my name is Chara and I come originally from Athens, Greece. Even if I love Greece and especially my city, I prefer to refer to myself more as a European citizen rather than Greek. This is not a statement about anti chauvist feelings but it is a way of life and routine.
I grew up quite internationally, or better say “Europeanly”. When I was a kid and a teenager, I went to a Franco - Hellenique school and all the summers I was sent in summer schools around Europe. Later, during my first university years when I did a BA in Business Administration and Management, I joined AIESEC, the biggest student association in the world in which I remained a very active member and leader (Local Commitee President) for three years. Being a member in AIESEC meant also participating in international conferences and connecting with people from abroad. After these three years, I took the desicion to go on Erasmus for six months in Belgium where I had some of the nicest and happiest moments of my life ( I could keep talking for ever about my Erasmus but not so relevant I guess…). I could refer to my Erasmus time as “the connecting and meeting people” time when I made some of my best and life lasting friendships at that period. When I finished my BA, I decided to do a Masters on International Advertising in Paris and London (cooperational schools) because I have always been fascinated about the cross cultural education, marketing and advertising. How different people get the stimulus to act and how that does affect on their minds. How copy writing and colours create different feelings in different nations and other cultural differences’ issues… This degree made me think about my general attitude towards the new, the different and unexpected information.
I am generally so much into the different and the strange that I am always looking for it. I believe that you can find this element only if you are very open to all the new. If you experience new things and different situations, if you get involved with the people you meet, if you really “live” the city you are and not just being a tourist. I like to experience a situation as much as I can and I think that on every occasion and from every single person you meet, you have something to take out of it/him/her.
The thing is that as I am always looking for the new and the different, sometimes I ended up a bit lost and undecided about what to do with my life and especially when it comes to professional issues. What I really want to do if I always want something new and something to keep me exhited and motivated? Which is the best way to deal with the question “what do you want to become when grow up”? I still dont know the correct answer… But I want to keep eyes and ears open to all the possibilities coming up… At the end we should give ourselves the chance to learn more about this world and its people.
My life moto would be: keep asking questions, get inspired by the unknown, meet better the people and environment that surround you
Hey Chara, thanks for sharing your ryde with us! AIESEC, ERASMUS… this seems like a lot of hooking up with people your age and diverse interests. Can’t think of more lively crowds and potential for exploration
You write: I grew up quite internationally, or better say “Europeanly”. When I was a kid and a teenager, I went to a Franco - Hellenique school and all the summers I was sent in summer schools around Europe
I’m curious who sent you to summer schools, if you could afford studying abroad or you received scholarships? Did you have to invest in something, was it difficult at times? or you had a lot of great allies, like for example I have my own people who support me, and whom I cannot be separated from, which is why I always find my way back from my travelling and experiencing… and which is why I couldn’t wait to settle and even slow down sometimes.
Also, you listed three homes in your profile page, so which is it :D?
thank you for sharing with me the “I have my own people who support me” and I can totally identify myself on it ! All the summer schools and the international studies I did were mainly supported by my family and partly (as the Erasmus) were funded by some scholarships. My parents strongly believe that I should travel as much as I can, live abroad and have international influences so they support my wills. They are the type of people who would prefer not to travel themselves in order to be able to fund my trips … and this is why I want as you already mentioned in your report to feel proud about me and me to do things to make them proud! I disagree in one and only point with you: my friends who had the most resources and came from wealthy families still haven’t taken jobs or haven’t invested in anything, not in themselvest because after a certain age even if they support you, you feel the need to “prove” that they were right supporting you and backing you up. Otherwise I would feel very guilty if I havent done anything for my personal development and education.
About the internships that you mention, I have done A LOT of them and I have really enjoyed them. But there is always the other side who always judge your unpaid, volunteer offer… These who say “enough with the internships and the volunteerism, find your self a proper paid job” and I am really upset with these people. Of course I care for making a living and I support the paid labor but come on… professional experience counts as well
As a conclusion I would say that my main allies are my parents and my networks. The networks that I built having those unpaid internships… :)
Hi, that’s a very rich account and all those different layers of experience just converge significantly in the description you give of ‘your’ places (Athens as home, Vienna as current city, London the home in the hearth).
Moral sustainment and encouragement is very important just next to the economic possibilities. My parents who are only 21 and 24 years older than me have always looked for solutions to give their children opportunities they hadn’t get. And when I grow up I wanted to maintain that line and found ways of doing things that apparently were very much out of reach in relation to my background: a PhD in the UK, for instance. It’s been hard but I liked it very much.
