What follows is a short fictional story to illustrate an attitude and an approach taken by one couple to reach a mutually fixed objective; any resemblance to persons living or actual events is, as they say, purely coincidental.
The Scribe – George Cattermole (1800–1868). Photo Credit: The Cooper Gallery
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One morning, as Anton Parris and his wife, Fleur, were sitting in the salon of their 4th-floor suburban Amsterdam apartment drinking tea and discussing tomorrows, Fleur put her cup down and said “I want to go and live near the ocean; Bordeaux would be nice”.
Anton paused to consider what Fleur had just said and gather his thoughts before responding.
Going Home
Of course, Fleur meant Bordeaux in France, and he wasn’t all that surprised by that; after all, they’d been talking about leaving the Netherlands for a while, and, among other destinations, they’d even considered returning to France at one point, their home for many years, but life had intervened and that idea had been set aside.
Anton had been to Bordeaux twice previously, once in 2010 with Fleur and once some 20 years prior to that during a solo roundtrip of south-west France. Indeed, Bordeaux would be nice.
Anton and Fleur grew silent and gazed out of their living room windows, each seemingly contemplating Amsterdam’s distant skyline. Their apartment, like many homes in the Netherlands, had large windows, ideal for a country notoriously lacking in sunshine and clement weather, and so, with the field of vision their fourth-floor location provided and, for once, some decent weather, they had a clear view over the neighbouring rooftops to the high-rise skyline of Amsterdam’s business district away in the distance.
Amsterdam-henge
But Fleur didn’t say “sea” as in the perennially cold North Sea, 40 kilometres due west from where they lived, nor did she mean the pleasant Spanish Costa Blanca Mediterranean they had come to know quite well; she said “Ocean,” and Anton knew exactly what she meant. Fleur was referring to the Atlantic Ocean, and specifically the region of the Atlantic Ocean between Bordeaux and Biarritz in Southwestern France. Fleur had set her sights on Bordeaux, and Bordeaux it was going to be.
During the lull in their conversation, it occurred to Anton that while Fleur had been gazing at the same distant high-rise skyline as him, her thoughts, like his, were most likely elsewhere. He also sensed that because Fleur was sitting at an angle to Anton, her view of the skyline was different from his.
It also didn’t escape him that the same may be said regarding moving back to France. He couldn’t read her mind, so it was important for him to fathom Fleur’s thoughts. Although Anton saw the benefits of returning to France, Fleur certainly had different expectations. What were they?
In the Manner of Converging Waters
They eventually continued their discussion after gazing out the window a while longer, and Anton realised that while their viewpoints didn’t differ much, they did differ, and while they shared a lot of common points and complemented each other—Anton, the project manager, and Fleur, the creative—it was best to leave nothing to assumption.
Indeed, the distant skyline was a good analogy, and Anton—the aquarian (familiar with various philosophies of water (and some of its paradoxes)) to Fleur’s Pisces—knew the benefits of assimilating Fleur’s perspective as Fleur did with his. They recognised that harmonising their differing views was for the greater good—in this case, moving to Bordeaux, as it had so often been in the past when experiencing some quite turbulent, uncharted waters they’d had to navigate.
After finishing their tea, contemplating the distant skyline, and discussing, among other things, a tomorrow they still couldn’t fix a date for, Anton and Fleur stood up, happy, if for no other reason, than, in the space of a tea pause, they’d taken the time to talk to each other.
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