The forgiveness bonus (Part One)

A few months ago, I took a radical step in deciding, once and for all, to forgive all the folks that I felt had wronged me, over my entire life and for all kinds of reasons like humiliation, treason, bullying or stealing from me. 

In my mind, that forgiveness applied to these bad or unpleasant acts that I thought were perpetrated against me as long as they were not criminal in nature and didn’t involve acts that are judged repulsive in our western society.

For instance, I couldn’t forgive Biden and Trump for letting Netanyahu massacre so many people, destroy Gaza and allow terrorist colonists to terrorize Palestinians living in the West Bank, but I can forgive a boss, a co-worker or a neighbor for being a jerk. 

Still just like a soiled piece of linen where some stains are more stubborn than others and take longer to eliminate, absolving takes more or less time depending on the impact we had allowed it to make on us, and – for me at least – it’s still work in progress. 

As of today, I’m feeling extremely good about my decision, but more importantly as time as now accrued, it’s as if I experienced being a new man, have the sensation of being better all over myself and in particular feeling much relieved, mentally much lighter, energetic and literally freer from what in fact was a constant burden I carried along. 

Truthfully, I can’t really believe that getting rid of resentment, bitterness and hostility could represent such a great cleansing and liberating job for me. From there, I realized that there was a justification in stopping this invading resentment through the act of forgiving and establishing ourselves as the “adult in the room” and as a result soaring well above the individual or the experience we absolved. 

Herein is the bonus that we are guaranteed to receive out of the act of forgiving. This simple but difficult act seriously lightens our load and self-elevates ourselves. Pretty impressive and another excellent reason to put an end to the endless cycle of recriminations. 

Tomorrow, we’ll dig deeper into the subject and explore how this process works in practice...

Foreign languages, my ticket to life!

If I had to guess, I think that the seeds of my attraction to America and its English language were planted the day I ran into a magazine called “Europe- Amérique in the 1950s that I read as soon as I could. It was published by the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) — the US agency running the Marshall Plan. 

Following this, I won a contest at school that took me to Paris, Brussels, Stuttgart, Munich, Innsbruck, the Passo Stelvio, Como Lake and all the way to the UN in Geneva. It made my head dizzy with a taste for internationalism and a bottomless appetite for discovery.

The following fall, as I was entering middle school, I started to learn English and while my dedication to learning that language was lackluster it would suddenly coalesce and explode during my compulsory 16-month military service, where I got myself a “Méthode Assimil” the French gold key to language learning. And I learned English, starting with “My tailor is rich…” 

So much so that upon my discharge I clinched an aircraft mechanic job with TWA in Geneva where I was paired up with a crew of German speaking Swiss guys with whom I had to interact daily in English. A decent mastery of conversational English got me without official certification into the Avoriaz ski school and helped me secure lessons with students that could only communicate in Shakespeare’s language. 

I had found my niche and as I got certified and became a better ski instructor in both French and English, I took a stab at German and got myself a second Assimil method, still without the accompanying audio since I had no cassette player at the time. In between, I taught skiing in Australia for two seasons during their down-under winters that were followed with two stays in Germany where I enrolled at the Sprachinstitut in Tübingen for 6 week each time. 

There, I polished my conversation skills and was ready to add that skill to my quiver as soon as the winter season began. From there, I thought that adding Italian would be the right thing to do and here I was grabbing a third Assimil volume, this time with cassettes, as I finally had a player by then! Because Italian is so closely related to French and the dialect from Savoie, I didn’t feel the need to go too deep into studying that language, but still claimed it as an extra skill of mine. 

This coincided with my scoring a great job with Look on the account of speaking four languages! I would eventually use my Italian and improve on it a lot when I worked with Lange ski boots and started to spend an insane amount of time at the company’s Italian factory. Further down the line and towards the end of my career, I spent quite a bit of time in Japan which encouraged me to learn some basic Japanese, but I found that exercise intensely difficult. 

Two years ago, to prepare for some vacations in Andalusia, I got involved with Spanish and that effort and the pleasure I get out of learning that new language keeps me motivated to pursue my efforts. As anyone could conclude, my focus on languages wasn’t a waste of time!

A cool epitaph!

Everyday, our walk zigzags for 1,430 feet inside the Park City Cemetery and we enjoy the calm away from the heavy morning traffic. Many times, I’ve thinking about epitaphs and why not, one that could be perfect the day I might need one! 

That’s how I got hooked into a few lines of a French song by Georges Moustaki that goes like this: “Nous avons toute la vie pour nous amuser, nous avons toute la mort pour nous reposer." It roughly translates into “We have a whole lifetime to have fun; we have all of death to rest.” 

I find that it possesses a disarming simplicity. Moustaki knew how to wield: a naked truth, devoid of pathos or grand rhetoric, but offering almost a philosophical smile at the human condition. "We have all of life to have fun, we have all of death to rest." 

As an epitaph, it is remarkably apt. It conveys three essential things: A trust in life: as long as it’s here, one must live it, savor it, and embrace it as a playground for learning and connection. A peaceful acceptance of death: not as a threat, but as a natural, inevitable, and almost gentle rest. 