But very often when I was trying very hard to do these things , a lot of people would come up and say: why do you do that? what’s the point? why travelling/moving and bothering when you can be safe and secure at your place? I often think that this sounds very much a sardinian way of securing a general equilibrium (sardinia is where I come from), but at the end of the day I also think that it might happen to many other poeple outside of its boundaries.
Thank you Valentina for saying this, because it has happened to me as well and I think to other people who tried to over pass their limits and their boundaries. People (more often, older people) react very short minded and moderately because they are safe at their cave… But if you dont risk and dont “gamble”, you won’t never see what is over the hill… And for me the unsecurity and the unkown keep people take actions and make moves towards something better
Re-reading this thread makes me wish a lot that we had a mission on family and how we look up to that generation, and although people say we are a Y / lost generation (implying in itself that we are dramatically different from the previous ones), maybe we should not only think about the differences when we define ourselves, but also to what connects us… and look at our paths as a continuation of our parents’ paths … not a disruption.
It sounds like you’ve had lots of fabulous opportunities - in terms of both travel and work experience. I’m quite envious! I think that, in today’s social and economic climate in which flux and uncertainty are the new norms, even if any of us do know for certain what we want to do with the rest of our lives, finding our way onto that path and maintaining stability while we’re on it is a tall order… and getting taller.
I turned 30 recently and I reflected on just how different my life is from how I’d have imagined in at the age of 20. In most respects it’s probably much better - in the sense of more fulfilling - than the scenario my 20 year old self imagined, but there’s certainly a great deal more uncertainty. And so I’ve stopped framing my thinking about what the next decade might have in store in terms of “what do I want to be when I grow up?” - a question which people still laugh at when I phrase it in that way. (People, certainly in the UK, seem to think we ought to grow out of thinking about how our lives and careers might evolve with the passage of time and the gathering of experiences… what stifled imaginations!) Instead, I’ve started to focus on how I want to be. I want to be inspired and excited by my work. I want a lifestyle that is conducive to a healthy body and mind. I want to be generous with my time, experience and ideas.
Reading a lot of the missions that have been posted, it seems like a lot of Edgeryders are thinking about their futures in terms of how rather than what they want to be. I wonder what sort of wider cultural shift this might reflect… one that is based more in the personal fulfillment of core values, social cohesion and vital communities, than the status associations of different professions. I can only hope that this is a reflection of young people across Europe - indeed, the world - more generally!
My question to you, Chara, is whether you feel that how (or what) you want to be might have been different if you had not been fortunate enough to have had the opportunities to travel, study and work in so many places.
you are right … we should think more about how we want to be, how we want to feel about what we are experiencing rather than what but i think the society we are growing up has made us to think more realistically. For me I want to feel happy and excited and motivated of what I am doing, whatever this is …
What are you doing at the moment? and what was your dream when you were at your 20s? What made you change your plans? Sometimes life moves on and you just take decisions without thinking a lot and this is a sometimes fascinating and sometimes frustrating … or both. You could also check Paola’s Ryde who talks about taking “fast” and maybe unconcious decisions that could change your whole life path. And she also wonders if it is too late to change it.
Funny, is your name really Chara? In Gaelic this means ‘friend’…very nice name!
Thanks for your message, its nice to meet someone here who has a wider eye for experiences outside of the box. Its a funny question…the one about what to be when one grows up. I had always thought ‘I am what I am now, why would that be any different in the future?’ The human is a fully rounded being…rounded by each and every type of human experience, by all present and by all past and full of the evolving potentiality of an unlived future, if one can lease the small self in favour of the greater. Today, with specialization and the categorical method of verification adapted by the scientific materialist school of modern thought leads us to professionally categorize ourselves according to our activities. What if I do something else…am I a different person? Hahaha, of course not! Perhaps your taste for the new, and the different, and the inspiring comes from your deep seated knowledge of what it is to be as a conscious human being. There is a funny story about John Lennon:
When he was very young he asked his mother - “What is the point of living?” She told him, “the point of living is to experience happyness”…some years later in school the teacher asked young John “What do you want to be when you grow up?” John said “Happy”, the teacher replied “I don’t think you understand the question” to which John replied “I don’t think you understand Life”
At the moment it is clear that the world is reviewing this core question of what it is to be? Is it an individuated experience or can it be something shared? Must we live as self-serving capitalists or is there a new uncategorical mode of life and behaviour that integrates enough working principles to properly serve all people within society. Of course there is this mode, it is nothing new, it is our human nature in its balanced form. If we understand our situation, between the individual will and the connective/collective experience then it becomes clear that to life a life of self-interest will be, and can be seen now as being a detrimental process if carried by the whole of humanity. we need to rediscover the true meaning of things…we can start at self-interest seeing as it is so fundamental to our motivation. Inter Esse means ‘Between Beings’ in latin and this is where the word interest comes from, something is of interest to us when it is held for consideration between us two, and so Self Inter Esse really means Self Between Beings and thus points to the actuality and the interpersonal responsibility we have as humans. There are old tribes from south America who used to greet each other with the statement ’ I am another yourself ’ . By this they held their communities in check against outgrowths of the individual will to dominate held especially among men.
