Escapades - 2

playlist for writing this post:
The Strokes, their complete "First Impressions of Earth" album (2006). Start with the first song, "You only live once"...
as I was messing around at the same time, I had to use a bit of :
Shakira's "MTV Unplugged" (2000) towards the second part :)

Today's "Escapade" is not mine. I heard two life stories, and they both started exactly the same: a bright young graduate worked as a consultant/auditor for a global, world-renowned firm, in a glass-and-steel sky-rise in La Défense. Namely, the main Central business District in the area of Paris.
Then one day they felt like doing something else. Resigned from their jobs, from one day to the next (or almost). And started their own adventure.

1. The first one set out to create a firm selling natural, waterless car-cleaning solutions. He thought we should stop using so much water to wash car, and also he found that the existing products for washing cars without water were not so efficient.
Going back to his family home in the North of France, he started his own company. His family was soooo skeptical. SOooooooooooo skeptical! He knew nothing about the car-washing business, and had little idea about what organic components should be included.
He just carried on. After 3 years, most of his relatives are actually working in the company he founded. His mother, who was most worried about his future, is the most active and enthousiastic employees.
He offers professional washing services, his main customers are companies that manage fleets of vehicles (private industry, but also public institutions, or car rental companies). he washes a car in a couple of hours, with products using only natural ingredients and without any water addition.
Talk about a sustainable business!
It looks like he wants to focus on developing this business a bit more, but who know what he can come up with next?

2. Amaury Bironneau was also a successful, as we say, French young graduate. He had started a career in one of those big multinational firms offering lots of benefits, and interesting jobs, of course.

Still, one fine day, he got in touch with Patrice Franceschi, captain of the exploration sailship "La Boudeuse". The ship, bearing a french flag and stationned in Paris, on the river Seine, is usually at large somewhere halfway to the other side of the planet.
The boat brings its crew to meet and exchange with peoples and cultures.
So Amaury met the captain, something "clicked" and he knew that he was ready to embark on a year-trip to the other side of the world, only a few weeks later, with 20 or so people that he had never met before.
So many things happen on those kind of experiences, it is all about "expect the unexpected"... In 'developing' countries, things do not work as they are supposed to, and coastguards will ask for bribes, medicine wont be available, people wont speak your language...
Amaury was born in a "farmer" environment, his family coming from the ground, he had no pre-set mind to go sailing. He just went, because it felt like something right for him to do, and he couldnt picture himself making a career, putting his suit on & shaving every morning, going into an air-conditionned office.

The ability to make a risky decision, a committing life-choice, in order to get closer to one's true self and personal path. Now, that is what I call a leadership behavior.

I feel the same sometimes. We all want different things at different stages of our lives. At the moment, i dont want so much change that I'll go to Papua New Guinea. What happens when I do? How much time will I allow myself to prepare?
The future is gonna be such a great time! Incidentally, it is also the place where we are going to spend most of our remaining lifetime, so it better be great!!

the most AWESOME blog post ever!!

at the general request, here is a custom dedicated post to two amazing friends.
By alphabetical order:
Christine, from Mexico, teacher, globe-trotter, care giver and always cheerful, who keeps blowing our minds with her unique way to stay optimistic and love life like no one else I know
Ellen, from Germany, journalist (yet?), fine observer of the world, acute analyst of her time & surroundings, who entertains our crowd with her delightful way to recount anecdotes and tells about people so that you will know everything about them even if you never met them.

also, I agreed to write that this would be the most awesome blog post ever published :)
thanks to both of you for being here, even when you are away... well you know what I mean!

Gathering & sharing viewpoints

For the past 2 weeks, I was trying to write a new post for this blog, but I could not focus on a single topic. There are just so many things I want to write about and so many extremely, both important and interesting things, happening around at the moment that I failed to narrow my post down to one issue.
Eventually, I decided I would today share some information sources that I value, and some pieces of info that I believe relevant, all that being a patchwork of what is around nowadays.

On Toni's blog,(amazing Aiesecer from Macedonia) I found out about the annual EBBF Conference, from where I learned about the EBBF organization. In short, it is a community of people looking to develop ethical values, personal virtues and moral leadership in their work.
To give an example of the mindset, here is a quote from one of the EBBF members in the latest newsletter "If at the end of my career all I had to show was money, then I would know that I had failed."
That is

Dreaminder is a website where you input, today, a dream that you have. Something you would like to realize, or witness becoming reality, some time from now. You also input your email address, and a date.
On that date, the website will send to your email address what you wrote.
Yes, you got it, it is a reminder of your dream.
I did iin late 2007, when I was still job-hunting, and received my dreaminder on Xmas 2008, exactly one year after starting my new job.
The great thing, you totally forget about it. Then suddenly it is brought back to you, and your thoughts navigate between that past moment, those past expectations, and the present. And you can assess if you have acheived what you had set yourself to.
Or it will also simply remind you of what dreams you had, and serve as an encouragement to always go towards the realiszation of those dreams.

the 1% for the planet project is a US-based initiative for organizations to donate 1% (or more) of their annual income to support environmental causes. It uses the principle that, even in 2009 with a global economic slow-down, the "western world" is able to survive using 'just' 99% of its income, and giving 1% to issues in dire need of funding.
Personal note: you dont have to join that particular project. I encourage you to apply that principle to yourself and donate to causes that are important to you.
Come on, do you really, really need that cream on top of the big cake?


