Story to tell....Veronique

Oh Puerto Vallarta, you’ve stolen my heart and you’ve conquered my soul. From the first looks out the windows of our taxi, your ocean view with mountains as your back ground, the clouds dancing through your peaks, playing hide and seek with the sun. Your citizen, so ever welcoming, helpful and so pretty. You can see in their eyes that they are living in paradise. When you look into them you just want to get a hold of their essence, their spirit and their joie de vivre. Visiting your beaches, where the sand looks like it’s sparkled with gold, makes me understand why Don Perdro de Alvarado  thought it was a great place to establish himself with it’s first colony Sitting with your sand in sparkles of gold, the great white wales wave at you from a distance where you can actually see them smiles. If you find that little corner restaurant, you can indulge yourself in some of the best traditional Mexican food I’ve had. Fresh, spicy, tangy, you inspire me to keep cooking with loc...

What happened to our sense of logic? What happened with our desire to understand where information comes from? It’s sad when you think about it, that greed has taken the world over and we are in a middle of a crisis and that instead of acting out of compassion, some of our political leaders have decided that for the better man of their own personal agenda, that it is much better to spin fear and participate in the creation of a miss information crisis. I do not disagree, we are in a situation that has to be taken seriously and where we need to be considerate of each other’s and make our best efforts not to affect people that could possibly be at risk of this health crisis. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday, who had just came back from Paris last week, with her little nice. They weren’t sick but the little girl was being bullied in school because she has just came back from vacation. I mean, WTF! Children are children and they will take information we gave them ...

Some people will say that I was lucky. That I had all the opportunities in my life to become a strong and powerful woman. Some will say that society was already at a place where I could grow and prosper as a woman in a male dominated field and industry. Some will say that the obstacles that I have faced were not at all related to me being a female. Some will say that the door was wide open and all I had to do was to go through it. Maybe they are not totally wrong, perhaps they are a bit right. My life journey is certainly a great one, and I certainly had to work through it. I was faced with situations where I was certainly at a disadvantage because I was a woman.  My journey was however made a lot easier because of all the great woman leaders that came before me. Only to name a few, I am thinking of Harriet Tubman I recently discovered. I think of Oprah Winfrey, Marie Curie, Queen Elizabeth, Amelia Earhart, only to name a few. I owe it also to the great women that s...

Thirty years ago, on December 6 1989, in Montreal, 14 women in l’Ecole Polytechnique were killed because they were women. I was only a young kid back then and I don’t recall those events. Years later I remember, on the day of the anniversary, listening to the news and seing the sorrow the souvenir brought into the lives of people across the country but not fully understanding why it had happened. It’s only years later, while attending university in the engineering program, that I really became fully aware of the gravity and the meaning of that day in the evolution of women’s rights. They were 14 women just like me, just like many women I’ve grown with and shared challenges of studying in a field where men dominated in numbers. We were all aspiring to do great things, to push the limits established in the society, and complete our education with a goal in mind of helping our communities, our country and the world. We had dreams, and we were going after them. Never in our minds w...

You wait. You do the work. You are hoping for an outcome. You work at it so hard, you think it will never come. You take one step back, sometimes two. You are waaaaayyy to hard on yourself because you should know better, you'be gone through the learnings and you can't really understand why the path is going as you thought if would. The picture is still blurry and you wonder if it will ever happen. You've dreamed of it, you've wished for it, and yet still nothing. Until..... Well, the day has arrived. Totally unexpected. You took a chance. You didn't know for sure if this was the right move, but yet, you took a chance. Your gut was telling you it was what you were meant to do. Your gut was stronger than any anxiety & insecurity you might feel, and for once, you listened to it. It felt like a big plunge into the abyss but at last you did it. It took a few weeks. You were scared, telling yourself you've made a big mistake, you probably should have played i...

The moment when you all of a sudden feel inspired by someone or something you've just watched or witness. The ha-ha moment. The moment that follows, I would define it as the cliff moment. The moment when you have an amazing idea or a vision of something that could be beautiful and truly life changing. In that moment, that doesn't really last forever but gives you that boost of energy, fuels your soul and would allow you to conquer the world in that one instant. You feel so powerful, event though you might not have done anything so far in your life that merits to be noticed or acknowledged. We all have to moments, where everything is possible. How many of us make something out of those moments? Hard to tell. I would define those moments, the cliff moments. The cliff because you know you are on the edge of something great, and the only thing that is stopping you of taking the jump, is your own self doubts, your own fears and your own uncertainties. Nothing is for sure in ...

As a year come to an end we all have a tendency to look back on what the past year has brought us and make an assessment of the quality of the year we’ve had. Some of us will judge the past year based on the personal accomplishments we’ve made, by the milestone that we’ve reached, the successes we’ve had at work or with our families. We often are looking for a measure. A measure that is based on what society has been dedicating us through social measurements and gauges. If we take that yard stick and we measure ourselves and the past year to what society has shown us to be great and successful, maybe we are missing out on something. We are missing out on what our true value is as an human being, missing out on what our accomplishments really mean to us. Aren’t we meant to always be disappointment if we only count on those social barometers to decide if it’s been a year worth living? Worth the question I think :) Here are some of my reflections of the past year; ------ ...