A philosophy of lightness: no tragedy, no drama, just a way of saying, "I’ve done my part; I’ve lived; now I rest." It is neither bleak nor fatalistic. On the contrary, it is a way of saying that some of us chose to live fully, to enjoy life, learn, and love, and that what follows is merely a return to stillness. 

It seems to be tailored-made for me, who love to reflect deeply on life’s trajectory, on aging well, on continuing to grow, and on turning my remaining years into a crescendo rather than a decline. It makes this sentiment rings true and it says I’ve played the game to the very end! 

Who wants another leak?

Just ten days after my nice new fence around my backyard was completed my next door neighbor to the west sent me a pretty rough text message telling me that my contractor and his crew must have had disrupted his irrigation sprinklers line and the a leak that he directly attributed to their negligence during their work had developed on his property. 

When we met, he sounded clearly convinced that his sprinkler underground line has been disturbed by the post excavation work and I realized that he may be right to be suspicious, but I wasn’t 100% convinced. 

This originated from the fact that even though the area is located on a 5 to 10% slope, it seemed quite odd that the water didn’t go into a sloped (diagonal) trajectory, but for strange reasons that disregarded the basic laws of hydrology and gravity, it would have chosen to flow across the fall line, and when we tested the line, the water was gushing out six feet away west from the post and the presumed breakage area when it should have manifested itself near the fence post. 

As a follow up to our in-person meeting, I offered to dig up around the corner post, near the fence, but level with the observed leak, to examine if, and where, there’s a break or fracture on the PVC pipe causing the leakage and the area was bone-dry. 

Either way, I promised to keep him posted. The next day it took me about one hour and a half to dig a hole that was a couple of square feet in surface and about one and a half foot deep. 

I finally come in contact with the white PVC pipe, except that unlike what my neighbor had told me it wasn’t in a straight line, it branched out on a T connection to the leaking area six feet away and 18" deep, a place where none of the fence workers could have disturbed the line. 

Thanks to my calm, patience and personal handy work, I clearly proved to him that his premature conclusion was dead wrong. Saying that he was embarrassed was an understatement!

When age enriches us

As I have evoked the idea several times on this blog, the aging process can take us into several directions depending on what we let it do, and this true independent of our particular situation having to do with our economic, social, physical or mental health status, or a combination of either of these factors.

So, all things being what the can be with us, we can see the “aging glass” either half-full or half-empty. As I’ve also said, aging is quite brutal a stage in life, it’s not for “sissies” and the way we want to steer our attitudes, our expectations and our objectives demand a strong determination. 

The alternative to this, I found, is a “crash and burn” approach that is not palatable for me, so I see my advancing into time as a continuing adventure where I have no alternative, but embrace ideas, projects and actions that force me to get out of my shell, re-invent me and in the process – almost always surprise me as much as they regenerate me. 

The end of the road transforms itself into an apotheosis, when I’ll have done everything that was possible given my abilities and for as long as I could muster the energy to accomplish it. What a superior way to embrace old age and make the best out of our last Act!

Céline Dion’s Paris concert

While Dion’s return to the scene was preceded by a powerful and sleek marketing job, we managed to watch her two hour concert on September 12 on YouTube via large screen TV. It had been shot by fans in the audience, commonly referred to as "bootlegged" or user-generated content, rather than an official broadcast. 

The clip was filmed at the Paris La Défense Arena. We weren’t too crazy about the star’s choice of dress (there were at least 5 changes) and hairstyle as a bun did give her a severe look and wasn’t in my opinion helping her facial features. While taking into consideration the amateurish quality of the transmission, we found that Céline Dion’s attempts to engage the crowd were stilted and didn’t encourage what should have been a more enthusiastic audience support. 

Even though she was quite emotional and touching at times, she fell into the trap of taking herself and her act a bit too seriously. As for the quality of her performance at that show, the English language songs were generally great, particularly “All by myself”, while Jean-Jacques Goldman’s French songs had a much tougher time in comparison both in their content and delivery. 

My wife enjoyed the show a little more than I did, but both of us wouldn’t have been sold on attending one of her following live concerts if we had happened to be in Paris at the time and able to get tickets. On September 14, the video was no longer available on YouTube... 

The 9-11 unasked question

When I learned about the September 11 terrorist attack I was having breakfast in Vail, Colorado, following my morning run. In hearing what was happening in New York City, the first thought that came to my mind was “Years of humiliation and punishment brought against the Palestinian population is the root cause of these attacks”.

By and large America didn’t perceive that angle of the devastating attack. Fueled by its righteousness and its ingrained sense of exceptionalism, it became self-indignant saying “How can someone attack us in this manner, this is totally unfair, we absolutely didn’t deserve that kind of treatment.” Nowhere, have I heard “Why did someone inflict that horrible punishment to us?” 

True, asking WHY would have made sense, but remained conspicuously absent from our national response. At least that’s how I understood it. Absolutely no comprehensive post-mortem, but instead a “well-deserved”, twenty year war of vengeance against Afghanistan first, and almost simultaneously another one, almost as costly in lives and resources, against Iraq. 

A tragedy for all that is also a powerful reminder, that in order to learn from a catastrophe we should always get to the root cause of the situation by asking a simple “Why?”