Category: Understanding life and the world

Big ideas and analysis related to life and the world. This is where I become philosophical and tend towards guru-ness.

A Balanced Life Has Change and Instability Built In [en]

[fr] Quelques réflexions sur l'équilibre de vie -- et le fait que celui-ci est en fait un perpétuel déséquilibre, qui doit pouvoir absorber le changement.

I want a balanced life.

When I stop and think about what I want in life, that’s the best answer I can come up with: I want a balanced life.

I’m not an extremist. I want time for work and time for play, futility and depth, travel and stability, arts and science, me and others, and space for my wide variety of interests.

Many years ago, one of my philosophy courses made me suddenly understand that imbalance is what makes life alive. The very chemical reactions which form the basis of life are oscillating reactions, which go back and forth around equilibrium, permanently out of balance, but stable enough to allow us to live and breathe long years.

There is a risk of getting caught up in words, here. Stable, balance, unstable, imbalance.

During my physics classes in high school (what we call “Gymnase”), I learned that there was stable and unstable equilibrium. An object is in stable equilibrium if it is hanging from somewhere. If you make it move, it will come back to its equilibrium point. Unstable equilibrium, on the other hand, is when the centre of gravity is above the support base. Push it over, and it may fall and never come back to where it was. It’s unstable.

This struck me as counter-intuitive. When I first read about the two terms, I thought it would be the other way around. A lamp hanging from the ceiling seemed less stable than a table on the kitchen floor. There was a slight discomfort in the realization that what I considered most stable was in fact labeled by physics as “unstable”.

Me sitting on the couch: that’s unstable equilibrium. I feel pretty stable, though.

Walking: a body which is losing its balance every step of the way.

I’ve written more than a handful of articles that have to do with my quest for balance or related topics. Here are a few I dug up, but you can probably find more if you hunt around:

So for balance, you have to factor in instability. A balanced life is not a rigid regimen of balanced components. A balanced life is elastic, ever-moving, a harmonious danse of spare parts. A chaotic system, probably.

Balance, probably, is an ability to manage change. Interesting idea, for someone with a slight adjustment disorder.

A balanced life is a life that can absorb external elements without being turned upside down. This reminds me of something that’s sometimes said of Indian culture: it’s inclusive, it absorbs rather than rejecting.

So, my balanced life needs resilience. And it will never be really in balance — forever trying to reach it.

The Trap of Happiness: Big Things and Small Things, Outside and In [en]

[fr] La clé, pour être heureux, n'est pas dans les événements ou circonstances extérieurs, mais dans nos activités. En nous, et non au dehors de nous. Ce n'est pas très intuitif, d'où le piège. ("Quand ceci ou cela arrivera, alors je serai enfin heureuse.")

I realized today that many of the things I agonize over, the big things of life, are probably not worth spending so much energy on.

These big things of life — work, relationships, where to live — are just the measly circumstantial 10% component of our happiness (50% is due to our happiness “set point”, and the remaining 40% depends on certain intentional activities).

If I’m agonizing over whether to pursue a relationship or not, whether to keep my current line of work or change it, stay put or move to another continent, I’m doing so because at some level, I believe those decisions hold the fate of my happiness. But they don’t.

This is not to say that major life changes have no impact on how we feel. Of course they do. And of course bad decisions can lead to pain and anguish. But if things are going reasonably well and the drive is to be happier, the research presented in The How of Happiness (which I’ve already blogged about) tells us that these major changes will probably have way less long-term effect on how happy we are than certain more modest-looking intentional activities that have been show to reliably increase happiness.

Major events give us a “happiness high”, which is maybe one of the reasons we keep on looking to them as the solution to our lasting happiness. Hence the trap of happiness:

We think that big important things like being in a relationship, having a great job, having kids or living in our dream city are going to make us happy, when in fact it is small day-to-day activities that make use happy.

So when we’re unhappy, we yearn for big changes and stay stuck on “if onlys” rather than doing something that will actually make us feel happier.

For me, there is an important corollary to this:

The key to our happiness is inside of us, and not in exterior events.

This is nothing new under the sun, but I think that today I have really understood it.

You see, in addition to agonizing over “big decisions”, I spend a lot of energy hoping or waiting for things to happen which I expect will make me feel happier. Things that are outside my control or depend on other people. Without getting into details, this energy sometimes pushes me down alleys where I do things which I know are doomed to failure, which I know are a bad idea (and I can even explain why), but I have a very hard time stopping myself from doing them.

