Why I left.

Aix-en-Provence, 24 June 2016

Six months after coming home, I feel the need to explain the reasons behind this round-the-world project. It's a story I've told plenty of times already, but writing it down now does me good — it puts me back in the context and reminds me why I'm living the way I've chosen to live.

That urge to leave really arrived at a point when I was asking myself a lot of questions about what meaning to give my life. I'd had a well-paid job for sixteen years, I lived in a beautiful part of the world (Aix-en-Provence), and yet I was uncomfortable in my own skin, unsatisfied... "You can never have too much of a good thing", supposedly — but I felt something was off, a problem that no amount of high-tech gadgets, branded clothes and other possessions was fixing... Quite the opposite....

Sabbati horribilis

My salvation came out of a particularly hard week. In early September 2013, one after the other: my girlfriend at the time left me, I had a car accident, and to top it all off I was less and less happy at work... that last point wasn't really a surprise; I'd been in the role for a little over a year and, honestly, I hadn't enjoyed it from the start. Why did I stay? I must have thought it was worth it, to hold on to the comfort I'd settled into and imagined was enviable. But at that stage of my life, even practising my passion — salsa — wasn't making up for the rest.

So from that particular week, while I consider that I hit bottom, I take away nothing but positives, because it genuinely let me mark a break. Things had to change; I was finally aware of that now, even if I still had absolutely no idea what to do.

Discovering philosophy

That's when a colleague at the office passed me a collection published by Psychologies magazine, containing summaries of the ideas of the great philosophers: Plato, Epicurus, Seneca, Sartre....

I still don't know why Fred passed me that little book, but it was well judged. Being immersed in the world of philosophy did me an incredible amount of good. I still can't explain to myself how I hadn't clicked with the subject at school. Never mind — I imagine I simply wasn't ready.

I followed the collection's recommendations and bought a number of books, among them Seneca's Letters to Lucilius. That book did me a world of good.... You don't always realise how far from new the questions we ask ourselves and all our doubts really are, and above all how humanity has already contained remarkable people who can still help us feel better today. I genuinely recommend reading it to anyone in a low state who isn't satisfied with their situation... With one reservation, though: Seneca held a view of suicide that I don't share and that owed a great deal to the difficult era he lived in, so I kept a critical eye on some of his ideas. But otherwise: wow! Reading that book is concretely one of the things that helped me climb out of the depressive state I was in in September 2013.

Pedestrian mode activated!

After the car accident I'd had, I'd started very early on the process of buying a new vehicle. There were no injuries, but my car was still a write-off. Well — I stopped that process at the last moment.

After searching for and finding the new car of my dreams, and after signing the papers, I really didn't feel good. Instead of the excitement that acquiring the vehicle of my choice was supposed to produce, I felt distinctly uneasy. So I used my cooling-off period, and the moment I posted the letter cancelling the purchase I felt genuine relief. So I was pleased, but I didn't really understand what was happening to me.

I was starting to realise at that point, all the same, that my recovery wasn't going to come through buying things. It was definitely time for me to start putting being ahead of having.

Not just reading "the world", but travelling it too

My father always pushed my sisters and me to read Le Monde. He barely misses an issue, but it had never really been my cup of tea and I'd always looked at the copies lying around the house with complete indifference :-D . I started reading it daily, from the moment I had time to kill on public transport. I came to enjoy that morning interlude. What I like most in that kind of paper is the international section, but also the frequent first-hand accounts you find there of people living sometimes so far from me, in situations so different from mine, and yet whom I could understand — or even find so close to me once I'd finished the article. Say what you like, but reading those stories, being exposed to the context, clearly does more for understanding and empathy than ten seconds on a television news bulletin. So I read those long pieces, describing situations that were often hard, and I felt connected to those human beings so far from me physically. It reinforced me in that idea, in that feeling, that we're all in the same boat: there aren't several races, there's only one and it's the human race.... It stops being about ethnic groups, or the inhabitants of countries, and becomes about individuals, each with their own story and all of them aspiring to happiness. So I was trying to understand these strangers and to know the context they live in.

Out of that was born an irresistible urge to travel. I wanted to test the hypothesis I believed in: that we're all the same and, at the same time, all unique. I wanted to reconnect with the humanity I was rediscovering through the philosophical works I was reading. I wanted to become a citizen of the world :-) !