Any year that has you in Japan twice before the first six months are over is shaping up to be a good one, in my opinion. Better still is getting to bring your 15-year-old son on one of the trips and hit all sorts of father-son attractions, which you can read about at SHARPmagazine.com. The non-father-son version you’ll find in these pages as part of our first Escapism Issue. And while these trips and so many others I’ve taken this year had business at their core, they were in no small way escapes as well.
But to say they’re escapes diminishes them somewhat, surely, they served another purpose beyond business and escapism? Of course, they did: they inspire. Destinations the world over offer new and innovative perspectives on architecture, art, design, business, and joie de vivre. And the more I travel the more I recognize how this inspiration informs the world here, though sometimes years or decades later.
Escapism also suggests the need to get away to forget or avoid your life, and that’s not the case either. I’m not looking to escape my life but rather to enhance it, increase my experience and share it. If living is truly about experiences, then at some point we all, most likely, need to look beyond our day-to-day lives, beyond our work and beyond our habitation to find something new to inspire us. Certainly, this seems to be the case if you live and work here at least. As a relatively nascent culture we often don’t lead in terms of lifestyle innovation, but we can.
It’s not the place we should be escaping from but the dogma of how we live and what we prioritize. The place evolves into a representation of a society’s culture and its ethos, and that’s why the places we love abroad also often have lifestyles we desire, one is informed by the other and vice versa. For Canada it is a natural evolution to draw from more established cultures with deeper roots and to tailor this inspiration to our needs and wants. Inspiration should be adapted and evolve otherwise it’s a copy and there’s far too much homogeneity in the world already.
Business travel can be arduous but only because of the zeitgeist of Western capitalism. Most white-collar business travelers have three to four weeks of vacation, I’d recommend adding days here and there to experience the place you’re travelling to. Learn and be inspired by difference and bring that back with you. Heck, if you plan your flight correctly, you’ll probably need an extra night anyway.
Better still, add a couple of days and bring a friend or partner to make memories of a shared experience, pretty much the opposite of an escape but rather a shared journey of discovery. And that’s what life is, and our inspiration for SHARP: The Book for Men, a journey of discovery, shared among us all. Maybe we should have called it The Experience Issue.
— MICHAEL LA FAVE, CCO & Co-Founder
