It's September

A month of new beginnings, but also one of dark reminders

It’s good to be back after a full month in Europe with stays in The Netherlands, Germany, a bit of France and celebrating a few family birthdays. At the same time we set up Nora, my oldest daughter, for a career start in Amsterdam with fast growing Vancouver-headquartered Apply Digital, ready now to take on the European market. It was also a hot summer, exactly one day of rain out of the entire stay with our week in Heidelberg being an almost tropical experience. We had to bring back our Hong Kong heat management skills with lots of water (and beer) and setting up fans wherever we slept. The place is not exactly built for these temperatures.

At the same time lots of political turmoil, from asylum seekers to farmers to inflation to energy to Ukraine to endless disconnects between governments and the governed: it will be a rough fall and winter season for all of Europe. Expect the same here in North America.

Yet as always, September feels like a new beginning. We got a break, some rest and had time to recalibrate and in what is always a beautiful month I am gearing up for everything to come. I do plan to bring structure and very regular updates to you with this newsletter. Subscriptions have grown even during the last few (quiet) summer months and the Substack platform is proving to be an incredibly powerful platform for content creators all over the place.

But to go back to the trip: more than ever this was a break of reconnecting with my youth and roots. There was finally time for it. The photo above was the exact spot when in 1972 I was walking to school that it sunk in what my parents had just told me: a gruesome attack on the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games had taken place. If your brain links up certain places with particular events you never forget them. Today that is exactly fifty years ago and last night I watched a documentary on the journey of Ankie Spitzer, widow of murdered Israeli athlete Andre Spitzer. She never shut up and kept fighting for justice and proper remembrance. The entire saga reveals how incredibly violent and gruesome the attack was, how deeply incompetent the German authorities responded and how political expediency not only prevented real and meaningful remembrance but actual persecution of the few remaining terrorists. It was as always left to Israel to figure it out on its own, and when it did indeed do that it of course became the subject of international criticism. That it took the IOC until 2016 to properly mourn and remember the slain athletes adds an ever sourer note to the tragedy.

Today I am as perplexed and shaken as the eight year old boy who walked to school when I re-read and take in the entire story. Now with the benefit of age and experience I can put it in context and evaluate the dynamics at play at the time. It does not make me overly optimistic, but the fact that we are able to remember and learn and continue to give a podium to people like Ankie Spitzer to tell their story does give us hope. Remember that when we dive into the fall and winter. It will be messy and often dark, but we have ability to reinvent, re-energize and move on while never forgetting how we got here. It is September: let’s go.