My year spent as a MacroTransient at FoAM is now over. One year of not being a student, not being an employee, not being unemployed. One year with no expectations. One year of incredibly pure freedom of action, movements and thought. One year to re-design a lifestyle, figure out tough life choices, defining a personal and professional identity. One year of careful help from FoAM to try to answer that crazy questions: “What do I want to do with my life ?”

Below is an attempt to summarize this crazy year, and maybe give you a hint of how this feels, or even give you the will to go through the same difficult but rewarding process.

After a very intense year, and a quite active travelling period in the autumn, the first thing I needed to do was to decelerate. A quite tricky process when all your standards tell you that action is the only valuable thing. I had to face the emptyness of some days, during which tiredness & procrastination were the only two words coming to my mind to define them. Anyway, a few important deep processes took place during the first months of this transiency.

One of the first actions I took when I arrived in Brussels was to sign up to an Aikido class.

After more than seven years of focusing on mind development, my body needed to catch up. I knew it would be difficult, and I was looking forward to this quiet period to take the time to start the difficult task to reconnect my body and mind.

Why Aikido to reconnect body and mind ? One of the things I also needed to start working on was my recurring panic whenever I was confronting with any somewhat violent confrontation. I therefore wanted to practice a martial art, as I though it would help me both reconnect body mind and help me deal better with violent situations. Aikido being on of the closests martial art to the “non-violent” philosophy - or at least my professor advocated so on his website, I thought it would be a good starting point.

As expected, it has been far from easy. For the first time since years, I felt completely dumb at something, like if I had no grasp on how to learn gestures. I started to learn three months after most of the students, and constantly felt holding them back with my stupid ununderstanding. Moreover, the (fake) violent situations were there, and being put to the ground more than fifty times in two hours, having to get back on my feet everytime, was far from easy in a setting were I already felt dumb. Self-esteem was having a hard time.

After a year of practice, I can feel some progress. I feel more body conscious, and I feel like I am a bit less sensitive in slightly violent situations. New students have arrived in the dojo, and they helped me find out I had learned something. I also decided to go to the training max once a week, to dilute the potential bad feelings. I feel I can progress more easily now, and I am willing to continue.

In December, I gathered all my notebooks since June 2012, when the Transiency had been proposed to me. I had carefully noted down since then every single thing I wanted to do once I would be a resident at FoAM.

So I took a whole load of post-its, and wrote down every single activity and posted them on the wall, attempting to sort them out.

After two weeks of scrutinous transcription, I ended up with a ten years amount of things to do. Problem: a Transiency is one year. Some choices were to be made. I hate choices.

Hopefully, some sweetness was here in the middle of the two hard challenges I just mentionned.

Amélie and I had been together for a few months at the beginning of this Transiency. Thanks to this new period opening in my life, we now had breakfast together every morning. We also spent the Aikido-free (on my side) and teaching-free (on her side) nights together, often doing nothing else than having a tasty (vegetarian) lunch together, and chatting.

Compared to the lifestyle I had in Paris, in which I would pile up conferences, projections and meetups on top of my full working days, I can say that Amélie really helped me discover the world of Doing Nothing. And I deeply appreciate it.

In January, I was lucky enough to receive a job offer from my Master Thesis Supervisor. He was (and is) starting a small company on the topic of artificial closed-ecosystems, a life-support system which uses living organisms to filter water, cycle nutrients and transform carbon dioxide back into oxygen. Such a system is essential for long travels in space, as we cannot carry everything we need to survive several month in space if we single-use them. Such tehcnologies are not only relevant to space though, they are also relevant to sustainability, as they can lead to very efficient pollution control and recycling technologies.

He proposed me to join in as the first employee of the structure, starting from March.

Even though the Transiency work had not been easy so far, I could not think about stoppping so early. I had a lot of deep personal work to do, probably way more that what I envisioned in the first place, and I would definitely not even be started with most of it by March. I had to say now.

I understood in this experience how hard it can be to say no to an offer when you do not know exactly how to phrase what you would do instead, and you can only intuitively feel it is very important.

Hopefully, my Master Thesis Supervisor did not take it the wrong way, and offered me the job again last August. But more on that later.

FoAM Brussels being a temple of cooking, I spent some time trying a few recipes, and cooking lunch occasionally to the FoAM team.

In addition to reducing my reliance on industrial food, it also helped me decelerating & reconnecting body & mind.

In September 2013, Cocky Eek from FoAM Amsterdam proposed me to come as a guest lecturer in her Tactile Research Lab, a class she is teaching to ArtScience Students from the Royal Academy of Arts in Den Haag for several years now.

I felt very honored to be proposed to co-teach in such an environment, and was very happy with this experience. We helped a small group of students try to figure out how they could integrate their artpiece in long time frames, make them “sustainable” in the deep initial sense of this word.

I was confronted their with highly creative students, and a complete new way of teaching. This way of teaching is way more personal, intricated with the personality & life trajectories of these students.

I wish I could bring part of this way of teaching to my engineering school, as I think it would help have engineers concerned with society, conscious of their personal issues, and more able to question the myths and taboos of the society they live in.

One of the initial objectives of this year was also to learn practical know-hows to include more DIY in my daily life.

FoAM Brussels gave me a “carte blanche” for a garden on their small balcony. I went to purchase seeds to the marvelous http://www.bio-logiques.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=175:fraternites-ouvrieres-a-mouscron&catid=100&Itemid=518|Fraternités Ouvrières garden, and started some seedlings. Which died when I travelled - see below. I started again some seedlings, which died again. A few lived through my periodic travels, and managed to give some fruits - mainly red radishes, carrots and tomatoes - both yellow and red.

This experiment in itself gave me an idea of how hard it is to rely on my own food production, and how devoted and sedentary I had to be. Which made me re-think completely the self-sufficient hypothesis.

After decelerating, and hitting in different ways the reality wall, I needed to plant seeds of what a post-Transiency life could be. I was lucky, it was Spring, a good period to plant seeds.

I needed to feel inspired, and learn from others' experiments. So I picked up to experiment-based books from my reading list: