by Tim Leberecht

On New Year’s in 2015, a few weeks before the release of my book, The Business Romantic, I gave a talk at an event in Charleston, SC. Afterwards, a man approached me and wondered: “You spoke about romance, but you never mentioned nature.” He thought it was an inexcusable omission.

On Portugal’s Algarve coast this past fall, a small boat took me and a few others onto the Atlantic, a few miles away from shore, to watch dolphins follow us, tease us, and study us, and it was the first time in a while that I felt a deep (re)connection to nature. I have always been a city boy, and my idea of a nightmare weekend is to go hiking or camp out in the desert. I’m afraid of the ocean and usually swim only in hotel pools.

But out there on the Atlantic, with the shoreline disappearing from view, I had a “moment.” I felt lost and deeply connected at the same time, as my 10-year old daughter, who wants to become a marine biologist, listened carefully to the guide. He told us that whales give last honors to their dead mates by carrying their corpses with them for weeks, and that some of them commit suicide because they make the deliberate decision to end their life rather than suffering from the agony of being in human captivity, divorced from their natural habitat.

Later, I learned that there is a whole field of science devoted to what I experienced — there is always a clarifying, demystifying, definitive term for it! — : ecopsychology, which is seeking to understand the relationship between humans and the natural through ecological and psychological principles.

I prefer to call it romance. The ultimate romance. The original romantics would capture this very overwhelming transcendent power of nature. And I’m only now beginning to see: nature remains when everybody and everything else is gone; nature stays with us until the end.

No tear is like another

There are those who say that not only animals have feelings, water does, too. In Frozen 2, this deep and dark sequel to lighter original, Frozen, Olaf, the snowman, claims that “water has memory.” And indeed, German scientists found that each droplet of water has its own individual microscopic pattern, each distinguishable from another. The scientists contend that water picks up and stores information from all of the places that it travels through.

Along the same lines, the Japanese author Dr. Masaru Emoto once claimed that water has consciousness, insisting that negative or positive words, emotions, and music can produce water crystals or other shapes. He is now widely dismissed as a pseudo-scientist. But while his claims were debunked, they still sound too beautiful not to be true. Pseudo-science is dangerous, but fiction can remind us of emotions that are real.

In fact, I can empathize with Dr. Emoto. When you write about water, it’s hard to not exaggerate, not to drown in metaphors: Watershed moments, “every man is an island”, sea change, and so on, water is the most universal and therefore the most trivial element of life. We are water, after all, for the most part (our bodies are to 70 percent made up of it), and as a Chinese proverb goes, “Water is a mirror of the heart.”

In German, there is a saying that when someone lives close to water, they’re prone to crying, to being overly emotional. Water can be kitsch, quickly. But it is also truth, always. The water we shed ourselves — tears — is said to hold a unique memory, too. No tear is like another, and each teardrop contains the information from an individual human experience.

A desert of waves

The sea is what we’re made of; it is “the closest thing to the essence of being human,” as Jorge Luis Borges put it. Waves, in particular, have always intrigued the imagination of artists. There is most prominently “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” the famous print series by the Japanese ukiyo-e artist Hokusa from sometime between 1829 and 1833. Van Gogh is said to have been enamored with the piece, and to date, its composition — with the great wave dwarfing the sacred Mountain Fuji in the background — remains an enigma like the sea itself (only three percent of the world’s oceans have been explored). Subsequently, waves became a favorite subject of painters of all genres, from the romantic William Turner, to the realist Gustave Courbet, to the impressionist Claude Monet, to the photograph-like images of sea and ice created by Zaria Forman using her fingers as a brush.

Writers, too, found in the sea — “a desert of waves,” as Langston Hughes put it — a key to uncovering the depth of our existence, from Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea, to Borges’ poem El Mar, the Song of the Sea by Rilke, and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Moreover, countless composers observed and emulated the rhythm and melodies of the waves, from Debussy’s La Mer to Elgar’s Sea Pictures.

For me, the sea came alive mostly in movies and all those scenes still haunting me: Jaws, of course; the amour fou of The Shape of Water with its bewildering love of otherness; the outburst of tenderness in the final scene of Roma; and the broken heart and its fault lines in Rachel Weisz’ face in The Deep Blue Sea.

All these pieces of art portray the sea, literally or metaphorically, as both the epitome of permanence and the epic human struggle with impermanence.

Total surrender

I’m sharing all this because it helps explain — in fact, helps me understand — why we devote this year’s House of Beautiful Business in Lisbon, which I co-founded and co-curate, to the theme of The Great Wave. One the one hand, for someone with a passion for immersive experiences, The Great Wave is all too obvious. On the other hand, how exciting would it be to breathe new life into such cliché? Breathe new life into business, into life itself?

I’m pretty sure it was not so much us choosing the theme; it was The Great Wave choosing us, like a force of nature. In hindsight, scenes from previous years’ House editions were telltale signs — the image of a wave that was included in one of our visuals at the House 2018; and at the House 2019, a whole session “On Water,” as well as the stories of indigenous Amazon communities and climate activists shared by the Brazilian filmmaker Estela Renner; or a string quartet performing a last tune on the sinking “Titanic”, distorted as if underwater, as part of an interactive dance performance.

Each served as a cue of what had been building up all along: a longing for something greater than ourselves that puts us in our place, reconnecting us to a home we have abandoned and betrayed, destroying and renewing, crushing and lifting our spirits at once.

This ambivalence is hard to grasp for those of us, including myself, who grew up with the idea of linear careers, objective truths, steady progress, and knowledge and science giving us control over our lives, all of which based on the positivist doctrine that winning was not only possible but also desirable.

A friend in New York once told me that she viewed winning and losing as a continuum, but a short moment before losing there was a fleeting chance for total surrender: as the final act of human agency.

As we face The Great Wave — relentless growth and extraction threatening our planet, growing social divides causing unprecedented inequalities, AI and automation taking our jobs, and Silicon Valley tech icons spreading the gospel of digital reductionism — it is now slowly dawning upon me:

To give back, we have to give up.

It’s a scary and beautiful thought. Come honor it with me in Lisbon.

To join the House of Beautiful Business 2020 (“The Great Wave”) from October 31 to November 3 in Lisbon, please apply here.