A word from the one behind your screen
On one side this project is groundwork for my studies, and on the other my studies are groundwork for this trip.
This piece was written in French. It is here in the original.
What made me who I am today
At school I took economics, maths and geopolitics, but really I would have liked to take every subject there was. Not to pile things on — just because everything interests me. And because I did not have to revise much, it left room for a thousand other things.
First, a great deal of sport, in volume and in variety, which I have come to connect more and more to a certain connection with the living world — that is, to myself, to other people and to nature:
- Skiing
- Climbing
- Trail running
- Road cycling
- Running
- Dance (letting go of control)
- Karate (self-control)
- Downhill mountain biking
- Hiking
- Archery
- …
The same goes for writing — essays, poems, songs, reflections, and then the skeletons of novels (one day I may pick up the pen again and finish them). In the end that is really where my thoughts took shape.
The long philosophical conversations, with my teacher or with certain friends, were another way of testing my ideas against daily life.
And then other kinds of art: photography has fascinated me for years, drawing is with me every day, and so are editing and video.
The school web TV was a bridge between several of those interests and really opened the way towards interviews and the work of a journalist — and it let me meet and get to know some remarkable people.
That said, I think few things take up more room in me than music. At school you would have had better than an even chance of finding me in headphones, and today, spend a day with me and you have no chance at all of not hearing music. All of it, from classical to hard metal, by way of Dutch music, never forgetting pop, French songs and sometimes even rap.
Wanting to learn everything, I also took up drums. But sometimes you have to choose, because:
“Try to do too much and you end up doing nothing at all”
Flavio WTranslated from the French
My body could not take all of it, on top of injuries and nights of three or four hours, so recently I had to come back to what matters, keeping the same drive: to learn everything and pass it on.
And in the end, last year I had to come back to essentials there too. I had chosen to take a gap year from January, but I was also preparing the entrance exams for Sciences Po and considering a preparatory class. It did not fit: I would come back from this trip and the time would vanish under the workload. But nobody can take this project from me — my project, so I decided this would not be a gap-year trip. This journey to West Africa is the start of a long road. Which is why, from next year, I intend to develop Objectif Naturel alongside my studies.
A preparatory class was not an option, so the degree opened its arms: maths, sociology, everything I like.
With a workload that is not excessive, neither one will crowd out the other. On one side this project is groundwork for my studies, and on the other my studies are groundwork for this trip.
So the degree is a first step, and it may take me all the way to a doctorate.
But why leave now? It is simple: I do not want to keep the set rhythm of studying without ever stepping out of that bubble to see the whole picture. So if I want my studies to fit me, I have to start by fitting myself.
What I believe
Questions about how we live together sit at the centre of our lives, and I chose to grow up aware of them. Too involved not to worry, and never involved enough to move anything.
And yet…
That is what I believed, anyway. I was the product of a society that made me powerless, unable to see tomorrow's world being born. But I could not give up on today's world, or feel sorry for myself in the shadow while the light was shining all around. I simply had to agree to see it at last, and I never gave up.
If capitalism had seemed to me to replace the snow of my mountains, it was because I had not yet learnt how to look. To live, seeing is not enough; you have to choose to go past the shop front. So I stopped walking past the gilded windows, I opened the door, went past the overexploitation, stepped over the disinformation and left the overconsumption behind. There I was, in the back room: it was no longer glittering, it was luminous; it was no longer human, it was alive.
Getting to what matters
And then I understood. To live, I had to stop living above the living world, stop merely surviving. From then on I looked the world in the face and the day was breaking. I no longer saw buildings, I looked at stretches of earth; markets became a bridge to the rest of the living world, and nature the purest connection to life. Choosing to look did not make the problems go away.
In the end I came to be sure that to change things I first have to accept them, because…
My name is Flavio, I am 18 and I want to see things differently. I have always worked hard and done a lot of sport, and that is no longer enough to feel like I am living, so before I start working life “I am going away to learn differently.”
I have always wanted to discover everything and to learn fast. But it is no longer about succeeding; it is about understanding, about connection — with other people, with myself, and above all with the rest of the living world. I cannot predict what it will bring me, but I am sure of two things. I want to share what this experience teaches me, both to deepen my own learning and to pass on ways of connecting to the living world. And this:
“If I leave tomorrow, I will certainly come back a different person.”
Flavio WTranslated from the French
