Les Signes

Do you believe in signs?

I do. (What can I say? The Alchemist is my absolute favorite book. Ever.) I believe there’s something greater that encourages us to go certain ways, and if we listen close enough, we will find these paths that will ultimately lead us to happiness.

Of course, more often than not, my “signs” tell me to go back to France. Take today, for example:

• Upon arriving to work, I went immediately to the coffee machine to make a cup. Lisa, our wonderful office admin person, had ordered a new variety of coffee — which I just grabbed and drank and loved. When I asked what it was, the response was, “Well obviously you loved it. It’s called “French Dark.”


• I turned on my computer and opened my e-mail. Inexplicably, all my computer’s automated messages were in French — and the only way to stop it was restart the computer all together. This isn’t the first time it’s happened.


• I wrote to my favorite career consultant — a contact at the Skoll Foundation who is French by birth — about traveling and Paris. After struggling with writer’s block all weekend, this was the first articulate document I was able to compose.


• We received this month’s edition of Urban Land, ULI’s publication, and our client is in it. (It’s a piece I pitched months ago, but it’s fun to see it together — and it looks great!) I sent it to the contact responsible for gathering information from the client’s side, who I have never met before but worked closely with when creating the by-line. She wrote back with words of congratulations and a big fat “Merci!”… but why thank me in French?


• It was another crazy, miserable, work-filled and overwhelming day. Strolling down the hall in the early afternoon, one of the interns (who looks EXACTLY like my brother’s friend Becca, who came to Camarat with us last time) stopped me and said, “Are you ok? You look like a fish out of water!” The last time someone called me that was when I came home from France last September and my mother said I should go back… that I was 'a fish out of water in Boston, happier in a different culture.'


• At the gym (that’s right, I made it there tonight), I plugged my iPod into my ears and listened to my seemingly RANDOM mix of music. Except, as luck would have it, the first 10 songs were 10 of the 25 French-language songs I have on there. I mean, what are the chances of that?

Ok, fine... maybe I stretch the “signs” a little bit.

But it tells you where my heart really is, doesn’t it? And isn’t that enough?