Here at the Nagasaki Retreat, we’re getting ever closer to the first major milestone of our collaboration with the Lee Rigby Foundation – the opening of the Lee Rigby House.

This project represents the culmination of many of the core principles of the perfect society – idealism, mutual support, team-work, and of course, hard work! All these are what is meant by Kendo’s mantra to ‘be the best you can be’, and we’re seeing them every day.

We’ve been amazed at the positivity of the atmosphere surrounding the project – the good-will that strangers have shown, the cameraderie and positivity of those coming here to work on the house, and the delight of meeting such fundamentally good and generous people are all humbling and truly inspiring.

What’s happening here cannot be bought – great things are being achieved by people volunteering their time and skills, their reward being the knowledge that something permanently good is being created – a genuine legacy of the very best kind.

Kendo teaches that the challenges we face are, in fact, opportunities. This can be hard to believe when a challenge is particularly great, but, as is evident from the above, no-one has to go it alone… Perhaps the first step in finding someone who can help is simply knowing that they are out there, and while answers may seem impossible to find right now, having faith in the good nature of good people will be rewarded.

This project continues to show that there is something above and beyond the rationality and reason of the mind, and that is the true positivity that springs from people pulling together for what is intuitively right. It makes it easy to believe that together we can build a future for us all that’s worth having faith in.