I went to a new bakery today. It had opened recently and our friend Fa told us how good their bread was. It turns out, she was right, it's the best bread in town. The owner is German, had one day decided to go on a pilgrimage to Sant Iago, passed by Le Puy and never returned to her homecountry. She speaks impeccable French, so she must have settled here and years later, this bakery was for sale, and now she's selling the best bread in town right at the foot of the cathedral. This was our second visit, the owner is cheerful, we buy some more bread and a coffee, the space is minimalistic, a stylish young woman is reading a book to my right, as an older lady comes through the door. She is small, has a colorful elegant blazer and black boots with metal ornaments, just the right amount to be playful and fresh. Her nose is imposing and could just as well be printed on an old roman coin from the region, big piercing blue eyes are looking for contact and commanding attention. She orders three slices of bread. With olives. With walnuts. And one made of rye. The owner is starting to package them: "No no no, just put them on a platter. I'll taste them here and take some tea and sit over there by the window". She makes me smile because she makes me think of my friend J. "I love bread!", she says with evident joy in her eyes. Yep, just like J! I smile back and tell the owner that I would have done the same if I had known that one could order slices here! The lady comes over and asks me if I'm from here. "Yes", I say, "how is the walnut bread?" "Delicious, delicious, but tell me young man, do you know what *boulangerie engagee* means?" She speaks clearly, all sounds neatly pronounced and with that care for playful nuance that old people carried over from the past where language was more than grunting and memes. "I don't know I must admit, this shop is still very new and it's our second time!", "New is relative", she says, "I remember coming here 50 years ago. It was already a bakery then!" I offer to inquire about the description of this shop but she just waves her hand: "I'll ask, don't worry", makes her way through the numerous clients dropping in one after the other while being attracted by the two large vaulted windows and makes the owner explain to all of us that it means the bread here is carefully chosen to be organic and full grain, as healthy as possible with as many fibers as possible. Recently I have read an article saying that roughly 30% of people feel like leading a happy life, another 30% a meaningful one and about 15% an exciting one. Simplifying alot this translates to a focus on friends & family, dedicating long parts of life to a continuously exercised activity or chasing newness and change. 2% report of doing all three. I have always felt like leaning towards excitement. Being in one place for more than a year makes me anxious, I don't care about family and friends have not been a concern for most of my life. While I felt good about myself, I was also deeply unsatisfied and anxious. Now I'm once again at a moment where decisions in these dimensions have to be made and I'm not so sure anymore in which category I belong. These last three years I have been living in a small and pittoresque town and for the first time made enough friendships to have a good laugh everytime I go out of the house and know a couple of houses and gardens of various friends. While I'm not really close to anyone, I still get the feeling of belonging. I have a number of what I consider good friends strewn throughout the world with technology binding us together quite well and the possibility for rare but meaningful common activities. And finally I have a routine, simple, motivating tasks that I take great care of performing and which give me the feeling that I'm building up a future while enjoying the moments that I dedicate to each of them. All in all, it's a small, humble life with a good amount of comfort. I don't expect me to be exceptional by any means, but I'm looking forward to living as many of these days as I can. Life is not perfect however and I can imagine more in it. I could have ambition, try to focus my potential on tasks that actually matter for someone, compete and advance. I could also be living in a city more catered to my lifestyle. My good friends are far away and being nearer to an airport or in a place that is actually comfortable to reach and interesting to see, I could hope to get more interactions with them. There could be culture, opera, theater, scientific lectures or meetups. But for that I would have to leave a place behind where I can smile into any shop front or while walking in the streets and get a familiar face to smile back. Do all of this again, built up acquaintances and friends from scratch. And would I enjoy those opportunities? Would friends actually come to see me that often? I now understand while people chose to settle down, raise families, what the benefit is. Those 20, 30 years are not just wasted, or dedicated to new and different people, they are a period in which you grow into a dense and stable network of people who know you well, family, friends, acquaintances, a support structure, security and resilient redundancy. There are no qualitative differences between these 3 major flavors of lifestyle but it is important to chose the ones that correspond to your wishes. In other words it is important to know yourself and then be at liberty to decide what you want to do. The other day, we went to see C, a common friend in Monastier. She