Our feet reveal how we walk through life!!!

The upper part of my feet shows strength, revealing my dynamic action-prone character. The middle part is flat, signalling that I do not retain much of the intensity of the events. The heels are not solid at all, revealing a weak anchorage into stability, receptiveness and passivity. I have never been able to be a couch potato, and never understand how people could sit for hours at cafés without being nailed to their chairs.

I have never been able to station in any place for long. I find a lot of people too passive, but I have never questioned myself for having a deficiency in passivity. Perspectives!

According to the massager Marilyn, too much into action could reduce one’s receptiveness. She said I may have an intense life, but if I turn each chapter too quickly, I would not be able to live fully of each intense emotion – positive or negative. It is important to strike a balance between the time to act and the time to feel.

I admit. I surf through emotions of big and small events like surfers on waves, with the unconscious wish of not being swallowed by the waves. Happy moments were exciting but fleeting. During sad moments I tried my best to switch off emotionally.

Marilyn said my heels give a feel of soggy earth, which provokes a vicious cycle in which I feel less prone to anchor on my uncomfortable heels. She tried to help me evoke past events which might have forged the way I walk through life.

I told her about my childhood in the context of the imminent Vietnam war, then moving to join the Hong Kong family and the unwholesome family saga. I went to Aix for French studies, and stayed on for some years. Despite the reputed Provence beauty, I have never felt home in Aix. Some years later I landed in Lausanne. For the first time, my heart felt home amid the peace of mountains and lakes. But the question keeps haunting my mind, where is the next move?

Marilyn draws my awareness to the fact that the warring Vietnam and the transitory Hong Kong belong to the past. I might have all the valid reasons to jump over the unstable situations without anchoring my feet in those days, but now the situation has changed. I am no more a child depending on the family, and I am living in the safest country on earth –Switzerland! I have never seen things from this perspective.

Am I just repeating my robotic vagabonding and avoiding anchorage out of old fears?

I have always prided myself for my quality of moving forward, of strong adaptation; I thought I was seeking out adventures and it was my choice to be an eternal vagabond. Now I am not so sure. Is it a conscious choice to seek out excitements in the new landscape? Or is it a compulsory pattern of fearing emotional entanglements and deceptions?

Will I be able to call it home from where I am? HOME! It is such a basic thing taken for granted by many, and such an impossible luxury in my eyes!

This is an excerpt from the chapter “Intelligence” from the series of personal development books “Ecoute Ton Corps” by Lise Bourbeau in Quebec.

This excerpt will set the right tone to my new life chapter as I embark onto my first day off the professional highway.

Since 1996 and for over 10 years, my professional life has been on the fast track, with precise destinations, itineraries and agendas. A lot of kilometres, a lot of cities, a lot of faces, a lot of actions, and a relatively high profile. Good fun and good material gains too!

The professional highway comes to an end: I start treading on unpaved trails, no pre-defined destinations, with highly probable detours, an open agenda to greet surprises, and an open heart to discover new experiences! To learn! To be more flexible and receptive and to live closer to simple intelligence instead of tumultuous intellect!

Anguished and impatient? a bit. A lot of excitements for the unknown! Like plunging into a waterfall of no return!

The Bangladeshi economist Yunus, through the Grameen Bank he founded, pioneered micro-credits in Bangladesh in the 1970s, providing small business loans to poor people without collateral. Millions of people benefiting from the small loans have worked out of poverty through their own development.

According to a report from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yunus’s first loan was pocket money – $27 to a group of 42 women – and his next loans were $100 and $200, amounts he borrowed from a local bank, with himself as the guarantor. He set up Grameen Bank in 1983, and since then he has guided the bank’s development and led banks and governments outside Bangladesh in applying micro-lending principles in their own countries and communities.

He proves that he can turn his vision into reality, and that by living close to the people and being “sur le terrain”.

The official press release of The Nobel Foundation announcing the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006 states: “Lasting peace cannot be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty.” Yunus’s long-term vision is to eliminate poverty in the world. Although the Foundation considers that this vision cannot be realised by means of micro-credit alone, micro-credit can play a major part in it.

There is a sublime quote from Yunus: “One day our grandchildren will go to museums to see what poverty was like.” What a bold and compassionate vision! What a beautiful soul!

As I am going through a phase with intense interest on an inward journey of self discovery, the blog of Steve Pavlina would be what I consider as the most inspiring. The blog focuses on, as its headline sums it up smartly, personal development for smart people.

The author has a no-fuss and focused writing style, easy to read, and quick to get to the points. And the content is so rich that I have yet to explore every chapter. I randomly click on one chapter – how to discover your life purpose in 20 minutes -with the pre-judgement that the title is too naive and simplistic for such a profound subject matter. But I was delightfully surprised how the author gets around complex matters in a smart and neat way.

One thing I really appreciate about the blog of Steve Pavlina is the balance of the personal and the non-personal. The author writes for an audience, and in every line of his blog he is conscious of the existence of the person reading his blog. He writes, he dialogues, he shares. It is not a narcissistic monologue of “how smart I am”.

Some of the fascinating chapters include:

Level of consciousness

The Law of Attraction

Living Congruently

The blog indeed opens up to a new level of consciousness.

100 days since my Blanc left. I dreamt of him last night, he was busy sniffing everywhere and did not have the mood to give me a kiss.

Blanc was a very handsome Siberian husky who turned heads in the street. He enjoyed all fine things of life — chocolate, foie gras (he skipped the toast), walks, soft sofas, tender voices, and some less fine things of life — cowdungs and the bottoms of female dogs. Blanc lived 16 years and 8 months. It was an exceptionally long life for a husky, but too short for all the love, the food and the journeys that I would like to share with him.

100 days afterwards, and years to come, the tenderness Blanc brought to my life will stay on.

The blog search takes us to blogs of many individuals expressing their opinions about many pearls, while the google search takes us to authoritative sites such as American Museum of Natuaral History, which offers more reliable information on pearls.

Other prominent pearl sites include Nova also give accurate information on pearls.

A beautiful autumn month, with leaves turning brown and vines turning fiercely red under the autumn sun.

2006 october feels like a sort of going back to school, with my first classes on how to join the blogosphere and becoming a villager in this virtual community without geographical constraints.

I find myself on a threshold — an opening up to new possibilities beyond the life I have known so far.