The panel of things which caught my attention was quite wide actually.
One was about how being out of our home town, home country gives us a new (to us) feedback once we come back. Maybe I’m more critical because I’m French but it sounds to me that French parents can sound exasperated when they are with their kids. When I was first exposed to US parents, I would just wonder why US parents would “sugar-coat” their kids with day-long chants of “awesome”, “you’re the best”, “champion” whatever… but I end up feeling that it’s better this way than expecting continuously 5 year-old kids to make mistakes before they are belittled or categorized as failures. Seriously, where’s the love.
One example : “What have you done with this xxx I already told you 1000 times to do it like this and that …” Generally xxx is quite complicated for that age and maybe the elder sibling can do it, but probably you need to cut some slack to the younger kid…
Then we spent time on the beach. I must say that something - quite unexpected maybe 2-3 years ago - happened.
I’ve been losing weight as a result of tagging along with the lunches and diners at home. Mathurin, Eugénie and Caroline are today gluten-free, healthy vegans. I’m not but we don’t cook separately.
Nothing exceptional with my body mass index, besides that it was way over where it should have been in the first place. So I’ve lost weight and lost weight and here I am playing with my wedding ring. It’s quite loose so the fact that I might lose it in the sea crossed my mind. Unfortunately that’s exactly what happened maybe one day or two after I thought about it.
There might be something interesting to explore between rational thoughts and habit, because despite my rational thinking, I did not take action to break my habit of carrying my wedding ring.
I was there, in the sea and there were a lot of waves so I tried to stabilize myself in the water, some “reflex” arm movements and there I felt that my ring had left my hand.
I dove, tried to see something in-between those seaweeds and everything. I must say that I saw something twinkle so I think that was my ring saying goodbye.
Of course, after being so bad about my rational thoughts, I immediately rationalized about the probabilities to find my ring in the sea and the following days I tried not to spend time looking for the ring. As a rational use of my time, it was better to spend it with my wife and my kids rather than looking for an object which symbolizes the actual wedding, marriage etc…
But I was a little bit sad about losing this ring which we had made in 2000 - so that would be 14 years ago. It was super simple and engraved inside with “CAROLINE TAKAYA 2000”. So if you happen to find it in the sea on that beach in Corsica in France, well you know that I’m interested in it.
However once we got back to my wife’s family home, my mother in-law digged into the family’s rings and came out with this incredible coincidence : I am now the custodian of the wedding ring of Mathurin Bellanger and Blanche Eugénie Sauleau. It fits me perfectly and it’s dated January the 7th, 1902. So it’s a 1902 ring, just a century before our son Mathurin was born.
I say that I’m the custodian because I will certainly release that custody to Mathurin himself in due time.
Mathurin is a first name which runs in the family, with three successive generations of Mathurins at one point one century ago. We did not know that the Eugénie first-name was in the family too, we saw that when my mother-in-law made a family-tree. We like to pass things through generations.
So let’s keep this rational momentum and look into an interesting topic : what’s the place of being gluten-free, healthy vegans in today’s society ?
There seem to be some interesting trends to understand : how come our modern society is ageing and “graying” while our food industry is transforming our plate for the main benefit of their economic profitability ?
Is our modern society really ageing ? Or are we merely extending our life expectancy while at the same time reducing our healthy years on total life span ratio ?
Cheers, Takaya