B Leaders For Change event and many other things
Travelled by Eurostar to Amsterdam on Wednesday 22nd for the B For Good Leaders event there. First evening involved a wonderful dinner at the Royal Tropical Institute, where I met a bunch of new people – always a good test.
The following evening, having not booked one of the optional dinners (because the ones I was most interested were already fully booked) I trusted to fortune. Then, out of the blue, Sabine Oberhuber, a longstanding friend, got in touch and invited me out to dinner at an Indonesian restaurant in the Hotel Jakarta. Glorious. Five hours later, we were still talking.
That was the day, too, when I did the plenary session alongside Rutger Bregman. Ann odd format, where Rutger and I sat with out backs to the audience, with cameras ahead of us projecting our images onto the screen, while we faced our “anchor”, Isabelle Grosmaître.
Still, the feedback afterwards was very positive. A key question came to me early on, when Isabelle asked whether there had been a moment after which my path was set. I replied that I could tell stories about epiphanies at age 7 or 11, but that the real shaping factor had been a series of metamorphic moments in my working life, which seem to come along every 5-6 years. And, I said, I’m going through one at the moment, like a caterpillar wandering into a chrysalis. Happily, people took that very much in the right spirit – or at least the many ones who came up later to engage.
Probably the session highlights for me, though, were in the building’s basement, the Wisdom Keepers area – curated by Kiva. The Wisdom Keepers taking part were Cheryl Angel (Lakota Elder), Carola Esparza (Mapuche tradition, Chile), Rutendo Ngara (South Africa), Toroa Aperahama (New Zealand) and peace-builder Scilla Elworthy (UK). The two sessions I got to see, with Rutendo and Scilla, were outstanding.
Overall, a wonderful trip, though somewhat scrambled by Eurostar on the way back late last night. Our train was delayed by two-and-a-half hours, crawling at many points in the journey, with some noisy passengers (thank heavens for noise-cancelling headphones) but at least I got to peer into some interesting hedgerows.
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