The adventurous manager

Simple life and little girl

I've noticed something interesting: the older I get, the less people around me ask me what my passion in life is. I suppose it's logical, when you're young, you have the future ahead of you, an infinite number of possible professional careers, all the time in the world to make a living from your passions. But when, like me, you're past forty, you're supposed to have chosen your path a long time ago, so people assume that you've either succeeded in working in what you're passionate about in the first place, or that you've long since failed. In either case, asking someone my age what their "passion" in life is is less interesting than asking a young adult with a bright future.

For me, my passion has always been the same: I've always loved the unknown, long journeys to discover new landscapes, reading books that were previously unknown to me, discovering new mathematical notions, and this thirst for discovery has always encouraged me to explore such and such subjects. I wanted to be an explorer, or an archaeologist, and for a while, I did everything I could to achieve this, but as I passed my teenage years, my dreams took a back seat, I pursued higher studies that seemed useful from a professional point of view, and I ended up working for a large telephone company as an executive.

You'll probably tell me that it's a good thing, that my salary is high, that my job is moderately interesting, which, in the corporate world, is the equivalent of saying that it's an exciting job, and that, as long as I do my job well, it will ensure me and my future family a secure and comfortable future. It's true, it's all true in what you've said, it's what everyone tells me, and it's what I've come to tell myself too. I stayed with this company for twenty-two years, saved for a golden retirement, dedicated my life to this job, and unfortunately for me, I didn't enjoy life.

Almost no friendships, not to mention romantic relationships, no personal projects, no time to devote to myself, to have fun, to enjoy myself... I lived a monotonous and uninteresting life, and I often regretted it.

But that changed as I left the office at 6.11pm. On paper, I was supposed to finish at 6.00 p.m., but I quickly learned that, in order to make myself look good in the eyes of colleagues and superiors, it was common practice to stay an extra ten minutes or so, in order to prove to anyone who would notice our seriousness and desire to work. I have to confess that in over twenty years of my career, I've never actually worked past 5:30 p.m., and I'm pretty sure that my colleagues haven't either - we used to sit like idiots for almost three quarters of an hour, pretending to work, thanks to this, I've become a professional origami player, a tic-tac-toe genius and, my proudest achievement, a champion at throwing garbage into the communal dustbin, placed exactly six meters and twenty-two centimeters from my desk, and yes, I took the time to measure the distance, I had time to kill.

As I was leaving the office after yet another day's work, I witnessed a scene that would change my life forever: a little girl, who couldn't have been more than five years old, was walking with her father on the sidewalk in front of me. As I began to move aside to give them room to pass, the little girl dropped her teddy bear, which she was holding in her right hand, and it ended up on the road, some 30 centimeters from the sidewalk. The child then took a few steps out into the road to pick up her teddy bear, but the father, who was on the phone, didn't notice her or the bus that was hurtling towards her at around 40 kilometers an hour. I don't know why or how, but I'm able to grab the child by the hips and throw her onto the sidewalk, I remember the sound of a horn, a scream, perhaps my own, and then nothing.

Complete darkness.

Silence.