Well Chara, I am another yourself! Nice to meet you and look forward to chatting more here and there on EdgeRyders.
Funny, is your name really Chara? In Gaelic this means ‘friend’…very nice name!
Thanks for your message, its nice to meet someone here who has a wider eye for experiences outside of the box. Its a funny question…the one about what to be when one grows up. I had always thought ‘I am what I am now, why would that be any different in the future?’ The human is a fully rounded being…rounded by each and every type of human experience, by all present and by all past and full of the evolving potentiality of an unlived future, if one can lease the small self in favour of the greater. Today, with specialization and the categorical method of verification adapted by the scientific materialist school of modern thought leads us to professionally categorize ourselves according to our activities. What if I do something else…am I a different person? Hahaha, of course not! Perhaps your taste for the new, and the different, and the inspiring comes from your deep seated knowledge of what it is to be as a conscious human being. There is a funny story about John Lennon:
When he was very young he asked his mother - “What is the point of living?” She told him, “the point of living is to experience happyness”…some years later in school the teacher asked young John “What do you want to be when you grow up?” John said “Happy”, the teacher replied “I don’t think you understand the question” to which John replied “I don’t think you understand Life”
At the moment it is clear that the world is reviewing this core question of what it is to be? Is it an individuated experience or can it be something shared? Must we live as self-serving capitalists or is there a new uncategorical mode of life and behaviour that integrates enough working principles to properly serve all people within society. Of course there is this mode, it is nothing new, it is our human nature in its balanced form. If we understand our situation, between the individual will and the connective/collective experience then it becomes clear that to life a life of self-interest will be, and can be seen now as being a detrimental process if carried by the whole of humanity. we need to rediscover the true meaning of things…we can start at self-interest seeing as it is so fundamental to our motivation. Inter Esse means ‘Between Beings’ in latin and this is where the word interest comes from, something is of interest to us when it is held for consideration between us two, and so Self Inter Esse really means Self Between Beings and thus points to the actuality and the interpersonal responsibility we have as humans. There are old tribes from south America who used to greet each other with the statement ’ I am another yourself ’ . By this they held their communities in check against outgrowths of the individual will to dominate held especially among men.
Well Chara, I am another yourself! Nice to meet you and look forward to chatting more here and there on EdgeRyders.
I am another yourself and thanks for this amazing mission answer!! I really enjoyed reading … so much new and interesting things in there!
Let me start with my name. “Chara” in Greek means “joy” or “hapiness” and my parents gave this name to me because as a baby I was all the time laughing and smiling! And I think they were right because I am still doing it
I think you are right that by saying that people tend to identify themselves according to their professions and jobs, because this is the easiest way to do it. For me it is more doing a lot of things, feel fullfilment and happyness. Yesterday actually something really weird happened to me… I went for a job interview in a very well known company in Vienna. They are this kind of company who seem to hire more open minded and creative young people. During the interview they asked me if I am going to keep some other professional activities in paralel with the new job. I said of course I will keep some social entrepreneurship projects that I m currently doing… This apparently was the minute when the CEO of this company got mad and crazy!! He told me that I am old enought (25 y.o) and I need for the rest 10 years stay focused on just ONE thing in my life, not being spontaneous and not “moving so fast”… I felt so bad and so upset… It s maybe the way I am raised, but I don’t want to be this one dimension person that just gets up every morning and goes to work to stay there for 8 hours and then back home! I need to have different things in all my aspects and this is the way I keep being motivated and inspired… I really didnt get any of his points specially when they want to sell the image of a very fun, young and cool brand :S
“the point of living is to experience happyness” this is one of the most nicest things every read… It inspires me a lot because it is putting in one sentence all the meaning of life we should look for
Looking forward to finding out more about your experiences
I 've had a bit of trouble finding your message via my profile, but thanks. Yes, i got invitation, and have booked tickets, and am coming. I just for some reason re-hit the i’d like to come button, because it was right before my face, and yes, i would still like to come even when i already am… If you know what i mean.
Chara, I love your post! I feel very much European as well, but in a way I don’t think that competes with being Italian. I just think of both as very much part of my identity but I would never be able to “order” the two identities. I am very fascinated with this issue, in a way I think it’s not much different from acknowledging the cultural identity of your region\local area without that meaning that it is in competion with your national one. In our generation most people have different and mixed layers in their identity, now that social and geographical groups are much more dynamic.
