That Instant That Won’t Stop (lyrics and making up)

First let me introduce Yvon who inspired this. Yvon Françoise aka YvonF, is a French creator of spontaneous, modern and uninhibited electronic music. You can find most of his creations in SoundCloud. Go find him there with open mind, that’s worth listening.

When I got this track from Yvon, I was trapped in the loops of these disturbing sounds. I firstly thought of eternity as a succession of repetitive instants – you know, these loops that we are seeking for every day to escape from modern “instant life style”. Then I got that it is more about… a never-ending instant.
While looking for examples in our day-to-day life of these kind of instants, shall they exist, I just witnessed a car accident.

This is what this song is about: the traumatic instants of our life that won’t leave us, as they always come back, never really leave you and are so long when you go through them again.

That Instant That Won’t Stop
- by Yvon Françoise (music, arrangements, production) and Eric-Marie Picard (lyrics, bass, voices)

What I was there for
And what were they doing there too
In that instant that none of us would have expected to be?

That instant that won’t stop

Awaken dream
Or, consciously sleeping
It happened once, but it’s always here, inside
This never-ending sustain

Here it comes again

That was fast. That was slow.
The crumpling of metal. The acrid smell of burned tyre. The whistling of air bag. The seep of hot water. The “clock” of seat belt’s locker. The hair floating. People shouting.

Get out! Get out!

I cannot get rid of it!
I just went through it and it sticks to me…

What I was there for
And why were they there too
In that instant that none of us would have expected to be?

That instant that won’t stop.

  This work (recording, music and text) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

What Kind Of Tree Are You ?

When I want to think or recover, I sit in my garden under tall trees that have this particularity of permanently loosing leaves and generating new ones. They are always green and the ground at their foot is brown. As if they were indecisive deciduous trees constantly hesitating between autumn and spring.

In the region they live, sun is strong, rain is quite rare and soil is hard. The repartition of their thick leaves is optimized to catch the maximum of energy. With their dense foliage, they protect the soil from being burned, preserving a low yet sufficient humidity, and they constantly enrich the humus with their own leaves.

Is it mimicry that I do feel the same constant renewal ; a subtly mix of reevaluation, awakening, revitalization and rebirth ? Such as these trees, I don’t hesitate to recycle my knowledge, my thoughts, as per fertilizer for my personal development. I attempt to catch only the most valuable information to me – from documents, music, movies, communities and individuals, whether around me or on the Internet. Some will name that openness, synthesis or analytical skills. While for me, feeding my mind with pure energy and fresh water is vital. But it is not the most important.

The balance between collected information, reflection and generated wealth to proceed further, is the point. The true place in the ecosystem for biologists. The barycenter, for mathematicians. That’s the lesson these trees are reminding me of everyday.

Now, that’s me. That’s my environment. Plenty of tree species exist and have developed different and successful strategies to find this balance within their own growing environment.

What kind of tree are you ?

Expatriation : story of a change

Preparing a relocation to another country and getting established there, are generally mainly considered as a matter of organization – personal involvement, time and money in other words. It’s also commonly admitted that once we are set up, then starts the tricky part of expatriation. I would like to illustrate through my own experience that the change actually starts at the very moment we are considering the relocation as a realistic opportunity, and that managing this change is a long-term process that should be wisely prepared.

It’s now one year I left Paris for a kibbutz in northern Israel, literally “at” the frontier with Lebanon. No need to say that there is a linguistic, cultural and environmental gap. Now, this move has been prepared several years before on both personal and professional perspectives. Besides practical aspects of this expatriation, I had a lot of interrogations, doubts, prejudices and dreams that generated an impressive amount of exchanges with my relatives, friends and colleagues. I remember even some short discussions with complete strangers, which illustrates if needed, how deep this change is. Think about it, how many times have you discussed with strangers about something that personal and emotional  ?

With my wife, we have discussed all aspects of this project together and made each related decision as a couple. We have done it quite naturally as we share and exchange a lot. But I realized after all that it was crucial that both pair and individual were respected : for our personal development, enrichment, well-being and couple balance. This expatriation then simply made sense, as part of our “life together” project. Our transparent, respectful and fluid communication became the main pillar of this change, and allowed us to focus on more inside interrogations.
During our own reflection phase, prior to definitive decision, we were not hiding our intentions to our kids. That would have generated or encouraged anxiety or frustration. Nevertheless, such as every parent willing to preserve their kids from adult concerns, we were not discussing about it in their presence. Which means that our children were informed with parsimony and mainly unconsciously.
When we were certain of our decision, we were ready to expose it to our young kids. Children are much more sensitive and attentive that we would like to think. I was astonished by their level of understanding. They actually had already started handling their own change, based on what they had felt and heard. My 5 years old son was already missing his friends : amazing how he was projecting himself through this change !

If we have naturally informed our children, sharing our project with others required more attention and control. We did the best as we could to make others aware enough of our intentions, motivations and progress, so that they positively contributed to our project. And we wanted this to happen while we still were in a safe place, surrounded by people that care for us or, at least, were familiar to us. It was a change for them too, of course. And we didn’t want to introduce uncertainty in this safe environment in which we were growing (i.e. positively changing).

Time for the physical move had not come yet that we had accomplished to my eyes, the most important part of our change. What gave us self-confidence, deep trust in our future, what ensured a sustainable support from our original environment. It ensured for us too that this experience would be anyway positive. Whatever the issue of this expatriation, this change would never be lived as a failure.