And I have understood today that the way to fight these “dysfunctional” urges is to remember where they come from: they come from feelings of unhappiness that I’m trying to address in the wrong way. I’m trying to make big things happen outside of me, rather than certain small things that involve only me — the “happiness activities” or “intentional activities” Sonja Lyubomirsky describes in her book.

Not surprisingly, some of them are already part of my “toolkit” for making myself feel better. Before reading The How of Happiness, however, I think I just hadn’t measured how important they were. And now I have extra stuff to add to my happiness toolkit. Yay!

So I’m making a note: to fight my gosh-I-wish-I-wasn’t-heading-for-that-wall-again urges, pick an activity out of my happiness toolkit. And I’m putting “working on being happier through daily activities” above my big “existential issues” on the priority list.

I find it ironic, in a way, that something as important as how happy we are (I mean, a huge amount of what we do, we do because in some way we’re trying to be happy) can be influenced by so small and seemingly trivial things.

It does explain, though, how we can tumble from “happy” to “not happy” in just a few clicks, and climb back to “happy” by answering two e-mails and cleaning the bathroom sink.

It’s not rocket science.

Drifting People [en]

[fr] On ne peut pas être ami avec tout le monde, ne serait-ce que pour des questions d'agenda. Je crois que j'ai accepté cette limite, et aussi que l'amitié va et vient la plupart du temps, et que les gens invités dans ma vie ne resteront pas forcément pour toujours.

I like people. I meet a lot of them. I connect easily and make friends. I have lots of people in my life, and not just “business contacts” kept at arm’s length.

At some point these last months, I started reflecting on the fact that I want to count as friends more people than I can cope with, from a purely “calendar” point of view. It’s very frustrating.

Four years ago I wrote a post titled “Too Many People“. I’m not at this level of crisis, at all, though the seeds of this year’s realization were undoubtedly sown sometime then.

I think I’ve accepted that people will drift in and out of my life. I’ve accepted that I cannot pursue every friendship worth pursuing, and that when friends drift out of my life, it is not just my responsibility.

You see, for some reason, I tend to look at things as if I was in charge of maintaining the relationship. But there are always two of us, and when there has been no contact in a year, it is also because the other person has not made a move either.

I’m not thinking of any of my friendships in particular, here. It’s more that I think I’ve accepted something about the somewhat transient nature of friendships and relationships, and the practical limits which mean one can’t be friends with everyone one wants to, and feel more at peace with it.

Variety is the Spice of Life [en]

[fr] De l'importance de varier les choses que l'on fait pour être heureux, les façons dont on s'organise, et le type d'article qu'on publie sur son blog. La routine ne tue pas seulement le couple. Vous avez d'autres exemples?

I’m in India. I’m reading “The How of Happiness“. The two are completely unrelated aside from the fact they come together to give me the title of this article.

Spice
Photo credit: Sunil Keezhangattu/Flickr

Don’t let the slightly corny title put you off as it did me, The How of Happiness is an excellent, solid, well-researched and practical book.

I don’t want to delve into the details of the book, but just share with you something that has fallen into place for me during the last week. It has to do with variety.

You see, in her book, Sonja Lyubomirsky doesn’t only go through the various things you can do to make yourself happier, or help you pick those that seem the best fit for you: she also insists on the necessity of varying the way you put them into practice.

The example that really made this point hit home for me was the one on “counting your blessings” (yes, corniness warning, directly from the author herself, but don’t let that stop you).

First, the test groups who were asked to write down the things they were thankful for 3 times a week ended up seeing less improvement in their happiness than those that were asked to do it only once a week. Doing it only once a week makes it more of an event and keeps boredom/immunisation at bay.

Second, even then, Sonja Lyubomirsky invites the reader to not do it in the same way every week. By writing, by conversation with a friend, upon certain occasions, about certain areas of your life, or in yet a different manner, so that it remains a meaningful practice. (Page 97, if you want to look it up directly.)

This immediately reminded me of a flash of insight I had one day walking in the mountains around my chalet. I can’t remember exactly when it was, but I can see the road I was on and I remember the insight quite clearly.

Update: I found the article I wrote at the time, it was in 2009!

I was thinking of the different ways in which I had got organized, and how I seemed to become “immune” to a given method after some time had passed. The flash of insight was this: “maybe I just need to keep on finding new ways of getting organized.” I brushed off the idea, because it wasn’t comfortable, and wrote it down to the need to have different techniques for different contexts. For example, there are times when I’m more stressed than others. Times when I have more work than others. Times when I feel productive, and times when I need to kick myself down the two floors from the flat to the coworking space to get to work. Even my recent musings on freeform versus structured work go in that direction.

