

This does not mean forced positivity or suppressing difficult emotions. It means recognising that how you show up in any shared space, with family, with clients, with strangers, is entirely within your control, and that bringing your best available energy into that space is both a responsibility and a gift you offer everyone around you. When you feel low, the goal is not to pretend otherwise, but to hold the intention of moving through it rather than settling into it.

It is, as both women repeat throughout the conversation in different ways, an inside job. Nothing external substitutes for the work of managing your own inner state, and nothing external can do that work for you.

Sometimes that work looks like a deliberate energetic protection ritual: a visualised halo of white light, an intentional shower ritual to wash away the day’s accumulated energy, or simply choosing, again and again, to plant a small garden today rather than waiting for some imagined, more convenient tomorrow.

Because as Oidasan made so clear, simply by living it, today is not preparation for life. It is life.