Why Flâneur?
Day 1, Lisbon (10/19/21)
Flâneur is one of those lovely, elusive words that has no real equivalent in English. “To wander without purpose, observing society” captures only what it looks like on the surface. From the outside, to saunter, amble, loaf, idle, seems indulgent. As the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve explained it, to flâne “is the very opposite of doing nothing.” Indeed, it is to give yourself the gift of time: permission to live an unstructured life, and by so doing, discover something about the world, and about yourself.
In our case, both Teresa and I feel compelled to discover something crucial about ourselves: what comes next? Who are we becoming at this transitional stage in our lives? After thirty years’ work, we could keep going a few more years, then slide into retirement in our own community, surrounded by our dear friends and family. But is there more? Is there someone else we could be if were we not so busy being who we are? We knew we needed to create some empty space if we wanted to find this out.
Fortunately, we both love to travel, and in fact we have been part-time flâneurs since we met. We fell in love more than 20 years ago while wandering the streets of New Orleans. We later developed a communications training business together that involved a lot of international travel, and we found ourselves sauntering through cities in over fifty…