But in fact, I was right. Just like it’s important to vary “happiness activities/techniques” to prevent habituation (or worse, boredom), I think it’s important to vary one’s organization methods. Or at least, for me, it is. And it could well be because there is a “happiness” component for me in the act of getting organized. I like the feeling of being on top of things, of finding solutions to be productive despite my built-in procrastination engine, of learning how I function, of coming up with strategies to prioritize and get things done. And maybe — maybe — for me, trying to find one method that I can just stick to is a big mistake.

Another area I’ve recently connected “variety is the spice of life” to is blogging. I’ve been hanging out with the communication team at Wildlife SOS these last days, volunteering a bit of my time and expertise to help them make better use of social media.

As I was inviting them to vary the type of article they publish on their blog (at the moment, almost all the stories are animal rescue stories), I realized that this was another example of this theme at work: “variety is the spice… of reader engagement?”

Even if as a reader, animal rescue stories are my favourites, I will actually enjoy them more if they stand out against other types of articles. And for another reader, the favourites might very well be “behind the scenes” articles or “get to know the team” ones.

By publishing only one type of “top post”, one turns it into the “average post”. Add a sprinkle of intermittent reward to the mix, and you’ll probably positively influence the way readers perceive your content. Isn’t it more exciting to head over to a blog which might or might not reward you with a new article, which might or might not be the type that moves you most?

Now think about relationships: don’t we say that routine is the biggest love-killer? Oh, some habits are nice — but you also want new stuff, changes from the habitual, different way of being together and relating to one another. Surprises. The unexpected. This is nothing new.

So, let me summarize. Variety is the spice of life. Not only should you flee excessive routine in your marriage or relationship, but also in the following areas:

  • activities that make you happy
  • how you get organized (work, and probably life too)
  • the kind of content you publish on your blog

Can you think of other areas where it’s a little counter-intuitive, but it actually turns out to be really important to add variety to the way you do things?

Linkball [en]

[fr] Une pile de liens, encore!

So, here’s another bunch of interesting links I’ve found and read. Again, blame Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook (and falling down the blog-hole), I’ve lost my sources for most of them. So, a big warm thanks to all the people I follow someplace or other — it’s thanks to you collectively.

W.L. Gore: Lessons from a Management Revolutionary (via johntropea): you’ve all heard of Gore-Tex, right? The company behind it, Gore, sounds very much like a “company of the future” when you read about how it is run (“self-run” is a better term).

My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling: off to Russia from the US (and into a Russian-medium school…)

ZOMBIES, RUN! Running game & audio adventure for iOS/Android: on Kickstarter, a game that will make you run in real life to survive the zombie attack inside the game. If you’re trying to back the project and Amazon doesn’t let you — happens with some non-US accounts, this workaround works.

Nobody Asked For A Refrigerator Fee: how fridges and electricity killed Stockholm’s largest employer a century ago. An example of innovation making business models go bankrupt. Sheds interesting historical light on the uproar around the demise of certain industries brought on by the internet.

A Jobs Plan for the Post-Cubicle Economy: how the work world is changing, and how our migration from office to freelancing is similar to migration from farm to factory.

SEO for Non-dicks: couldn’t have said it better. Read this if you’re concerned about search result placement.

Facebook Scare: Uncheck Comments and Likes: have been trying to fight the epidemic of “please uncheck comments and likes” copy-paste madness on Facebook by spreading this article. Scoop: your comments and likes have always been visible. They depend on the visibility of the status you’re commenting or liking. Only now, you actually get to see if the status is public or not (before, you had to guess). Don’t panic. Go and review your privacy settings instead. And get ready for Timeline, which is going to turn Facebook upside-down for you, whether you want it or not. (God save us all. I can already see the wave of panic, rumors, protests and bunched-up panties that is going to hit us.)

It’s the end of the web as we know it: I keep seeing articles that remind us of the importance of owning our data. Have you noticed how you’re reading this on Climb to the Stars, on my own domain, hosted on my own server, run with my own WordPress installation? Yup.

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? Excellent article on schools and education. Failure, we needs it. Parents who feel compelled to shield their progeny from all the ills of the world, read this fast — you might be depriving them of valuable opportunities to learn critical coping skills. (This is not to say you should be a hard-hearted bastard. Find the right balance.)

Interesting Articles You Should Read [en]

[fr] De la lecture. (Il y a un article en français. Sisi.)