showed us around her house. Two big town houses fused into one, the village's main square on one side, a far reaching view, that immediately drops off as if the house itself was an old city wall towering above a ditch, on the gently rolling hills of the region on the other. The inside is full of small, surprising objects. An old bike, a metal bathtub, a bar piano, some art prints, one of which spells "Alexanderplatz". "Alex is my husband", she explains, "and one of my good friends has lived in Berlin for many years! You'll meet her later!" We talk a bit about this and that, she and her husband are stonemasons and this is the third house they have refurbished in this town in 20 years. They bought this one when there was still an old couple living here, with whom they shared the space for more than 10 years. It's their passion, it's what they do, and they clearly now their craft! On the way to the gallery where we were to attend an art exhibition, she stops in every house and waves to the patrons of every bar. She knows them all. "Here you have the best wine, and here good music. We also have all the doctors you might need and recently a bookshop opened, where I can drink tea and always find my favorite books". Her daughter comes out of one house with C's cousin, and in another we meet a friend who moved here from Paris. The exhibition was nothing much but C did introduce us to her friend from Berlin. Outgoind and direct, she tells me in german that they have a language exchange going in Saint Etienne and we are invited. "Of course we will come!", we say, "what's this months topic?" "Your favorite german poetry!" "Splendid." They came back from Berlin to settle in a much smaller town because it had become difficult to live there, too expensive, too complicated. Later that night, C invited us to a jazz concert, the music was a bit loud so we didn't stay long, but I asked her if they have ever considered moving, especially now that their daughter is almost out of the house. "Yes", she says, "especially doing something in Scottland. Scottland is extremely beautiful". I nod. "But in the end, we have everything we need, you know? I feel safe here. I know if I need help, these people" - she traces a big arc with her right hand, many of the people at the concerts are her friends, "these people will be there for me." Intellectually I would love to leave everything behind and explore the world. I know that meeting new people, seeing new places and having new thoughts gives me unprecedented energy. But I would like to do it for a purpose, being a travel writer, say, or a wandering scientist like Paul Erdosz. There is a lot of sadness that comes packaged with this lifestyle. Some people would get hurt, some will forever disappear from my life and I would never actually be close to anybody. In other words, happiness would always rest on shaky ground and I'd imagine a sort of permanent anxiety about how I'd feel in the future. I also don't have a very high capacity for activity, that is after traveling for 2 weeks, I like to have a month or so off to relax and reconsider. For routine and also the time to sediment my recent experiences into thoughts, conclusions and understanding. On the other hand, when I stay more than a month at home, I'm bored. I start to doubt my life. I have the dumbest of all thoughts: "Life is gonna be looooong!" What actually keeps me sane in these off times, is monotonous routine. I never was an organized person, didn't even think it was a good idea to be organized if you were going to be creative and interesting. But having reached a point where I have simple metrics to measure, day by day the accumulation of some skill, knowing that any goal is reachable just as a function of putting in the time, knowing that any moment of practice and repetition corresponds to an exciting and unique moment of performance later down the road gives me incredible personal strength. It gives me meaning and what's more, the meaning is derived from how I feel about myself. Regular, conscious work on myself makes me feel like my life has meaning. I'm the one joking, speaking various languages, mentally and physically attractive because of my routines. I have fun with others and when I am by myself, because I do things until I'm good enough at them to fool around, to be creative. But I could never imagine being so diligent at any one of them to become best in class. I don't want to compete, put myself in the public market and claw my way to the top. I cannot see myself as a professional, doing one thing for the rest of life, hours and hours a day. So I want a home with familiar faces inside and around but also get the hell out whenever i feel like it. I want to have exciting new experiences and conversations but only if I can make them meaningful by coming back home and work some more on myself, my body and my mind. There will always be people with a more established attachment to their friends, families and neighbors. I will always be an outsider. There will always be people with a more meaningful life, absolute beasts in everything they do, experts and specialists and I will always be a dabbler. There will always be crazier people, doing completely unheard of feats, having crazy adventures and once in a lifetime experiences and my life will be tame and comfortable. But I might feel like belonging to a place or two, have a group of friends who want to hear for me and have one or two unique stories to tell that nobody would believe. That sound's nice, actually!