A nice question to ask yourself at regular times.

I retired from Accenture and from corporate life 20 month’s ago. I was 57 and gave up all the money I could still have earned for a jump in the void. Since I was 50 I knew I would be doing this one day, jump into White Space and create my own Construct; a dimension-less, empty white arena where I could learn new knowledge about the World and about Life. The best decision of my Life!

I left office on a Friday evening at the end of September, it had still been a busy week; I closed my computer and returned it, together with my telephone to the IT desk. I left my badge behind at the reception. While walking down the stairs and taking the road for metro, I lay of my business armour and took of the clothes going with my responsibilities. My career evaporated in thin air. I knew I would not come back to this Old Life.

I worked for great and remarkable companies. I travelled the world and I met thousands of astonishing people of which some became close friends. Together we achieved extraordinary successes and ugly failures, we laughed and we cried. I became part of an incredible story, growing young leaders in a free and democratic Central Europe. I was good in what I was doing and I still feel grateful for the rewards I received, but I realised this was not my true self! Something I started to feel at 50, with the disappearance of Michael and the arrival of Patrik in our Life. 

You think you can prepare for a New Life like this; I had many plans of what I wanted to do; gardening, painting, reading books or walking; I believed I was ready. There was however one thing I was was not conscious of and for which I was not prepared: I was completely naked, stripped of everything I had accumulated over the past years.

And still, this was the best thing I could do at this given moment in my Life.

Good things happen when you smile or when you’re naked. 

I met Alex Honnold on his Free Solo Climb of El Capitain, the biggest Athletic Performance of all times. Expanding his comfort zone in a minute by minute choreography across the wall, every move designed and thought through, the smallest mistake leading to his death. The only route to safety is so much more focus, a relentless disciplining of body and mind and above all radical truthfulness with yourself. You get it right or you die. Excellence, Perfection and Performance; achieving your full potential, no compromises; eliminating uncertainty and fear. A Life without ropes, vivid and significant. A Life with your true self.

I met Werner Wannaerts, a Belgian artist, on the Munich exposition of another incredible painter, Raoul De Keyser. Art is an expression of the Soul, and can like beauty never be judged with the Mind. Both helped me in removing the barriers I still had between my Mind, in which I most live, my Heart and my Soul. I was challenged by their Freedom of Thought and Freedom of Expression, not limited by any convention or outside control; they just perform a life with their true self.

I realised I was free, free of any obligation (except one), free of any expectation, free of any assumption, beyond belief! My only obligation left was to bring Patrik to adulthood. Can you imagine what potential that brings to your life? Not necessarily a productive or an economic potential, but definitively a creative potential.    

What clothes should I wear on my Free Solo? It became a slow search, a design thinking exercise. Conducting a research through my Life to develop an understanding of my True Self. Combine all my research and observe where I would fulfil my purpose. My research took me back 40 years, to the year 1976, the year I spent my holidays in Taize (France), a Christian community. I was spiritual and religious as a teenager, searching true meaning for my Life; even in such a way that coming out of grammar school, I studied Philosophy, but only one year because as a young guy, I got bored with Plato. As a good son to my parents, who were entrepreneurs, I swapped for Economics and Accounting, and the rest of that story you can read in my curriculum vitae. I tell this because I needed to go back to that part of my life to find the connection point for my future self on this Earth.

I ideated eleven (11) personal and creative life projects and I am prototyping and testing them with myself, with my family and friends and especially with my daughter Rosalie, a true millennial. 

You want to know what I am working on?

That is the purpose of this blog. Introduce you to my projects and let you become a participant in my Life.