# The Bakers I have been on a quest to connect with the world for a couple of years now and recently my gf also decided to join in. We're living in a small town and over time, you get to know everybody to some degree. But it's only recently that people set up shop here, quite literally, who I have some common ground with. A few months back, a new bakery opened and became instantly our new favorite spot. It is clean, spatious, has products of exceptional quality and happens to be situated adjacent to another ritual we recently developed: regular morning walks. I fell in love with the "brioche choco" and finally a decent coffee. The owners are very friendly, especially K who is handling sales and whenever G comes out from behind his furnaces, a goodhearted joke or two lightens the mood even more. The whole town is coming here, many daily and so we learn a bit of a lifestory, a name or some banter every day, and the regulars know each other now. That alone is fascinating to me, because I have never been a regular. Never wanted to be. You need a few things for that: a pleasant space, time, a group of pleasant others, good products and a host. It's no small deal when these stars align, because what happens then is nothing less than the birth of a whole alternate pocket universe. The town, your life, questions and doubts and all other people and places in the world do not matter. Everything feels right, the moments spent here contain everything you want from life. And you know tomorrow will be like that too. It is particularly striking to me that I'm the one writing these lines, as I have always had the tendency of wanting to be somewhere else as well, know other people as well, have other experiences as well. No matter what I experienced, I always felt the lack of all the other possible experiences that one could have. Right now that isn't the case. I have relatively easy access to some simple, you could say, experiences that are sufficient for my happiness. Most of them contain at least one other person so it took some time to build them up, but it has been worth it. The feeling of being trapped, of life being a one way road to the end, of routine eating away at your curiosity and thereby the feeling that your time, together with new memories, is melting away under the inescapable tropical heat of indecision and inactiveness - is gone. Now every day is a choice. If I start getting grumpy because my days tend to resemble each other too much, I go somewhere else, meet someone new and come back, balancing comfort and excitement. But new O. sees the world through the lens of stories, just like old O. I'm a refactoring of my old self, not a replacement. So where did all that bookish curiosity, the enjoyment of the abstract and intangible go? It is now focused on people, my living and breathing contemporaries which routinely express themselves better than the best authors. Just like technology cannot replace life, but claimed to do so, art really can't. They both add flavor, but the real fun begins when you hold the tools in one hand and experience as raw matter in the other before you get to work. That is to say, I'm insanely curious about everybody because I enjoy their stories, but I also derive self worth from my interactions, because I want to understand, compare, experiment, imagine. In short I want to write. It took me almost 10 years to get here again. My younger friends, consider this warning: do not take your motivation for granted, do not take passion lightly. The stars need to align for you to get them and who knows when it can happen again. These thoughts converse in the back of my mind and sound like the calm mumbling of all the other guests in a restaurant of a handful of tables, swelling water over a rift, swirling air over a flame - as I laugh, joke, get to taste new experimental brioches and speak in English, French, Czech, German and even japanese in this beautiful but small, conservative and stuck up town where somehow the world converges and I reach out in all directions like the spokes of Fortuna's wheel, the axis of my own good fortune. Where did that image come from? I guess it is a medieval city after all! At some point, the bakers seem so familiar that we just had to invite them out for lunch. They were more than happy. And their story blew me away. They have been married for 14 years give or take. K, the wife, one day feeling stuck and lost back in Germany heard the voice of the universe in the form of her friend with whom she was caring for pilgrims in some parish church: "What if you'd go on the pilgrimage to Santiago yourself?" "What if indeed", she tells us excitedly, "everything happens for a reason and off I went". With a tent in the beginning, because the system for pilgrims is not that well developed in northern germany, in France people helped her book places as a pilgrim, even though she didn't see the need. "Everything just works out". She met interesting people, came to Bayonne, where people offered her the position of caretaker for an accomodation for pilgrims. She didn't speak any french at the time. Her husband came over too but didn't do much with the change, K understood that there is nothing you can do against eternal depression and lack of motivation and left him to finish her pilgrimate. On the way back, she started that accomodation and met G. G had heard about Santiago while living in Lyon completely by accident. His life was one of almost life-ending alcoholism, punk and rebellion and a feeling of not fitting in. He had learned to be a baker early on but never quite liked the job. He had tried to quit the bad habits multiple times but after the sudden death of his dad, fell back into it and then in a travel bookshop, found a brochure about the pilgrimage. "Why not", he recalls, "it will help me get sober", he laughs, "but then of course you meet people of your own ilk, I partied and was drunk basically the whole way down". In Bayonne, he went to the church, getting the stamp for his pilgrimage passport and met K, they exchanged a couple of words, nothing more. On the way back, G fell and broke his arm. K being the only person he knew if but briefly, he went back to the church. "I wasn't even supposed to be there!", she shouts so enthusiastically that her knife get's caught by her sleeve and propelled towards the luckily empty table behind her and without noticing, went on: "Dominique, you remember her right? She actually needed some tomatoes for something and I went back to bring her some." And that's how they met. Neither he nor she are religious, but spiritual, as they say, go with the flow if you will, things happen for a reason. He is way more rational, I think, but has no problem admitting that this meeting changed his life. Together, they left their various problems behind, he became sober, they started working together, he met inspiring bakers that told him what he's practicing today. She tried various things, upscaling of old objects, selling organic pastries, working with her husband in the same bakery. And then completely by accident, they found out that a bakery just at the foot of the stairs leading to the cathedral of Le Puy, the start of France's oldest pilgrimage route to Santiago. Now they have the best bakery in town and everyone wants a piece of their carefully crafted organic bread that is very clearly the work of a passionate perfectionist. My food was cold by the time they finished their story, I was hooked. What can you even add to this? The stars aligned, individual actions navigate us between possible lifepaths, risk and reward, the good and bad, we quite literally have some wiggle room. Or maybe we aren't wiggling at all. It doesn't matter. As a story like this assembles, be it your own life or somebody telling it to you, one cannot help but being grateful to witness it.