“Tell me the name of a Romanian influencer that your generation follows!”, I asked a 25-year-old colleague a few years ago.
“Selly,” he tells me. (I didn’t know how to spell it then).
“Shelley, the British poet?”, I ask, wide-eyed with amazement.
He looked at me equally stunned, as if I’d given him checkmate, then smiled, indulgently, saying: no, he’s Romanian, he’s about 18 and very cool.
I felt overwhelmed. No matter how hard I try to be contemporary with the times I live in, no matter how much I read, get involved in various causes, despite my presence on many social media platforms and attempts to understand and use them, here was a trivial conversation that showed me what I didn’t want to admit: that maybe I was getting old.
Hard to admit for someone who when they started out threw away the materials they created in a year to force themselves to create new ones, to keep their mind young. It was a way of making sure I would keep up with my students when I was a teacher. I had many examples around of teachers stuck in time, I wanted to do everything I could to avoid becoming like them.
I’ve since left there, but I’m left with this ongoing quest to keep myself current. Beyond this need for contemporaneity, however, the passage of time is shown to me quite often. Here’s an example.
The other day I was looking to make a photo collage to celebrate a colleague who reached half a century. A significant portion of that time was spent with us in the firm.
We collected a lot of pictures. Looking through them with a few colleagues, I saw how he went through his years and how I went through mine at the same time.
Proudly, I thought that we’ve come through it well enough, that maybe we’re better, more balanced, a smidge wiser, more understanding. I was glad that we stayed away from major health problems for a while, I felt we were lucky.
At the same time, however, I can’t help but recognize a few body signals:
- The need to sleep more to recharge my batteries. There was a time when I could sleep for three hours and still have plenty of energy. But now I need seven to eight hours. Since I also have the Oura ring and I see changes in sleep quality depending on how much or how little I sleep, I’ve become much more attentive to this aspect. If until a few years ago I didn’t want to get much sleep because it seemed there was so much to do, I was upset at the thought of missing something, now I console myself by thinking, more wisely, like Marcel Proust, that “a man who sleeps holds around him the thread of hours, the order of years and worlds”.
- It takes longer to get the pillowcase marks off my face.
- My wrists still ache sometimes, more often than not.
- I go more often to the hairdresser, I don’t like white hair at the roots.
- It’s harder to keep the weight under control. I’ve never had more weight than I wanted. But for a few years it has become more difficult to drop two kilos. At one point, I went to the nutritionist. The lady, when she heard that my goal was to lose two kilos, suggested, not at all subtly, that I see a psychologist.
Although not necessarily encouraging, these body signs are also messages reminding me that it is important to take care of myself, my health and my well-being.
But going back to the collage of photos for my colleague’s celebration and seeing the time that has passed, many memories of people, places, events, emotions have come to mind. Some people are no more, they left life, as they say, so beautifully, in Chisinau. My memory will always keep them there though. Others stayed with me, we enjoyed a lot and went through a lot together.
Here are a few memories from those years:
- Days spent with Edward de Bono, creator of the Six Thinking Hats concept, in Bucharest, his jokes and brightly coloured socks;
- The astonishment of Michael Porter, the famous Harvard professor, when I met him at Băneasa airport with Afrodita Blasius, with whom I was then working for marketing; likewise, his humble, somewhat shy attitude, all the questions he asked us to make sure that, beyond his research, he was up to date with the latest events, with the perception from the grass roots;
- The Best Performing International Agent award that we received twice in an international network of which our firm is a part, which came with some incredible emotions;
- The interview I had with Manfred Kets de Vries, professor at Insead Business School, and the immense joy when I was accepted to the school;
- The honour of having lunch with Manfred every time I go to Paris;
- Tears of joy when the two entrepreneurs I trained, in two different years, took the top prize in the Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards project; one is from the United States, the other from Lebanon;
- The moments when I was on stage at the Athenaeum to award a school principal at the Principal of the Year Awards Gala, organized by the Association for Values in Education;
- My huge surprise when, in Hong Kong airport, I was called by someone from South Korea, a man I met a couple of years ago at a conference in Toronto; the world really is small!
- The sudden disappearance of a colleague who was also my friend, with whom I sometimes thought about different projects, who always gave me different perspectives, with an empathy I had not yet encountered;
- The immense joy I felt when I received a very good grade for my thesis for my Executive Master in Coaching and Consulting at Insead, and the confidence it gave me in the possibility of writing.
- My relentless attempts to make the firm work in Paris, at a time when everyone was in crisis; did I thank my colleagues in management for their confidence? Or perhaps they saw then that these attempts were the sort of fresh air I needed to survive in such troubled times and had the grace to leave me alone.
- Any trip to Paris – there wasn’t a time when I got there and didn’t get teary-eyed with excitement at returning to the most beautiful place in the world. That’s how it is for me, that’s how it will always be in my mind. I am one of those who, as Marcel Proust said, “go on a journey to see with their own eyes a desired city and imagine that you can taste in a reality the charm of the dream”. Reality has not disappointed my dream, I have been careful not to let it happen all these years.
- My attempts, which lasted a few years, to show my parents that I existed, that I was doing something; I realized what I was doing when, at a certain point, when I was in a top list of Romanian managers, made by a famous magazine, I went with this magazine to show them. I understood then that it was time to go further, to overcome that behaviour.
Certainly this collage of photos made me a bit nostalgic. Beyond the momentary experience though, I think that all of this and many, many more, loves and misunderstandings, successes and failures, ups and downs, have made me who I am, added to the crease in my face, my understanding of myself and the world, put color and shadow into life as I’ve built it. Such an endeavor stirs many, like looking at a photo album of your life and all the dormant butterflies suddenly scrape away.
In the meantime, I went online to look for the famous influencer again, applied a cream to give my complexion suppleness, dressed nicely and started doing what I do best: reading.”
via: Forbes.ro
