A friend, designer by trade, told me repeatedly: Creativity is just about reusing stuff.
When I started to write this newsletter, I received this message from my father:
Your ability to write with ease comes from your grandmother. This inheritance seems natural when you’re born with it, but not everyone is that lucky.
Find a way to make others benefit from it.
As far as I can remember, my grandmother always sent me birthday cards.
It would systematically arrive right on time, and that clockwork precision was the main source of my admiration.
This tradition didn’t stop when I became an adult. Every year, she would write a few wishes on a birthday card, and send it to me.
When she started to get ill, I was moving out of an apartment. One morning, I stumbled upon the box where I was storing all her birthday cards. I took the box with me, and went to see my grandmother.
I sat next to her, on her hospital bed. I read to her every single card that she had sent me over the years. She reacted to some memories triggered by those lines.
Slowly, something appeared to me for the first time — the cards made sense as a whole. It contained the wisdom of a lifetime, broken down in aphorisms, and sent in yearly waves.
By the time I was done reading, she was too tired to talk anymore, so I didn’t ask any more questions.
It was the last time I saw her alive.
A few months after, as I was preparing for my wedding, I decided to honor her memory. I assembled a text, entirely made up of sentences extracted from her birthday cards.
And I asked my designer friend to read it during the wedding ceremony:
All my best wishes for continuing your journey.
Life together is a continuous exploration.
May you pursue it with love and humor.
May your life as a couple be worth living.All my best wishes for the success of this trip.
Traveling is about encounters. What a wonderful gift!
It's letting yourself be infused by other cultures.
Be amazed, learning is a passion that never wears out.All my best wishes for a bright future.
You have so many friends and love around you.
Stay attentive, no matter how many miles separate us.
We are watching you, all of us who love you.All my best wishes for the achievement of your projects.
May these years to come inspire you and carry you with joy.
Move forward without fear, pursue meaning and beauty.
The world is yours. What will you do with this life that awaits you?
Knowing that she wrote birthday cards to her dozen of grand-children, it remains a mystery how she managed to produce such a constant stream of simple and profound encouragements.
Who created this text that was read during our wedding?
My grandmother, who never assembled these sentences together?
Me, who never wrote any of those words?
Whatever you create is reusing something that was created before.
And your creation may be reused by someone else, for a purpose you would never have thought of.
Maybe that is the sole ambition worth pursuing for a parent — surrounding your children with interesting material to create from.
Dear reader, if you don't mind sharing: What was the gift that your beloved grandparent left you?
Thank you to Maximilien Forgeot, Tristan Charvillat and Ayça Sevkal-Guyot for reading drafts of this article.
Every two weeks, I write an article to explain how the mind works, usually through a comparison that everyone can relate to.
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