I agree with what you say… I think that people nowadays they are full of multi identities depending on which group they are at the moment! Which is something nice but strange… because I am asking how can we find the real self underneath all these layers? Or it is just us but with a different outfit? I ve been wondering for long time and now I am just following my intuition dependind on the mood
I love my country but I love also Europe and of course I think that I don’t have something different than an italian or norwegian girl… we both share likeable stories … no?
Hey Chara - just a quick note about the “a bit lost and undecided” part. That feeling has been a well-known companion of mine during the last years, too. And while I know that everyone’s ryde is different, and yours couldn’t be more different from mine, here is what has helped me. Maybe you can draw something from it.
Keep eyes and ears open. Let others inspire you and get all the information that is out there before settling on plans. (No need to flesh this out - you did already in the mission report.)
Integrate what fascinated you. Like you, I can get interested in many different things in a row, and also lose interest again. In retrospect, what helped to find my permanent passions was keeping track of my past and aspiring interests and trying to find their common ground and integrate them with what I did currently ("pivoting"). That way, on a curvy path, I somehow arrived at the one and only project that fascinates me permanently, with first contributions ranging back 14 years from now. (Also helps to build up lasting impact on the world instead of allowing others to obliterate your past achievements because you're up to something completely different now.)
Keeping track of your mind. Actually, I do the above integration of past and future interests with a mindmapping software (FreeMind - it's free). Whenever I was completely lost in not knowing what to do in life, I sat down with FreeMind and my past mindmap plans, did a lot of drag&drop and rewriting and summarizing of projects and ideas and journals, and arrived at a plan that I was happy with (for that moment of the path at least). It's like externalized thinking, helping to keep track of and arrange more aspects than my brain can. Sounds crazy? I didn't imagine this either when starting with FreeMind ... . Will not be everybody's favorite technique of course.
Having a guiding question. Throughout my search for my long-term vision, I had this guiding question: What's most appropriate for me to do in the world as it is? One could also frame it as "what's meaningful", but taking into account personal attributes and haves and the state of the world as it is. Sounds a bit general, but note that it prevented my from pursuing personal happiness first - I sort of knew that it would be a result of knowing "to do the right thing in this world". A guiding question helped keep my plans and actions coherent and synergistic, even though the plans themselves changed often.
Having a hypothesis for life. I never questioned this above-mentioned guiding question. It was, in my case, rather rooted in a Christian world view. I see such a world view as a hypothesis that you can only test by living it out - upfront rationalizing cannot ultimately answer if it's true or wrong. Whatever world view one has currently, one should stay open for the option that it can fail as a hypothesis, needing a complete fresh start ... . In any case (and independent of truth content), a consistent world view proved to be a great tool to introduce order and cohesion into the various aspects and plans in life.
All this is not about choosing a paid job opportunity, but about finding one’s life vision and purpose. (If necessary, then go and create the job that fits it …).
thank you very much for the useful advice! Let’s take it step by step: 1. Keep eyes and ears open. my mother once told me that you should read everything falls on your hands (from books to manuals)… EVERYTHING has something to give you.
2. Integrate what fascinated you. I carry always with me a notebook and I write down all the fascinated ideas I have during the day. Every once a while I go back, refresh them and try to figure out what could do with all of them (new entrepreneurial ideas, new hobbies, new books…? etc)
3. Keeping track of your mind. Last year during my master class I attended a course called “Innovative Thinking”. The professor asked us to use the Buzan’s Mind mapto track our mindsets, skills and goals. I did it but to tell the truth I didn’t become a fan of it… but as you suggested it I could give it a second try. Maybe Freemind is more user friendly than Buzan’s.
Having a guiding question. My question to guide me is “is that make you a better person?” and my “hypothesis for the life” is to try everything and see as many as possible.
So I didn’t tell you anything new smilez Didn’t expect you to be such a big fan of this, say, structured approach to pathfinding in life. Enjoyed the surprise!
Out of curiosity, I just gave Buzan’s MindMap a try and, like you, ain’t gonna be a fan. For me, productive mindmapping needs fast visual navigation, but this obstructs it by (1) visually distracting, graphical overfreight (big images, text along curves), (2) poor keyboard support for folding, (3) poor optical feedback to show which node is selected, (4) no folding & expand feature in the free version after 7 days (would make my mindmaps completely useless), (5) no style-based formatting.
With folding and good keyboard shortcuts like in FreeMind however, navigation is way faster than in a word processor for me. (Also for long docs - I’m drafting a thesis with it.) Still, you might or might not like it - it’s very much a matter of taste.
By the way, the “Does it make you a better person?” question actually is a beautiful flavor for a guiding question. I like it’s simplicity: in the end, better people also make up a better world. Automagically.
