Empires of the mind

Our 16-year-old, gen­tle son is jus­ti­fi­ably im­pa­tient, wish­ing time to fly. I am the op­po­site, nat­u­rally, yearn­ing for it to stop. He is keen to set sail. I want to an­chor.

What a mind-bend­ing month. Two ex­cur­sions far from the sanc­tu­ary of the Pri­o­rat hills and the nour­ish­ment of un­civilised re­al­i­ties, have stretched me to ex­tremes; the fun­da­men­tal issue in both cases being the re­lent­less thing none of us ever have enough of and con­stantly strug­gle to man­age.

First I wan­dered with the hordes along worn away vias deep into clas­si­cal his­tory. Rome was a tu­mul­tuous mud­dle of truth, not least what Mar­cus Au­re­lius de­fined - that time is a vi­o­lent tor­rent. The sto­ical, philo­soph­i­cal Em­peror penned much we should heed. But we are so pushed for time, aren't we, so fleet of foot and mind in this flaw­less and wired mod­ern so­ci­ety to stop and re­flect as much as might be wise.

Star­ing at the bro­ken mon­u­ments (not the lit­ter) I was also mind­ful of his por­ten­tous com­ment, scrib­bled at the height of that seem­ingly un­break­able Roman au­thor­ity – “Look back over the past, with its chang­ing em­pires that rose and fell, and you can fore­see the fu­ture, too”.

Two weeks later and I was gaz­ing into the fu­ture.

By some com­i­cal quirk my en­trance pass to the Mo­bile World Con­gress dan­gling from the neck of my thread­bare shirt read IN­VESTOR. It was bold green whereas every­one else's throng­ing Barcelona's Fira seemed to be blue (VIS­I­TOR) or white (EX­HIBITOR). Every time I ap­proached some­one on a stand to ask for di­rec­tions their eyes lit up. I was an in­vestor, of sorts, but not the deep-pock­eted va­ri­ety they were look­ing for.

Some­where in the melee was our son, Joe, freshly re­turned from a whirl­wind four-day trip to Paris and Lon­don and back to Barcelona on the Imag­ine Ex­press pro­ject, and about to co-pre­sent his stu­dent team's tech­no­log­i­cal in­no­va­tion to a packed hall. With him were Ma­rina and Es­teve, the two other Bac­calau­re­ate teenagers cho­sen from 2400 young Cata­lans to take part in the Dreamer chal­lenge along with 29 adults. And they did it, with con­fi­dence and be­lief.

It was be­wil­der­ing to me, frankly, but to them it was ut­terly em­bold­en­ing, ig­nit­ing and un­for­get­table. Trav­el­ling on a train, 12 cre­ative minds, 12 soft­ware en­gi­neers and 12 en­tre­pre­neurs who had not meet each other in ad­vance, were chal­lenged to form groups of 3 and gen­er­ate ideas to change the world. It will also change their lives.

The en­ergy that Xavier Verda­guer (photo) and his team at the Imag­ine Cre­ative Cen­tre (Barcelona/San Fran­cisco) fos­ter through their in­no­v­a­tive pro­jects is pal­pa­ble and brings me enor­mous hope of a bet­ter world that makes the most of what lit­tle time any of us have - es­pe­cially if every young per­son is given mo­ments to recog­nise that we all are good at some­thing, and that every­one de­serves a chance and the en­cour­age­ment to find out what that is.

We are grate­ful to Xavier and Imag­ine, and also to di­rec­tora Magda Blasco and the teach­ers at IES Pri­o­rat, the small but open-minded and achiev­ing in­sti­tute here in this lit­tle co­marca. It was Madga and her team who saw merit in their stu­dents at­tend­ing the Barcelona iFEST just be­fore Christ­mas, La festa de la tec­nolo­gia, la ciència i la in­no­vació, the cat­a­lyst for Joe.

Check out iFEST and Imag­ine Cre­ative Cen­tre, both worldly, Cat­alo­nia-based ves­sels of change and op­por­tu­nity. It is a chal­lenge for the likes of me, but I look for­ward more than ever now.

http://​www.​imagine.​cc/