Who Am I

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on”
(W. Shakespeare) 

“We need to seed and cultivate our vision of humankind. How can we make the world understand that we need to broaden our horizons and look for an enriching, more favorable and inclusive perspective?”

I honestly don’t know… I’ve been wondering about this for a long time. And this question, heard in Assisi on a Sunday afternoon in spring 2011, has persuaded me to try and give my contribution.

For a long time, I’ve postponed the decision of creating a blog where my priority was not to talk, describe or write something I know of or, even worse, something I think I know of, but instead to share some ideas I’ve been pondering over in my life for some time now; ideas that fascinate me for their magnetism, because I feel that they contain the seed of possibility. Whilst being inspired by those ideas, I would really like to base this digital sharing between me and whoever will interact with this blog by relying solely on specific real-life experiences fostered by these ideas. Anything else would just be a mere conjecture, inference, ideology, or mental and emotional projections.

While doing this, I’ll make use of the small and brief, yet intense, moments of awareness experienced in my life, of my journeys throughout the world, of the people I’ve encountered on my path, of the emotions felt, of the insights produced, as well as my studies and my constant research. I’ll make an indiscriminate use of my personal life and my professional life, of my private sphere and my public sphere, of my inner being and my outward appearance.

My name is Oscar di Montigny. I was born in Milan, on August 31, 1969. Since 2000, I’ve been working for an important Italian banking group, where currently I’m Marketing, Communication and Innovation Director, as well as creator and founder of the Corporate University.

One day, in 1999, in a moment of awareness, I realized that my life was passing by intensely yet relentlessly and that I had left behind very little of what I believe I had been until that time. Thus I started searching, observing, studying, wondering about the fact that I couldn’t find any answers to my questions which didn’t pose even bigger questions.

Now, here, I want to leave some trace of the truest moments of my life. In order to do this, I’ve chosen a word, reflection, which gave rise to everything. A reflection is (as the etymology of the word indicates) a “cognitive act through which the soul, interrogating itself, becomes conscious of its acts and its dispositions” and, moreover, it’s also the “mind falling back on itself”. I would be a lucky blogger if even one single word that I’ll write in this blog will induce, in those who read it, these two occurrences.

But even a mirror reflects and, being a neutral object, devoid of judgment, it always returns a truthful image of the subject that looks into it. We’re speaking about the maximum accuracy between a subject looking into a mirror and the image of himself that he sees in it: its mirroring (“to reflect as a mirror does.”). Many times in my life I looked in a mirror and the image I saw never coincided with what I expected (was convinced?) to see: I wasn’t what I thought I would be.

Likewise, while writing, I don’t picture myself as an example of anything and for anyone, and I sure don’t think I can become one. So this is not what I aim at, while writing this blog; I won’t be guided by this frame of mind while managing this virtual place.
But should it, sometimes, appear this this way, I exhort anyone who should sense it to point it out to me immediately. To those who will read my words, I say…thank you! Thank you because we will share the most precious gift that Life has given us, the only one that, after we’ve spent it, no one can give us back: time. I hope to honor your time with quality words.

Be happy