I’m not one for lawn signs, but to support my local Alliance Française, I put one up in my front yard. Besides, I like the message. It says, On se quitte parfois pour mieux se retrouver ensuite. It’s a quote from Adolphe d’Houdetot, a nineteenth century French writer who wrote hunting books, and translates to “sometimes we leave each other to better find one another later.”
I wasn’t thinking of that line the other day when I walked around the lake behind my house. Instead, I detoured off the path deliberately in search of another. In the playground of the neighborhood elementary school, there’s a tiny meditative garden with native prairie plants and about a dozen large, inscribed boulders. You can meander through the garden, stepping from smooth rock to smooth rock, and read the words as you go, which is what I did. I hadn’t been there in a while and I wanted to refresh my memory of what those words said. The message on the stones suggests the soaring final lines of Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Summer Day.” Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?
After that, I needed a pause to think. I found a bench several yards off the walking path, nearer to the lake. It was a perfect summer day: puffy white clouds glided across a paint-box blue sky, graceful weeping willow branches swayed like a diaphanous skirt. A breeze rushed through a dense patch of tall, bamboo-like reeds on the water’s edge, making a whooshing sound as the reeds trembled and bent. And that’s when I thought about flexibility.
In business, flexibility is called pivoting. It’s the new Plan B; it’s a strategy. But with people, flexibility is not a strategic plan. I think of it as a character trait, one that encompasses other traits. Resiliency, for example. Can you be resilient without being of flexible mind? Flexibility leads to survival. Think of the reed: rather than break, it bends.
The very first sentence of the book I’m reading asks a question. “What makes a city great?” High hopes that by the end of the book that question, like Chekhov’s gun, will have been thoroughly examined if not completely answered. My answer, if you have not already guessed, is flexibility. But what does that mean for a city? Vision? Courage? Ego? A little of each, perhaps.
Paris had been ravaged by decades of wars and abandoned by kings for the safety of their châteaux until Good King Henri IV changed all that at the end of the sixteenth century. The massive building, particularly of public spaces, that he set in motion and that was continued by his son and grandson, Louis XIII and Louis XIV, established Paris as a modern city of unique splendor long before Haussmann came through with his bulldozer. Le Pont Neuf, Place des Vosges, Place Dauphine, the Louvre’s Grand Galerie, Île Saint-Louis, Place des Victoires all bear the direct or indirect imprint of Henri IV’s extraordinary vision. Newly cobblestoned streets coaxed the aristocracy out of their carriages to promenade around their refurbished city, which in turn encouraged other trades. Because to see and be seen, you had to look good! Within a century, Paris metamorphosed into Europe’s undisputed, glittering capital. Guidebooks sprung up for the visitors who came to walk and marvel.
And Paris has never looked back. Undeterred, it continues to assess, adapt, transform, and be cutting edge in everything from eco-neighborhoods to entrepreneurial ecosystems, from urban farming to digital technology station centers; from art and architecture to food and fashion, all without losing sight of its history, its legacy. Paris has withstood revolutions, demonstrations, and terrorist attacks; survived Huns, Hitler, Visigoths, and soon, a virus.
Jerry Seinfeld expressed his unshakable love of New York City in a recent Op-Ed. Part riposte, part love letter, he describes New York as having “energy, attitude and personality.” Referring to the coronavirus, he says New York will bounce back because that’s what great cities do: “They change. They mutate. They re-form.”
Great cities, in other words, are flexible, resilient, rare. Paris is a great city. What better place, as Henri IV did, to land our dreams.