"Is Paris Burning?"

The fan didn’t come on in the bathroom this morning. Normally it comes on with the light. I switched the light off and on again, still no fan. It used to come on, didn’t it? I’m not so sure of anything right now.

We’ve spent the last two days at the Airbnb Open, an international three-day conference for 5000 Airbnb hosts. It was demanding, as conferences tend to be, with sessions from breakfast right through to dinner time. So last night we came straight back to our apartment, just three metro stops away. Except for a brief sortie for some wine and a baguette, we settled in for the night, exhausted. Just before getting into bed about 10 PM, for some reason Paula turned on the TV, and we began to hear of mass shootings at restaurants in Paris. This was serious.

As news reports came in we kept looking at the map, and soon realized the Bataclone concert hall under attack was about a mile and a half from us. The Cambodian restaurant is in a lovely area on the Canal St. Martin, our “Paris neighborhood,” where we we’ve been walking days and evenings since we arrived. We did not feel the least bit threatened or personally at risk, but it was an enormous thing that was happening.

We had the TV on, tuned to the BBC, and were both ‘net surfing, looking for info as the situation “developed” (as the newscasters say, over and over). Eventually, around 1:30, there seemed to be no new news (just the same talking heads saying the same things over the same images of police standing around). I checked in with some French stations, but it was the same thing. I thought the Arab channel might have a different perspective, but it’s all in Arabic (duh), a language which I don’t even begin to speak.

All in all, it was very surreal. We saw the same images, heard the same reports, read the same tweets, as people anywhere in the world, but just knowing it was happening so close made it… even more impossible to comprehend.

As I said, we had just spent two days at the Airbnb Open. It was all the things large conferences always are: loud, stimulating, annoying, inspiring, touching, overwhelming. And ultimately, exhausting. We heard about how to stage your house to make it more appealing to guests, decluttering your home, how best to welcome guests, setting pricing to maximize income, “revenue management.” Even political organizing. I was tired of the nuts and bolts, and what I thought of as an unseemly emphasis on income generation.

And then, in the afternoon, there was a shift to Airbnb’s core message: 

                                                   Belong Anywhere

 It’s the idea of not only making guests feel welcome, it’s allowing them to feel at home, anywhere in the world. It’s about creating connections between people, and not just with our homes, but with our hearts. It’s about travel becoming transformational.

In the words of Airbnb’s CEO and co-founder, Brian Chesky: “Travel has never really been about where you go. It’s about the person you become when you return.”

This core message, these fundamental values, cut through my cynicism, and my skepticism, and my fatigue. After the final session ended to great fanfare, we made our way home to our cozy apartment, and sat at our small table, and had our simple meal, basking in the glow of a world that we can help create, not just by providing guests a place to sleep but by sharing our home, and our hearts.

                 see Airbnb’s inspiring ad on YouTube here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xegsh1CmPU

And then we turned on the television and saw the news, and had to confront the terrible paradox of the incredible human need for connection and belonging and the dichotomy of disruption and destruction.

We’re still digesting all this. We’ve got some great photos to share (not of the attacks, certainly!), but they will have to wait. Our hearts and minds are overflowing.  More to come…

Yours in sadness and respect,

Paul & Paula

·         And the fan? Oh, it works fine, now. I think the message is, don’t expect things to come out the way you expected…