Hop Skip People are people who serve as a bridge for contact between different corners; People in the middle who make the jump from one world to another. I've always wanted to make that my business. So here I am in post-confinement Paris thinking about writing what it was like for a couple of months - empty, with half of the two million people in the city center gone to their country homes - and now, without tourists there's something about what I do and want to be doing that is so much more relevant than strictly checking off boxes.
Imagine the Tuileries Gardens of the Louvre in June with more birds than people. This is what it was like when my six year-old son and I sat outside the Arc de Triumph du Carousel and ate our Korean picnic last week. I still know the stories of the history of France, but I haven't had the stomach to tell them to my kid or just anyone because what's more relevant now is the current state of the world. The streets are full of people speaking publicly with a vocabulary that comes out of necessity. There are random acts and natural emotions. We may have inherited the infrastructure, but we also must be able to imagine our part in it. How we connect and what we will contribute. I remind myself every place I go that I want to leave it a little better than when I arrived. What that means in action right now is much more important that how it reads as words.
As we head out of (into?) what they call, the "New Order" here in Paris, we are reminded of the lessons of the swami. That's right, the swami.
This is from my ISHTA teacher, Claude Bride, whose teachings kept my head and body in order when we couldn't leave the home. The swami says, "In life, what you should do, you will do. What is not necessary, you will stop. What you cannot do, you won’t do." That about sums up what must be happening for all of us in our hearts and minds right now.
Travel is something we all look forward to, but I have always been in it for discovery and adventure. Yes, there is an aspect of relaxation to attend to in the midst of our busy or stressful lives, but travel to me has always been the best kind of education. The way we see it, where there is tourism there is education. Hop Skip People do the most to educate us on the streets. There is no better way to engage than to have a Hop Skip Person around. We call them Streetrunners. A Streetrunner exposes us and interposes us; they take us around all of the neighborhoods to find the spots and see the people walking on the streets with us. So while tourism tanked in Paris and everywhere around the world, and the need is even greater for us to understand and experience people where they live, enter Streetrunning.
To uncover the sagas of fundamental function and mind creation so that we can move forward.