These are not advice columns. They are reflections grounded in experience — on what our systems do to us, and on what the living world shows us.
This autumn, the villa Les Tournesols will disappear from the seafront of De Panne. What do we really pass on when we believe we are passing on a heritage?
For a long time, I have had an intuition that there is a third way: one that allows something alive to emerge from the encounter between two beings.
In 2024, something from the past called out to me. It began with an email sent, for no apparent reason, by a stranger: the portrait of an ancestor, just as unknown to me, on display at The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
I have just finished Cured, by Dr Jeffrey Rediger. After a seventeen-year investigation into spontaneous remissions, he identifies four dimensions that seem to play a major role in our state of health.
In February 2026, everything collapsed. No more meaning. No more bearings. No more energy. What I want to speak about here is not what happened, but the way I went through it.
Reading an article about corruption in large corporations, I stumbled by chance on a name: Philippe Jaffré. CEO of Elf Aquitaine, dead of cancer at 62. It wasn't his career that stopped me. It was the age.
I found myself slipping onto ground that was draining my energy — without having chosen it, without noticing right away. The day I saw it, something was set free. Not the situation. My way of inhabiting it.
I had already succeeded, in the way the world counts success. Seventeen years in international finance, including Citigroup. Then seventeen years building Sequoia. On paper, everything was there. And yet.
For a long time I wanted concrete proof of certain things from the past that I felt without being able to put into words. It led me on a quest for external truth, since 2024.
For a long time, I believed my sufferings were only mine. Then I looked more closely at my family history. Dramas. Losses. Secrets. Deaths. Invisible loyalties, passed on unnamed, like ghosts.
There are symbols we don't choose. They choose us. In 2024, I was called toward a building. Incomprehensible at the time. It was a work by my great-grandfather on my father's side — a family, a lineage I knew almost nothing about.
People often reach out to me this way. A well-written message. Flattery about my career. Nostalgia for shared moments — even when there's been no contact for ages. Then the real request arrives. A piece of information. A contact. A diagnosis. No offer of reciprocity. No real commitment.
Every cart has a square wheel that slows our spontaneous momentum. That wheel isn't the same for everyone. That's exactly why we are mirrors for one another — and why mutual support has a value that autonomy alone never reaches.
We were raised to believe success is autonomy. Managing on your own. Depending on no one. Except that's not what nature shows. 'Every man for himself' isn't a law of nature — it's a story we were told.
Some of my exhaustion wasn't mine. It came from further back. What I learned by following the thread — about dispossession, invisible pacts, and what it costs to honor them without having chosen them.
It slipped into all my ways of functioning. It took me a long time to see it. The superwoman model was, for my generation, a conquest. But what no one said is that this model rests on an illusion: that carrying everything alone is strength.
Alice Walton could have stayed in retail. She chose to found a school of preventive and integrative medicine. What strikes me isn't the amount invested. It's the gesture. True capital isn't what you accumulate — it's what you pass on in a form that regenerates.