A little link-dump, I’m sure you don’t all follow me on Twitter or read Digital Crumble. I stumbled upon a few really interesting articles lately (or less lately). Here they are. (Don’t have sufficient energy to comment, but not doing perfect should never be an excuse for not doing at all! Oh, and of course 90% of the time I don’t have the faintest idea how I found them — thanks to all the people I follow on Twitter, Facebook, G+, and the random encounters of hanging out online.)

Enjoy!

Different Kinds of Downtime [en]

[fr] Déconnecter ou se décontracter peut prendre plusieurs formes, et je viens de réaliser que malgré tout le temps de libre que j'ai pris pour récupérer de mon printemps un peu intense côté travail, je ne me suis pas laissé beaucoup d'espace pour penser. Laisser vagabonder mon esprit sans arrière-fond de musique, d'activité, de TV ou de jeux iPhone.

At two points in my “grown-up” life, I’ve been through phases of intense work which drove home the importance of making sure I had enough downtime. One was when I started teaching (I ended up on sick leave) and the other was when I was preparing Going Solo (a welcome cat bite probably prevented me from burning out completely).

I learned that when you do nothing but work, you can’t recuperate. Since then, I’ve always paid attention to preserving enough time “for myself”. Even when I have a lot of work and have “no time”, I still make time to eat with friends, watch TV series, read, sleep, etc. I never work until two in the morning, I take my week-ends off (there are exceptions), and generally am pretty good at setting boundaries between “work” and “non-work” modes (which might make certain people feel I’m hard to reach ;-)).

Over my lunch break today, I think I understood something really important — and funnily, just after saying that I don’t feel like writing anything these days, I feel an urge to blog about it here.

The thing I understood is the following: there are different kinds of downtime.

I’ve been thinking about this these last days — for example, I use both iPhone games and TV series to relax or take my mind off stuff, but for different purposes.

One of my ongoing grievances about life these last months is that I feel tired and worn-out and don’t seem to be able to recuperate despite having taken a lot of time off (holidays here and elsewhere) since working too much this spring.

I go home for lunch break (it’s just two floors above my coworking space eclau, so it’s not much of a commute). I needed to sit a bit before preparing lunch, so I took a book and sat down on my balcony couch (yes, you can be jealous).

But I didn’t open the book. I just stared outside at the garden, looked at my plants, stared into space some more, did some low-level plant maintenance, stared into space, looked at the garden… See the idea? All that time, my mind was wandering idly around, thinking about this and that, and that and this, going back in time, forward in time… Just undirected thinking about… “stuff”.

And I realised that I don’t actually give myself much time for that. Thinking without doing anything else while I think. Maybe my discomfort these days months has to do with the fact that I have things to process and haven’t really been making appropriate space for that — despite all my downtime.

So, what kind of downtime do I give myself, and what need does it fulfill? And what are your types of downtime?

Fiction

Fiction (whether books or TV) takes me out of my life. It disconnects me from what is preoccupying me. At the same time, it’s like an emotional catalyst. I’m the kind of person who’ll end up crying whilst watching CSI. I like movies that take you on an emotional roller-coaster. So in that respect, fiction also helps me reconnect.

Games

I’m the kind of “on-off” casual gamer, but ever since I downloaded Angry Birds (end of last year) I’ve been playing iPhone games regularly. Games allow me to wind down and distract me, but without the emotional component I get from fiction. Games are also more active, and speak to my obsessive streak.

Physical Activity

I have an exercise bike at home I try to use regularly, I do judo, sing, and go sailing. Physical activity empties my head and tires my body — vital for something with a desk-bound job like mine. Sometimes my mind wanders off and I do some light thinking, but most of the time, I’m just completely taken by what I’m doing.

Online Downtime

Online downtime includes idly chatting, catching up with people, reading random articles… It’s a way of keeping busy without being productive, and maybe of avoiding “more down” downtime. It also leads to new ideas and insights, new interests to explore. It’s good for a breath of fresh air but at times like now where I feel worn out, overworked and oversocialized, I avoid it.

Socializing

I’m not sure if socializing is a “downtime” activity for me. I’m not much of a bar/club person, so for me socializing is either “networking” (and that’s work) or long (often personal) discussions with people I’m close to. I also know I switch modes when I’m around people. I guess it is a kind of downtime I need, but there are times when I’m more in an introvert mood and seeing people adds to my stress (maybe — hypothesis — because it’s stressful for me to be around people when I’m unsatisfied with something I do not manage to put in words; hmmm, maybe blogging is to be included under “socializing”?)

