Experience and memory are the treasure of a life

Hello. Komochan here.

The other day we held the celebration for the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge 2024.
A great many questions came from the floor, and answering them in conversation
made it rather an interesting kind of report.

And there,“What is the most important thing in life?”someone asked.

Many people might say money, or land, or something you can hold.
But looking back over this life and over the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge,
I answered that what matters is experience, and memory.

The question made me think again about what I actually gained.
And it is not an object or anything with a shape: it comes down to human love, to the experience of taking on something never done before, to landscapes never seen — to memory.

Now that a large goal and a dream have happened, I sometimes wonder about the work ahead and about my own worth: what can I do? What use am I?
A great many people came to the celebration from all over the country.


Being able to share, right there, the experiences and memories that made people gasp or laugh out loud is a treasure I have come to feel is genuinely enormous.

What I make of that experience from here is up to me.

It would be wonderful to take the opinions and advice of the people around me who have supported this, and put them to work in my life and my work.

Thinking about it, the Peking to Paris Motor Challenge and life are the same thing.


Peaks and valleys — headwinds and difficulties — and looking back, all of it is memory.
How you got past those difficulties is what matters,
and in this blog what I want to pass on is not the technique of motorsport or the parts,

but what living it taught me about life.

A life may run eighty or a hundred years, but rather than drifting through it, I think what matters is concentrating each single day and stacking up rich experience and memory.

What can you take with you when you die?

I am still living with lung disease and still fighting cancer.
Since every one of us dies without exception, I would rather have a life that is short and thick and concentrated.

Position, reputation, money, a wonderful car, wonderful friends — physically, you take none of it with you.

What stays in the heart is memory alone. And how widely you share that memory, and stack it up together with other people, is where I feel the greatest value in a life lies.

I would be glad if this gives you a momentto think again about what mattersto you.