Here we are, finally, going live on social media, with our first blog (exciting and scary, especially considering that Marie wrote the blog, so please excuse her “frenglish” writing.
We have chosen the International Day of Happiness and Spring Day (in the Northern Hemisphere) to go live, as we are super happy to be finally sharing our journey with you, and spring is so beautiful here in France.
Before we tell you more about Skultcha, we would like to give you a bit of background about ‘Happiness Day’ and encourage you to get involved. In 2011, the United Nations (UN) recognised the pursuit of happiness as a “fundamental human goal” and called for “a more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth that promotes the happiness and well-being of all people”. This is actually quite amazing and progressive. This step confirms a profound shift in attitudes which has and still is underway all over the world. People are now recognising that progress, development and growth, should be about increasing human happiness and well-being, sustaining the planet, supporting a more harmonious, balanced and conscious world, and not just growing the economy. This year’s theme is ‘Share Happiness – focusing on the importance of relationships, kindness and helping each other’. Well done to the UN for this. Skultcha shares such a vision and wants to contribute to these objectives. So now let us tell you more about Skultcha.
Skultcha is our personal journey of rethinking, redesigning and re-engineering our life, our way of living, shifting our culture to enable a better world. It is a journey of discovery, exploration, questioning, self-reflection through a series of conversations to learn how we can improve the way we live, our culture, to enable a better world. In this context, we define culture as the way of life, especially the attitudes, ideas, knowledge, habits, feelings, values, behaviour, general customs, and beliefs that characterize and inform society as a whole or any social group within it. It constitutes the shared bases of social action.
SKULTCHA has been in the making for the last 10 years (there will be more posts on how we prepared for it). We had what many of us call a “normal life”. We grew our careers, we grew our home, and we invested in our family. As we were doing this, we realised that there were many things in our world which did not seem right. Watching the news was rather depressing. We felt very uncomfortable looking at what values and principles society and the media recognised as important. Let us give you a practical example, Patrick was working in the marketing world, dealing with large budgets to sell things to people which they did not need, while Marie was trying to improve the sustainable management of the natural resources for the future of humankind dealing with ridiculously low budgets to achieve the objective. It was clear that we were not going in the right direction in terms of development. Facing this reality, we started wondering if we were contributing to this state of affairs, if we were responsible for it. The answer was clear, yes, based on our jobs, the way we consumed, our material aspirations, the values and principles we taught our children, the way we engaged with others, all of this based on our culture.
We have realised through our life and careers that, to improve the world we are living in, we have to make the changes ourselves, first individually and then collectively. Small and big changes are required. It is first and foremost a personal journey of learning, exploration and self-realisation. We want; we have to make this change, for us, our communities and the world. We cannot wait for others to make such a change. We have first to do it ourselves, we have to start leading and directing this change, this shift. Many of us have started this process and we will tell you more about these super humans in future posts. We know that we need more Super Humans, more of us, more of you to take this journey, to shift our culture to for a better world.
We made some improvements over the last 10 years, but it was so difficult to find the answers to some of our questions and to shift our culture while being immersed within the “rat race”. We realised that we needed to take some perspective on our current life, we needed to let go of the old habits, beliefs, and systems, we needed to start an exploration process, to rethink and refine our culture.
To redefine and rethink our culture, we have decided to start a journey and a series of conversations, driving (in our beloved Toyota Hilux which is currently being shipped from South Africa) across 27 countries from France to South Africa, to discover, explore and learn from different people, with different cultures. We want to learn from the diversity.
This is not a scientific research, this is not an academic research, this will be human to human conversations, authentic discussions, with no formalities, with the aim to understand better where we are at, on an individual and collective level, and how we can make changes in the way we live.
So what are these conversations going to be about? Many things, we love talking to people, we love people.
We first want to get to know people and their cultures. We want to understand how cultures impact positively or negatively on our world. Our conversations are also going to be influenced by some of the themes from the Sustainable Development Goals (driven by governments and businesses), which set the world vision for 2030, including for example: poverty, natural resources management, our economic system and economic growth, inequalities, responsible consumption and production, well-being and the pursuit of happiness. We will check if people do even know about these Goals, do they speak to the people on the ground, what do they mean for us every day, are they relevant, how can we contribute to them ourselves in the way we live?
We want to share this journey with others. We want you to join us in this discovery process, in this questioning process, meet us en route, meet us on social media, engage in the conversation, contact us to collaborate, let us know what shifts you have made so that we can learn from them and get inspired. We will share our own life re-engineering process, the shifts we have made, we are making and will make and the direction we will be taking. We do not have all the answers, we want to learn from everyone, including you.
We leave France on the 27th of May 2018 from Valence. Until then we will share more with you about the rationale for this journey, who we are, the preparation for the trip and some of our conversations in France. We will ask you questions, ask for advice and share some of our learning as we go along.
So come join us on our journey, FOLLOW US.
https://www.facebook.com/Skultcha/
http://www.instagram.com/the_real_skultcha/
Thank you to 4x4Megaworld for supporting the Journey.
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