What it takes to be competitive

Whether you want to be competitive in sports, school, business, social circles or just against yourself, your advantage will seldom have to be measured in spectacularly, large increments. Most of the time, a hair or even a fraction thereof will suffice.

Even if it's an itsy-bitsy, tiny bit at a time, it also has to be consistent. You must stay alert, be permanently on the look-out for challenge and never forget to act on it. With these simple precepts in mind, competitiveness isn't an occasional activity, but a permanent state of mind...

What's really hard for me...

...is to keep my desk and office table clean. Junk and papers seem to love to congregate on their surface and I let them. This continually drives my wife crazy, but what drives me even crazier is attempting to make it tidy.

I find that process to be both inhumane and exhausting. I can only take it to certain point until I hit a wall and must stop. Then, I console myself by muttering “live is much too short to work like hell in order to just have a clean desk...”

So what you see today is the best it ever will be.

My solution to the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock

It's about time I share my solution with the rest of the world. Immediately cancel the Zionist theocracy, re-open up the gates of Palestine to the 6 million displaced diaspora, let them all spread through what's known today as Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

Shake the mixture thoroughly, remove all nukes, slingshots and AK-47, and have them figure out how to function in peace together. Without the usual assholes called Netanyahu and Hamas, I bet you that Jews and Arabs will imagine quickly how to co-exist and prosper. The dysfunctional, ill-thought, two-state solution will never work.

Welcome to the the one-state, Semitic melting pot and this time, leave them alone for good!

Stranded in America?

As a mature person, I typically read obituaries because they begin to involve my peer group. I do it mostly on my French hometown newspaper, because in this era of cheap phone calls and free email, no one, that I know over there, would have the decency or the common sense of letting me know. I end up being well informed, but it's just because I make the super-natural effort of digging it out.

So, yesterday, I was stopped in my thoughts when I read that Marie-Jo, Jean-Claude Page's wife, a friend of mine, had passed at the age of 65 two days earlier. No one had bothered to let me know and the ones who might even have thought about it, probably shrugged it off, thinking or saying: “Why bother, this guy will know it before us, he's got internet...”

Moments of grace, times of chaos

Just as in skiing, no mountain-bike ride is ever the same. Sometimes it can feel like floating on a cloud (preferably #9) but some other times, it can seem just like organized chaos or a disjointed chain of event that makes the outing pure hell.

It doesn't take much: A hidden obstacle sticking out just a tiny bit too much, a temporary lack of balance that exacerbate a tricky situation which in turn, etc. You get the picture. I've written it many times, mountain-biking is fraught with danger, you never know what might happen as you get out on a ride.

So, as a rule, “hope for the best, plan for the worst,” but I might be repeating myself...

The art of taking a break

If there is something I'm not good at, is to take a break and do nothing. It must be the way I was raised and the way I led my life for decades, but I really a lousy job in that department.

In the upcoming blogs, I will explore that “terra incognita” and find the key to find a method that really works for me and give me access to the time off I so badly need!

Mountain-bike: Seeing, looking, focusing

Visual senses are key for safe mountain-biking. Of course, you must be able to see to get a sense of where you are and where you are going, but as soon as you look, it better be close to your intended path and often time, looking all over and too often can lead to problems.

Finally, the best thing to always do it watch where your bike is going. You may see a lot less, look at fewer things, but are more likely to stay stranding on your bike!