A good friend of mine based in Bangkok, that I had the unexpected luck to see last week, told me that people can be classified in their relation to information: some are gatherers, some are analysers/synthesizers, some will focus on becoming experts in a topic... I'm looking forward to know more about that (Vincent, si tu m'entends...). Today, I act as a "gatherer": I share in a single place information from very different sources. I like doing that, because of the impact it can have on people by broadening their horizon. My next step will be to learn to structure what I share. I think you'll agree I need to work on that ^_^

playlist while writing this post: some Nadasurf, and the "Eye to the Telescope" album of KT Tunstall.

Human condition

Lately I have been reading quite a few things about the Human condition. Or put differently: the condition of Mankind, as an evolved animal species on a uniquely plentiful planet.
And now, I am thinking a lot, about why are we here, and what are we supposed to do with ourselves, with our neighbours, with our world.

I think this is a discussion that will come back regularly on this blog, and I think before getting it started, I would need toset some definitions and objectives as well as some boundaries.

it's a bit late tonight, so I won't do it today, but here is some of the literature I was mentioning at the beginning of this post. Seriously, it's LIFE-CHANGING stuff!!!! Paradigm-shifting, glasses-removing (the theory of intercultural understanding and colored glasses....), thought-feeding... call it what you want, it really brings you to a whole different level of thinking.

Litterature:
"The World Without Us", by Alan Weisman. Interest of the book: what would happen to our planet, the fauna and flaura, nature in general, if humans vanished from one day to the next? That strange question starts an very documented, mind-boggling and eye-opening discussion. Looking back at what the world was before us, we see the natural evolution that we caused as an animal species, and the "artificial" evolution that we brought as we evolved into more and more complex societies.

"La vie - mode d'emploi" (Life - User's manual), by George Pérec. A French writer trying to make a style exercise comes up with an original way to give us a snapshot of parisian society around the turn of the century (from 19th to 20th). The "user's manual" describes the lives of all the inhabitants in a parisian building, in all apartments, from parties to adultery, from war crimes to art lessons, from the everyday, tiny events to the unleashing of human passion and fury.

"Apprendre à vivre" (learning to live) ,by Luc Ferry. French philosopher and former Minister for Education, his book is probably the best introduction ever to philosophy. His approach is simple, practical, and inviting to everyone. Looking at philosophy at the "doctrin of salvation without a god", he retraces the history of philosophy since it appeared in ancient times, explains the different schools, and why we went from one to another, and what is man's place in each of the main philosophical perspectives on the world, as well as in the main monotheistic religions.

Those 3 books are extremely significant to my thougth process, because they have been very easy to read (except maybe the 1st one, that sometimes gets dry, though alwyas very insightful), and totally changed my paradigms on the topics they adressed.
You know that idea: "once you have had that thought, once you have seen things this or that way, you can never go back. you can never forget those thoughts, it has changed your perspective on the world". Those books had that effect on me.

... and a few other things about sustainable development, that got me thinking about why we need it today, and what will be the human species like, if we ever make it through our global ecological crysis.

I want to write also about the idea of "change", as I got some new persectives from "The World without us", seeing that other species have alwyas known very slow change, following the long-term rythm of geological evolution, whereas we humans have brought so much acceleration into the game that we cannot even keep up with our own thoughts and actions, and who we have become. Another day, maybe.

"Escapades"

Sometimes I skip lunch.
Some of you will tell me it's bad; unhealthy; unreasonable.You are probably right, if anyone is at all.
The reason why I skip lunch is that I want to travel, to discover, I am hungry for new sights, new feelings. Maybe you know this feeling. You want to drive as fast as you can, to feel the rush of speed. You want to walk in the middle of a huge, hurricane-like storm, to feel the unleashed strength of nature trying to blow you away. You want to feel alive.
When I skip lunch, I just go for a walk, and shut down my mind. I just trust my feet.
Yesterday I went to the gym in the morning, and after working out I felt this gush of energy, so instead of going straight down into the first subway hole,I decide to walk for a bit. As I stood right in the middle of Paris, I could go exactly anywhere.
I walked from Palais Royal to the Louvre, walked around it, going around the "Cour Carrée", and found myself at the Pont des Arts. There was no snow, just a freezing breeze moving the top branches of all the leafless trees bordering the banks of the river Seine.
I had this impression of being detached from myself, looking at the whole scene from somewhere else... I could almost take everything in at the same time:
The slow, fat "bateau-mouche" humming away from the bridge, with its scattered tourists all on the lower, indoor deck. No one outside. The weather made everything look crisp, fragile, thin.
The long, squeaky shrieks of the gulls muffled by the soft, freezing breeze; the birds flying in circles behind the boat, following its backwash, probably looking for food in the muddy waters.
The reddish roofs on the island and on the opposite bank of the river covered in white frost, reminding me strangely of strawberries with icing sugar.
The passers-by in long, winter-fashion trench coats and parka, white, beige, and red, mostly; slowly crossing the bridge, enjoying the relaxing view.
And suddenly, I realized who I was, where I was, the lon way I had come so far, from my childhood to university to job in Paris; the importance of this city in history, the importance of France in the modern world, the wars and battles that took place in this city, the rise and fall of kingdoms decided in the Louvre, just a few yards behind me. The crownings in Notre Dame, whose bell tower tips I can spot from here, towering the shorter buildings around it. The passionate, enraged and furious lives of artists whose works are on display at Musée d'Orsay, a short walk to my right. And dead ahead, the average Parisian house, high and narrow, that probalby hosted its fair amount of wealth and joy and crimes and great, historical moments forever lost in the flow of history, as no witness passed them on to posterity.

It shatters your mind, to realize all that at once. It did, to me. I felt born again. And also calmer, and more serene. Then I realized I was hungry, and went for lunch anyway.