Thinking

Thinking is just that. Thinking. Not really doing anything. It happens when I clean the flat or the dishes or do laundry, but only if I’m taking all the time in the world and not really paying much attention to what I’m doing. Going for a walk or sitting on the balcony (without a book or an iPhone!) is also an opportunity for this kind of downtime where I let my mind wander around freely and think about whatever it is I want to be thinking, without real aim or purpose.

I’m sure that when watching TV, or exercising, or reading a book, there is some background processing going on in my brain. I’m sure it’s useful and necessary. But this is more like frontground processing.

And this, I think, is what’s been missing — and might be the reason why I’m having trouble identifying what is behind my feeling of “not quite right” (although objectively, everything is going fine).

Having understood this, I’m going to make sure I have time every day to sit on my balcony and stare into space. We’ll see what happens.

In Praise of the Morning Routine [en]

[fr] Avoir une routine matinale à laquelle on se tient, ça aide (même quand on a eu une panne d'oreiller, comme moi ce matin!)

I have a morning routine. From wake-up to office, it takes roughly 90 minutes. I don’t hurry. I don’t look at the time. I just go through it.

It’s a way to start the day, a way to wake up before staring at my inbox or getting started with work. It also means that for 90 minutes at the start of the day, I don’t have to make any choices or take any decisions.

There are times when I’m not good at sticking to it. But in general, I’ve noticed that the days, weeks or months when I do tend to go better. Not confusing correlation with causation, here: I’m very well aware that if I have the leisure to not be in a rush in the morning and take those 90 minutes, it means I’m not running around putting out fires all the time. True too, though, that if I am putting out fires but do manage to preserve this morning time of mine, I am managing to firewall some downtime from the madness of the rest of the day. In this way, my morning routine is not just a health indicator of my life, but also a took I can use to influence it.

This morning, I overslept. I had blocked a full day of work in the office, and I woke up three hours later than I had planned. Normally, when that happens, I rush downstairs to the office as fast as I can and get on with my day. This morning, I had second thoughts:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/stephtara/status/98311606978625536″]

Well, I listend to Nicole’s (and others’) advice and followed my gut: stick with the morning routine. Waking up late is annoying enough without throwing “my time” out of the window on top of it. And if I needed to sleep 10 hours straight, well so be it.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/cncx/status/98312585681715200″]

I now have a new “rule”: stick with the morning routine. If I needed extra sleep, well, let that eat into work or evening time, not morning and “get going” time.

Consequences for today: I worked later than I’d initially planned, and decided to give up going to a barbecue in the evening. But I went through my day without feeling crap.

So, you’re wondering, what do I do during those 90 minutes? No big mystery. My morning routine intially crept up on me (result of too much unstructured life) and was fertilized by my discovery of FlyLady (who, amongst other things, insists on the importance of routines). My morning routine is pretty much what it was 2 years ago:

  • get up, straighten bed
  • neti pot if necessary, wash any leftover dishes (ideally)
  • hop into exercise clothes, do sit-ups, 30 minutes on the bike, stretch a bit
  • shower, get dressed, have breakfast
  • prepare my stuff and head out/downstairs

Not much to do for 90 minutes, see. I often also take a few minutes to check Twitter, or play a level of Plants vs. Zombies on my iPhone (warning: crack-addictive).

Do you have a morning routine? (Coffee drinkers, you do — even if you don’t think you do.)

 

Eat, Pray, Love: Damn You, Elizabeth Gilbert [en]

[fr] J'ai aimé Eat, Pray, Love plus que ce à quoi je m'attendais. Le trip "spiritualité indienne sauce occidentale", je m'en passerais, mais il y a plein de bonnes choses -- outre l'écriture, que j'aime beaucoup. Pour plus de détails... lire l'article complet en anglais!

Damn you, Liz Gilbert. I didn’t want to like your book, but I did. I even like you (well, the narrator you). Yeah, of course I can relate: 30-something heartbroken woman finds peace and love. Which single woman in her mid-thirties wouldn’t?

It annoys me, though, that you found them through faith, because I can’t do that.

I don’t doubt that you had a life-changing experience. I’m not either against religious or spiritual paths journeys per se, as long as they actually serve to grow us as human beings. But like the friends you mention near the end of your India book, I *cannot* believe anymore — believing there is a God or some other power, personal or not, is too incompatible with my worldview. A part of me would *like* to believe, so that I could find the peace you found. But I’d be faking it, right? Because another part of me is *certain* that there is nothing up there — or in there, aside from ourselves.

