Does Beauty Matter?

Paris, FRANCE
Jan.3-6, 2015

In Paris, you walk.  Architecture, cafes, narrow streets that lead to a surprise - little or large, smartly-dressed women, sharp-looking men, art and good food.

The Montmatre Cemetary from our hotel window

Gargoyles under the moon watching over the narrow
alleys of the Latin Quarter

Not sure what this is

Sucre Daddy sugar

The Sacre Coeur Basilica from the
Boulevard de Rochechouart

L'Arc de Triomphe (Colin's photo)

.

Stairway to the top (Colin's photo)

The Arc de Triomphe is in the centre of a roundabout from which 12 streets radiate (including Les Champs Elysees).  Colin, much more camera savvy than I, managed to get a full 360 degree panarama.

Whether you are religious, atheist, spiritual, agnostic, a combination of all or none of the above, you can't help but wonder at what inspired humans to build such magnificent and beautiful structures to the gods throughout civilization...

Notre Dame Cathedral

Notre Dame Cathedral - right arch

Notre Dame - from the back

Mmmmmmm, cheesy raclette...

With Colin's bro Andrew, mom & dad

Can never have too many...

Walking in Paris, it just naturally makes you happy.  How could I help but compare its charm and beauty to the relative ugliness that had become my day-to-day back at home.  My work location was moved out of downtown to the southeast industrial lands of Calgary.  This cost me not only the interaction with the vitality of downtown life and activity, but my daily walks to and from work, my lunch time runs along the Bow River, the down-to-earth yoga instructors at the studio nearby, and the opportunities for planned and unplanned run-ins with friends during lunch or after work.

It wasn't all bad.  While I talk of missing my interaction with "the industry" railroad folks the most , I do not want to detract from the people with whom I worked directly over the last seven years of my career.  Prior to that, I never had a job for more than two years at a time before I got antsy and wanted to move on to something new.  Coming into this current department, Mechanical Reliability - which I never knew existed in the railroad until I was picked up when sitting an interview for a different job - there suddenly presented an opportunity to use a multiple of my collection of skills, and I really really enjoyed it.

It was a joint Mechanical Engineering-IT project - mechanical data-based processes for derailment prevention and proactive railcar maintenance, developed into an IT system to manage the data and automate the processes.   All of us directly involved in the design and building of this new system took much pride in this thing we were birthing, putting the best of our engineering and IT skills into it.  It was a thing of beauty.  But then, something happened.  Not all at once, but gradually.

Things became a constant battle about deadlines, paperwork, bureaucracy, who screwed up.  Those directly doing the work still wanted to do the work, but the energy and passion was no longer poured into our system.  It was instead split between meeting deadlines even if that meant with only a half-baked product, choosing which paperwork had to be kept up with and which could be left by the wayside, managing bureaucracy, defending oneself - and only then, if there was anything left, enhancing the actual system.

I can't put my finger on a single thing that caused the above and led to the elimination of satisfaction and enjoyment - I can speculate and pontificate on a mix of reasons.  At the end of the work day, I came home not as a useful member or participant in something bigger and better than myself, but simply as a tool for someone else's bigger and better.  And I had no idea what that was.

Walking in Paris, this kind of beauty could not have been manifested by angry, demoralized, embittered people.

But nothing is all good either.  I was surprised (a gut-sickening kind of surprise) at the number of men in uniform with big guns walking among the crowds in Paris - at train stations, at the popular tourist spots, walking down the streets.  We left Paris the night of January 6 on the Chunnel train back to London.  The following morning, terrorists shot the employees at Charlie Hebdo magazine headquarters.