Bangalore 016 Gandhi Bazaar.jpgTo your credit, you do not proselytize, nor try to tell us that your way is The Only Way, and that we should all be doing it too. You bear witness of your own personal path, which involved a spiritual adventure in an ashram in India. I can appreciate that. But I have trouble relating to that aspect of your journey. (There is the Siddha Yoga issue too, which bothers me, but that I won’t delve into here.)

Also, whether you want it or not, your spiritual journey is coloured by a very specific — and modern — Indian school of thought (and by that, I don’t just mean Siddha Yoga). You acknowledge that, but in some respects you are blind to it, for example when you serve us truths about Indian spirituality or religions in general — you are talking from the inside of a specific religious tradition, not giving us access some kind of general truth. It’s a mistake many make, and I guess I can forgive you for it.

I personally believe that our conversations with God are conversations with ourselves. I believe we are much bigger than we think, and probably much bigger than we can ever know. And I say this not in a “mystical” or “magical” or “supernatural” sense, but in a psychological one. So for me, any religious or spiritual path is no more than a path within and with ourselves, using an exterior force or entity (“God”, “energy”) as a metaphorical proxy for parts or aspects of ourselves which are not readily available to our consciousness. Yes, it’s sometimes a bit complicated to follow for me too.

So what I can relate to, clearly, are your conversations with yourself in your notebook. I know I am a good friend. I’m loyal. I can love to bits. If I open the floodgates, I can love more than is possibly imaginable — just like you say of yourself. But I do not let myself be the beneficiary of so much love and care. “To love oneself,” not in a narcissistic way, but as a good friend or a good parent would. I know this is something I need to work on, I knew it before reading Eat, Pray, Love, but your journey serves as a reminder to me. It’s also reminding me that meditation (even when it’s not a search for God or done as religious practice) has benefits — and that I could use them.

So, thank you, Liz Gilbert. We may differ in our spiritual and life aspirations, but your journey has touched me, and inspired me. I didn’t expect it to. Thank you for the nice surprise. And damn you, because now I can’t look down quite so smugly anymore on those who rave about your book.

Montréal: l'amour passe par l'estomac [fr]

[en] As the editor for ebookers.ch's travel blog, I contribute there regularly. I have cross-posted some of my more personal articles here for safe-keeping.

Cet article a été initialement publié sur le blog de voyage ebookers.ch (voir l’original).

On dit que l’amour passe par l’estomac, pas vrai? Je viens de découvrir que c’est vrai non seulement pour les gens, mais aussi pour les villes. Montréal m’a bien nourrie, et mes réticences initiales ont fait place à un début d’affection.

Ma première poutine, à la Banquise.

Ce qui se cache là-dessous est tout simple. On aime suite à une expérience partagée agréable. Si possible, plus d’une expérience. De façon plus générale, une relation se construit sur un vécu commun. L’amour ou l’attirance sans vécu commun, c’est un amour-projection, l’amour d’un idéal que l’on projette sur l’autre. Un fantasme qui peut servir de point de départ, mais qui fait ensuite place à quelque chose de plus véritable.

Je me rends compte que pour aimer une ville, j’ai besoin d’avoir une relation avec elle — ce qui n’est pas exactement le cas sitôt descendue de l’avion, ou même après trois jours passés dans un hôtel sans mettre les pieds dehors. Et dans le cas de Montréal, je n’avais pas d’amour-projection pour me tirer en avant, pour m’aider à faire ces premiers pas de vécu commun. Un peu normal donc que ça ne m’enchante guère, de passer une semaine avec elle: je ne l’avais pas encore rencontrée.

Tant bien que mal, ça s’est pourtant fait. Que peut-on vivre avec une ville? Du temps en compagnie d’autrui, des promenades dans ses rues, des spectacles et des visites. Mais à un niveau bien plus basique: une bonne bouffe. Il faut bien se nourrir, n’est-ce pas.

Alors au fil des jours, Montréal m’a nourrie. Et pour me nourrir avec elle (en elle?) j’ai dû traverser ses quartiers, prendre son métro, côtoyer ses habitants. Et de bon repas en bon repas, tout doucement, des sentiments plus doux se sont éveillés en moi. Elle n’est pas si mal, pour finir, cette ville. Elle reste une ville, mais elle est sympa.

Etre le lieu de bonnes expériences gastronomiques, pour quelqu’un comme moi qui vit pour manger, c’est déjà un sacré bon point de départ.